Kirsti and Edwina, K
Your example (opium) seems somewhat simplistic and misleading.
Peirce and I would certainly agree that there's more to say. But he used that example as the starting point for a much longer discussion. And by the way, nominalists such as Carnap, Quine... don't even make that first step. They claim it's illegitimate to use a quantified variable to refer to something represented by a verb or by a verbal concept that is expressed as a noun. K
The dozens of empirical investigations I have been tutoring for academic degrees by my students have shown how much time and effort...
Yes. But examples are necessary at every step of the way. Peirce used the opium example to show that a seemingly trivial choice of words can be a sign of some deeper meaning. As another example, the geologist John McPhee summarized an entire book in one sentence: "The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone." The details, of course, are important. But that one sentence connects all the details -- and helps the reader remember them. As for Quine, his refusal to admit variables that refer to verbal concepts shows a cramped mind that cannot recognize Thirdness in all its manifestations. Note the title of Quine's major book: _Word and Object_. His thinking stops at objects. K
[Chinese] does not consist of "words" in the Western sense. Our categories of nouns, verbs and adjectives just does not apply.
That is a comment that most Chinese people themselves would say. But Chinese linguists now recognize that their language does indeed have "words" that are up to four syllables in length and spelled with up to four characters. For example, see the attached che.gif. At the top is the character for the word Che. It represent a kind of wagon that with a box, an axle, and two wheels, but it is used as the generic word for any kind of vehicle. A train is a HuoChe (fire Che). A bicycle is a ZiXingChe (self-powered Che). A taxi is a ChuZuQiChe (for hire energy Che), and a bus is a GongGongQiChe (public use energy Che). But most Chinese speakers rarely use those long words. They just use the generic Che when the context is sufficient. For example, if a student says "I parked my Che around the corner", it's a bicycle. But if a government official says the same sentence, it's a car. If somebody says "I'll call you a Che", it's a taxi. But if you say "I'm waiting for a Che", it's either a bus or a train (depending on where you're standing). Furthermore, Chinese grammar is actually fairly close to English. If you learn an English word for each Chinese word, you get a dialect called "Chinese waiter English". But Japanese word order is totally different from English. If a waiter just replaced each word with something in English, it would sound like word hash. And the Japanese don't use the Chinese style of abbreviations. The Japanese word for 'taxi' is 'takushi', 'basu' for 'bus', and 'herikoputa' for 'helicopter'. E
Most Chinese were illiterate; they could neither write nor read the language
But until the invention of the printing press, that was true of every language. E
[Chinese characters are] visually made up, not of our alphabet letters, but 'radicals' [214 of them!] which are combined to form the 'image', i.e., the word
K
The order of strokes brings in meaning, stroke by stroke. So Chinese marks resemble a theory, more than anything else. Then the "little theories" are presented in a certain order, which sheds light on the meaning of the whole.
I agree with both of you. And in order to remember and to recognize the characters, it's very important to learn how to draw them. For computer recognition, it's difficult to recognize the finished image. But it's much. much easier if the computer can record the strokes as they are drawn. John
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