Author ｜
Wang Feng
Abstract ｜
Zhang Taiyan (章太炎, 1869-1936), who joined in the Late-Qing revolutionary camp, often declared that what he upheld was not “revolution” but “guangfu” (光復), the motive of which was rather cultural than political.As a great scholar, he invested an amount of energy in his prelection as the extension of this idea to restore the prosperous civilization and to sustain the artery of the culture.Zhang Taiyan’s academic structure is extremely extensive, but with the primary concern on Chinese language and Sinogram, which, from his perspective, reflected the wax and wane of the culture. Since thousands of years ago, Chinese language and Sinograms had been in decline, facing the problem of communicating with the Western culture. In order to provide the solution, he devoted to the investigation of the dialects as contrast to the dead Sinograms, hoping to increase the total of Sinograms. At the same time, he brought up the unique project of Chinese lingua franca based on historical accounts in order to find a perfect solution to the practical issue of matching the writing with the speaking system and the unification of populace languages.Meanwhile, Zhang Taiyan attempted to provide a complete theory for the Chinese language and Sinogram system to maintain its position,focusing on the incessant ten-year exploration of Zhuanzhu (轉注) and Jiajie (假借) to have reached the perfect explanation. On this basis, he composed Wenshi (《文始》) to build up the system of whole Sinograms. Zhang Taiyan’s concept of “wenxue” (文學) is the extension of his study of Chinese Language and Sinograms, the essence of which is to explore howto put Sinograms together to form a sentence according to which features.The contemporary trend of alphabetization of Chinese language, especially the notion to apply Esperanto, was his ideological foe in proscribing Sinograms. From the cultural viewpoint “to see the equal in the unequal”(不齊而齊), he spared no effort to defend the Sinograms, for he viewed the train of thought “to equalize the unequal” (齊其不齊) hidden in Esperanto as the product of cultural hegemony. The reason that the nation could layits foundation was build on the identification of language and history, which was all his works and his care served.
keywords ｜
Zhang Taiyan (章太炎), Chinese language and Sinograms, xiaoxue (小學), xinfangyan (《新方言》), jiajie (假借), zhuanzhu (轉注), wenshi (《文始》), qiwulunshi (《齊物論釋》), Esperanto