蒋黄鸡快手号:求求各位大虾，有谁有介绍西方文明的概况英文版本资料，急用，跪谢~~~

Western views of Chinese-derived writing systems are often extreme. Leibniz extolled the virtues of what he believed was a script that directly represented thought. Today we know that character-based writing is, like every other writing system, a representation of language, not thought and that, in its use in Chinese at least, it is basically phonographic. But the system is unwieldly, and this has led many—from early reformers like Lu Xun onwards—to propose the complete elimination of characters in favor of simpler phonographic systems.

Hannas takes this view several steps further: not only is character-based writing inefficient, but by its nature it has severe social consequences, sapping the scientific creativity of an entire quarter of humanity. Clearly such a dramatic conclusion requires extensive support: while H. is not the first to make this general claim, the seeds of which can also be found in his 1997 monograph, he has certainly made the most serious attempt to argue for it.

The first four chapters (pp. 8–112) are devoted to arguing that Japan, China and Korea lack the capability of true scientific innovation. (Taiwan, oddly, is not discussed.) In support, H. documents the institutions that the governments of these countries have established to reap the fruits of Western research. These range from “joint ventures” with Western institutions; to the strategic placement of research labs near major Western universities; to the hiring of foreign experts; to campaigns for Western-educated expatriates to funnel information to the “motherland”; to outright industrial espionage. In discussing expatriates, H. stresses that he is not claiming that East Asians are incapable of innovation: as he notes, East Asian scientists working overseas are among the most creative people in their disciplines; rather, something is sapping their creativity when they stay at home. For readers of Needham (1954–), who might object that China was once the most scientifically advanced nation on earth, H. notes that even Needham felt that China was always very practically oriented, and lacked the Western notion of abstract science.

But what is creativity anyway? This is the topic of the fifth chapter (pp. 113–138) entitled “The Anatomy of Creativity”. The title is to be taken literally, since H. argues that true creativity is a process that starts in the more analytical left brain, migrates for a period of rumination to the more fanciful right brain, where connections to ideas in possibly unrelated areas are explored, and then returns to the left, where the various strands of thought are synthesized into a coherent, implemental whole. In this, H. intends to exclude the popsychological notion that any unconstrained “right-brain” activity is creativity. Curiously, though, one of H.’s supporting citations is Jaynes’ (1976) pop-psychological book on the “bicameral” mind.

The connection of this to writing systems is introduced in chapter 6 (pp. 139–167), where H. explores the role of the alphabet in fostering creativity. Alphabets represent phonemes, and phonemes are an abstraction. Even illiterates are consciously aware of syllables, but phonemes require special training, such as one gets by learning an alphabet (cf. Faber 1992). Children acquiring alphabetic literacy engage in an analytic process that is highly unnatural. The alphabet thus becomes a “cognitive facilitator”, exercising the left/right-brain interactions that H. claims are needed for creativity.

Enter now East Asian writing systems, the topic of chapters 7–10 (pp. 168–262). East Asian writing, unlike alphabetic writing, is organized around the syllable. This is strictly true for Chinese characters as they are used for Chinese and for Korean, and also for Korean Hangul since, even though that system is segmental, the segments are organized into syllable-sized chunks. It is also mostly true for the Sino-Japanese pronunciations of kanji, though Japanese in general is more complex. But no matter: what Asian systems all share is their representation of linguistic units that supposedly require no analysis on the part of the learner. Rather, what is required to learn these systems is memorization of a large number of symbols and their mapping to natural units of the language. Korean writing,being segmental, would seem to require analysis, but whatever benefits this accords are mitigated by the syllable-chunking of the segmental glyphs. Also, Korean children must still learn Chinese characters, though these are no longer used much in everyday text. East Asian writing, thus takes the easy path in requiring no up-front analysis on the part of the learner. But the cost is that it fails to stimulate analytical thinking, and due to the sheer number of symbols, requires that children spend time better spent doing other things. A true Mephistophelean bargain. Lest one be inclined to think that H.’s thesis is overblown, and that the true problem lies with East Asia’s Confucian tradition, chapter 11 (pp. 263–283), argues that many of the features traditionally ascribed to East Asian society are due in part to the writing system. Confucianism demands uncritical acceptance of social norms, and is famously unfriendly to innovation, but how is this linked to writing? H. appeals to a radical view of gene-culture co evolution due ultimately to Lumsden and Wilson (1981), wherein it is feasible that cultural artifacts like writing could have influenced neural structure and hence other aspects of cognition. Thus East Asian culture may be deficient in traits that foster creativity in “alphabetic cultures”. Unfortunately, it is left vague how the obvious message of this chapter squares with H.’s observation that alphabetically literate emigre East Asians often excel in creativity.

Chapter 12 is a godsend to the reviewer, since in it H. lists a number of questions that one might ask in objection to his thesis, along with his answers to them. Still, there are plenty of other questions.Victor Mair (the series editor for H.’s volume) claims that there is probably no “other person on the globe who knows all the relevant languages as well as” H. (Eakin, 2003). If so, then H. might seem to be as qualified as anyone to make the claims that he does. Since, H. is also a powerful writer, it is easy to see that his book will be persuasive to many. What ultimately matters, though, is but one thing: is H. right? If he is, then the strong implication is that East Asian governments should immediately make writing reform a top national priority: adopt analphabetic writing system and a cornucopia of benefits will be the reward. If he is wrong, then this book will be relegated to the section on one’s bookshelf where one keeps other misguided theses on East Asian writing. On these two extremes readers will have to decide for themselves. For my own part, there were a number of troubling points at every stage of H.’s argument.

Many of H.’s ideas on the link between writing and culture are drawn from de Kerckhove and Lumsden’s 1988 collection, which explored the possibility that Western science was fostered at least in part by the alphabet developed by the Greeks. Being a collection from many authors, that volume offered a more balanced treatment of the topic (though the editors’ own bias was clear). By considering some contributions and not others, one could find support for any view, and this is what H. seems to be doing. A similar selectivity obtains in H.’s treatment of Scribner and Cole’s (1981) study of the cognitive impact of literacy among the Vai. What about the claim that East Asian writing, by focusing on syllables, requires no abstraction on the part of the learner? This is suspect on a couple of linguistic grounds. Hangul remains problematic for H. despite his attempts to argue otherwise. Koreans show phonemic awareness (see Sohn (1987) on segmental language games), suggesting that Korean readers have done the segmental analysis that H. must argue they have not done. Second, H. apparently assumes that the syllables represented in a syllabary trivially represent the syllables in speech in a one-to-one relation. This is simply wrong. Syllables in speech frequently differ substantially from what the standard orthography would imply, with elisions (e.g. Mandarin tamen ‘they’ becoming tam, or loss of syllable nuclei in Japanese voiceless syllables), and other alterations being common. Despite the primacy of syllables, use of a syllabary still involves abstraction.

The characterization of creativity as involving both an analytic phase and a more unconstrained phase seems reasonable enough, but the neurological basis that H. proposes is speculation. Finally one must ask if East Asians are really more creatively challenged than anyone else. H. presents evidence that East Asian governments would prefer to import ideas than invest in developing them themselves, but are they alone in this? H. notes that other countries—France and Israel are both mentioned—have a track record of similar data collection; lacking the same in-depth analysis that he devotes to East Asia, it is hard to know how the cases compare. People have been copying other people’s ideas from time immemorial. Patents—invented in the Western “alphabetic” culture—are a recognition of that fact and an attempt to offer innovators some protection. But there remain many ways for people to get others to do their creative work for them, and organizations of all kinds often do exactly that. Frequently this is bound up with a particularly narrow view of what the organization in question would like its own people to spend time on. H. makes the following point about China: “The second reason I am pessimistic about China’s ability to excel in creative science is the government’s narrow view of the intellectual foundation on which science is based. ... Radical innovation of the sort the PRC government claims to be promoting depends in particular on access to models outside one’s normal intellectual domain. Nothing could be more inimical to creativity than limiting the scope within which free inquiry is allowed to proceed. Yet that is exactly what the state does by declaring which topics may and may not be considered.” (page 36)

Sadly, H. probably does not realize how perfectly this description also applies to contemporary U.S. corporations. Twenty years ago, there were industrial research institutions like Bell Labs, where scientists were given virtual free rein to create, and an environment where creativity was valued. Today, such institutions barely exist, and what we have instead are self-styled research labs that sanction only certain lines of inquiry, and set myopically short term goals for everything that is done. Furthermore, companies increasingly contract out for work in areas that they had formerly supported in house. Presumably this has nothing to do with a lack of exposure to alphabetic literacy, but are there other parallels to East Asian society? Indeed, such parallels abound: many large U.S. corporations are structured like East-Asian-style socialist states, replete with paternalistic executives, a well-entrenched culture that favors short-term gains over long-term investment, and a belief that slogans and “motivators” will take the place of a genuinely nurturing environment in fostering creativity and productivity. H. does not deny the importance of cultural support for creativity; indeed, he emphasizes it. But what’s missing is a clear demonstration that “creativity gaps”, if they exist, require any-thing other than sociological factors to explain them.

References
de Kerckhove, Derrick and Charles Lumsden, editors, 1988. The Alphabet
and the Brain. Berlin: Springer.
Eakin, Emily. 2003. “Writing as a Block for Asians.” New York Times, May
3.
Faber, Alice. 1992. “Phonemic segmentation as epiphenomenon. Evi-
dence from the history of alphabetic writing.” In Pamela Downing,
Susan Lima, and Michael Noonan, editors, The Linguistics of Liter-
acy, pages 111–34, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hannas, William. 1997. Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma. Honolulu: Univer-
sity of Hawai’i Press.
Jaynes, Julian. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind. Boston. Houghton Mifflin.
Lumsden, Charles and Edward Wilson. 1981. Genes, Minds and Culture:
The Coevolutionary Process. Cambridge. Harvard University Press.
Needham, Joseph. 1954–. Science and Civilisation in China. Cambridge.
Cambridge University Press.
Scribner, Sylvia and Michael Cole. 1981. The Psychology of Literacy.
Cambridge. Harvard University Press.
Sohn, Hyang-Sook. 1987. Underspecification in Korean Phonology. Ph.D.
Thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.