The Sinitic Languages: A Contribution to Sinological Linguistics, by Mieczysław Jerzy Künstler

Reviewed by Stephen Matthews

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The title of this book already signals its perspective: a linguist looking at ‘Chinese’ from outside China, and from Europe in particular, perceives not a language but a family of languages, comparable in their diversity to the Romanic or Germanic language families (see Chappell 2016 for recent work from this perspective). Indeed, in a new twist on an old comparison, the author asserts that ‘Pekinese and Cantonese are more distant than Icelandic and Southern German’ (p. 40). Having published the original book in Polish in 2000, the author was working on a revised English version at the time of his death in 2007. Künstler’s text breaks off at the end of chapter 8, at which point Alfred Majewicz takes over the translation, without attempting the updating that Künstler was pursuing in his English version. The book is based on lectures given at University of Warsaw by Künstler, who is described as a passionate lecturer as well as a ‘severe and demanding professor’ (p. xiii). Both the passion and the severity come across in the book, which presents a relentless critique of Chinese linguistics, especially as practised in China. Linguists are taken to task for numerous errors of method and argumentation. In reconstructing proto-Sino-Tibetan, for example, numerals are commonly used as evidence when they are more likely to be early borrowings than true cognates (p. 63). […] Altogether, the book provides an accessible introduction to the history of Chinese and contributes to an appreciation of the diversity with the Sinitic group. Some of its critiques of Chinese linguistics remain relevant and provide material for lively seminar discussions. Künstler laments how ‘Chinese scholars have neglected ex definitione everything concerning their language written by foreigners’ (p. 222) and this book is likely to suffer the same fate, if only because of the author’s decision to eschew characters. The English version has been a long time coming, but it should ensure that Künstler’s scholarship endures, at least in Sinological circles.

Journal of Chinese Linguistics vol.48, no.1 (January 2020): 294-296
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