OT: This post discusses Chinese conceptions of time and history, in response
to the introduction of the subject of the Chinese calendar in this thread.

"Tim Hanke" wrote in message et...
"Bill Smythe" wrote ...
No, but we Americans (and western Europeans) could reasonably make a
concession to the Chinese. When entering a Chinese name into a Western
database, such as the USCF membership list, enter the entire name in the
family-name field, and leave the given-name field blank. Such names would
appear correctly on both alphabetized lists and paychecks. On lists, they
would appear without commas. The lack of a comma could be an indicator
that the family name is the first name listed.

Bugger the Chinese. Next you will be telling us our calendar is all wrong
too, and this is really 4700, the Year of the Ram.

Tim Hanke (born in 4655, the Year of the Dog)

The Governor-General of Canada, Adrienne Clarkson (nee Poy)--Canada's acting
Head of State in lieu of Her Majesty, The Queen--was a Chinese immigrant from
Hong Kong. She would not appreciate being 'buggered' by Tim Hanke and his ilk.

Fortunately, not everyone shares Tim Hanke's racist bigotry and insolence.

'On the matter of (the Chinese) language, it is a well-known fact that
occasionally Westerners are struck down by a blinding light, like Saint Paul on
the road to Damascus, with the feeling that they must learn this language with
its marvellous script or else burst. That was perhaps not so surprising, but
the effect in the mental world was a very striking one, because I found that
the more I got to know these friends from China the more exactly like my own
their minds seemed to be, certainly in their intellectual capacity.'
--Joseph Needham (Science in Traditional China, p. 3)

How may differences in language and differences in thought be connected?

"The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis...stresses the dependence of thought on language,
claiming that differences among languages strongly affect the thought processes
of their speakers. Again there is a certain degree of plausibility to this
claim, particularly in the realm of vocabulary. In fact, it is unnecessary to
look to other languages; we can simply look to technical sub-vocabularies in
our own language...to see how much greater precision is afforded in discourse
and thought by virtue of having a more finely divided vocabulary.

Whorf's more radical claim was that the grammatical structure fundamentally
affects thought. He claimed, for instance, that the Hopi language contains no
elements that refer to time, and therefore that monolingual Hopi speakers have
no concept of time; both aspects of this claim have been refuted....More
recently, experiments...have shown some interesting differences in non-verbal
spatial understanding in speakers of certain Australian and Mayan languages,
compared to speakers of European languages; the differences appear to be
related to the way these languages encode spatial relations, thus offering
support to a limited version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis....

The upshot is that the character of thought may be to some limited extent
affected by the proclivities of its interface with different languages; certain
thoughts may be more easily accessible because one's language makes it easier
to express them." (pp. 292-3)

--Ray Jackendoff (Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution)

The Chinese language is strikingly different from European languages. Then
does it follow that Chinese conceptions of time should be quite different from
European ones?

Here are some excerpts from Needham's essay, 'Attitudes toward Time and Change
as Compared with Europe' (initially given as a lecture at the Chinese University
of Hong Kong and reproduced as a chapter of 'Science in Traditional China'):

"It reveals the fact that Chinese scholars were very conscious of scientific
and technical achievements, by no means always trivial in comparison with the
works of the sages of old. It remains to be seen whether, when all the
information is in, pre-Renaissance Europe was as conscious of the progressive
development of knowledge and technique as they were.

In the light of all this, the widespread Western belief that traditional
Chinese culture was static or stagnant turns out to be a typical Occidental
misconception. It would, however, be fair to use the terms homoeostatic or
cybernetic, for there was something in Chinese society which continually
tended to restore it to its original character, that of bureaucratic feudalism,
after all disturbances, whether caused by civil wars, foreign invasions, or
inventions and discoveries....

What is important to realise is that although Chinese society was so
self-regulating and stable, the idea of scientific and social progress and of
real change in time was there. Hence, however great the forces of conservatism,
there was no ideological barrier of this particular kind to the development of
modern natural science and technology when the time was ripe, as it certainly
is at the present day.

Lastly, we come to what is perhaps the greatest question of all that could be
raised in this present context: namely, could there have been any connection
between the differences, if any, in the conceptions of time and history
characteristic of China and the West, and the fact that modern science and
technology arose only in that latter civilisation?... (pp. 121-2)

Sinologists have appreciated for more than a hundred years the linear
time-consciousness of Chinese culture and its extraordinary success in the
writing of history--greater perhaps than in any other culture. Thus, in an
interesting paper, Derk Bodde wrote:

'Connected with their intense preoccupation with human affairs is the Chinese
feeling for time, the feeling that human affairs should be fitted into a
temporal framework. The result has been the accumulation of a tremendous and
unbroken body of historical literature, extending over more than three thousand
years. This history has served a distinctly moral purpose, since by studying
the past, one might learn how to conduct oneself in the present and the future.
....This temporal-mindedness of the Chinese marks another sharp distinction
between them and the Hindus.' (p. 129)
....
Strange as it may seem to those who still think in terms of the 'timeless
Orient', the culture of China was, on the whole, more of the Iranic,
Judaeo-Christian than of the Indo-Hellenic types. The conclusion then springs
to the mind: If Chinese civilisation did not spontaneously develop modern
natural science as Western Europe did, though China had been much more advanced
in the fifteen pre-Renaissance centuries, it had nothing to do with China's
attitude toward time." (p. 131)

--Joseph Needham (Science in Traditional China)

For further reading:

The standard scholarly reference is the series, 'Science and Civilisation in
China', chiefly edited by Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen.

A valuable abridgement for the general reader is 'The Genius of China:
3000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention' by Robert Temple.

--Nick