Take stalk of: thoughts on philology and Sinology

In a note I was composing to some friends, I just wrote "let's take stalk of…", was surprised and smiled, corrected myself, and continued writing.

But then I paused to reflect….

This little Sunday morning mini-experience reinforces a lesson that I always try to inculcate among students:  sound is more important than symbol in linguistic analysis.  This is especially so with Chinese, where the symbols (Sinograms, aka "characters") mask the sounds of the words they are meant to convey.

Cf. Bernhard Karlgren's (1889-1978) classic Sound and Symbol in Chinese (1923), which lays out the basic problems of speech vs. script in the Chinese case, but which we have moved far beyond in our current investigations.

These reflections coincide with discussions that I have been having with Diana Shuheng Zhang about the relationship between Sinology and philology as it has been practiced with regard to Greek, Latin, ancient Indic and Iranian languages, Egyptian, and early Semitic languages.  It is Diana's opinion, and I'm fully in agreement with her, that until we come to terms with the concept and reality of "word" in ancient Sinitic, we cannot do Sinology in the same way that scholars have engaged in classical philology for other languages during the past two millennia.  Diana believes that this disparity is the result of the particular features of the Chinese script, such that, if we want the results of our Sinological researches to be comparable to those of classical philology, we need to have an enhanced understanding of the nature of Sinograms in relation to language as it was spoken at different times and in different places.

I hope that I'm not misrepresenting Diana's conceptualization of the problems we confront in dealing with the distinction between philology and Sinology and her methodology for surmounting them.  One thing I do know is that she has a long-term research strategy for working toward the goals that I have outlined above.  It is a sophisticated project involving historical phonology, morphology, and other aspects of language and writing.

Incidentally, I just googled on "take stalk of" and discovered that I'm far from the only person who made that error.  Even more interesting is the fact that "take stalk of" is used in its literal sense fairly often among agronomists and vegetable gardeners.

Selected readings

• "Philology and Sinology" (4/20/14)
• "Which is harder: Western classical languages or Chinese?" (3/6/16)
• "Chinese, Greek, and Latin" (8/8/17)
• "The miracle of reading and writing Chinese characters" (3/26/17)
• "Writing characters and writing letters" (11/7/18)
• "Alphabets are as simple as…", by Roger Highfield, The Telegraph (4/18/06)