Introduction
引论
William S-Y. Wang 王士元

Abstract 摘要

This volume is based on a conference held in Oakland, California, in January 1986. The initial ideas for the conference were contained in a letter I sent to a few friends the preceding May. In it, I suggested several avenues of interaction and cross-fertilization, in the hope of correcting for the unfortunate insularity that specification often leads to in Chinese linguistics. Briefly put, these are: (1) linguistics with allied disciplines concerned with population movements, such as genetics, geography, and history, (2) data gathering with theory development, (3) language group with language group. The conference was the result of the many enthusiastic responses to that initial probe.

In the spirit of the above scheme, the pages that follow are divided into four parts. Part A begins with contributions from allied disciplines, Lee and Wong from history, Yuan from genetics, and Zhou from geography. It is important that the evolutionary scenarios we develop independently in linguistics be cross-checked against the relevant knowledge from other fields. All too often in Chinese linguistics, we forget that data gathering is only the first step, and that the real intellectual rewards come from the theoretical interpretations of these data. The papers by Chen and Cheng exemplify theory construction from data, one on the analysis of tones, the other on quantifying linguistic affinity.

Part B contains papers on some of the major linguistic groups in China. Wang Jun presents a wide perspective on the features of many of the minority languages of China. Such information is valuable not only for itself, but also indispensable for research on the historical development of the Han dialects. These latter are represented by overviews provided by Ting for Mandarin, by Pan for Wu, by Yue-Hashimoto for Yue, and by Norman for the Min dialects.

In Part C, Lin discusses the linguistic situation of Beijing, and Qian describes the speech of Shanghai. Often new patterns of linguistic usage are created at socio-cultural centers such as these two cities. Once established at the centers, these patterns radiate outward to bring out change at other sites. There are many more great cities in China, and I hope that these two pioneering studies can stimulate future research on these other cities. Similarly, I hope there will be more overviews of linguistic groups in China, on the models of the papers in Part B.

The volume closes with remarks by Pulleyblank, Mei and Hsieh [Zhu], commenting on different papers at the conference, each providing a distinct perspective on the field.

The topics discussed in this volume, the languages and dialects of China, are significant from at least two complementary vantage points: Chinese studies, and linguistic theory. The goals of Chinese studies are to understand the activities and the behaviors of the Chinese peoples, both in the past and in the present. One of the major avenues toward achieving these goals is through studying their languages.

The linguistic wealth of China is possibly the richest in the world in terms of the diversity of living speech and the time depth of written materials. Tapping the information in the ancient texts as well as unearthed artifacts, archeologists and historians have deepened our knowledge of the Shang dynasty China of 3500 years back. With the methods of historical linguistics, however, we should be able to push in time several more millennia beyond the Shang.

The histories of the language will surely provide evidence on early contacts among the peoples, in the form of words borrowed or grammar shared, as well as the possibility of dating these contacts. The reconstructed vocabularies presumably will include words of kinship, of flora and fauna, and of various aspects of material and spiritual life. These words will be useful toward understanding the culture, geography and cognitive structures of the speakers long ago.Parallel to the understanding society from language, we may also ask questions on how language has influenced society. In contrast to the great diversity in speech, there is relative unity in the written language. Presumably, it was the invention of writing that early marked the ancestors of the Han people for cultural dominance. This unity in writing also must have played a crucial role in bonding together the numerous peoples of China into one single cultural polity, to a scale not seen anywhere else in the world. The effect of this bonding must be even stronger in recent decades, with the sharp rise in literacy.

The feature of the written language that enables the cultural coherence in China is of course the distinctive morpho-syllabic logograph. The beauty of this system is that it is simultaneously connected to the meanings and the sounds of language; hence, its communicativeness is less vulnerable to changes in sounds of speech. The effect that this written language had on the evolution of the speech it represented, the consequence it has on the cognition of its users, these are some of the topics ripe for discussion at some future conference on the languages and dialects of China.

The goals of linguistics are to understand the nature of language, how it is structured, how it is transmitted, and how it changes. Here, again, China’s tremendous linguistic wealth promises profound contributions.

From the viewpoint of Change, the rich body of linguistic observations stretch over well over 2000 years, going back at least to Xunzi, and to the early dictionaries and dialect studies of the Han dynasty. In addition to these linguistic works, there is an enormous body of historical data on social contacts and population movements.

Putting together the archeological, the historical with the linguistic, we should be able to derive a detailed knowledge of how the dialects were formed as a result of both system-internal and external forces. There must been high degrees of hybridization throughout China’s past, as waves upon waves of people were driven from their homes by war, famine or plague, or lured into new lands by the promise of a better life.

Currently, the sum total of our knowledge on the deeper histories of human language is based on virtually a single case, that of the Indo-European family. But even here, the basic issue is not resolved – whether the original Indo-European were nomadic conquerors on horseback, swooping southward from the Kurgan steppes, or Anatolian farmers, whose domain expanded gradually with their agricultural ways of life. I believe that from studying the languages and dialects of China, given the time depth of materials available here, another major case can be developed, so that our knowledge on language prehistory can rest on a broader base.

Synchronically, the potential is just as great. Western scholars have long been fascinated by the structure of the Chinese language, including such savants as Leibniz, Humboldt, and Rousseau. In this century, no less an authority than Edward Sapir called Chinese “soberly logical”, presumably referring to its highly regular syntax and its simple use of inflectional morphology. Indeed, Chinese grammar has been the focus of a great deal of linguistic research, especially since the publication of Y.R. Chao’s comprehensive grammar. Furthermore, recent work is extending into the grammar of other dialects as well, which appear to be actually more diverse than Chao has indicated.

Yet another part of China’s linguistic wealth is the highly distinctive tone systems. Tone languages are richer by one more dimension, as it were, than the “ordinary” languages. In addition to consonants and vowels, which are found everywhere in the world, words are built with the pitch of the voice as well. Although phonemic tones are found in almost all parts of the worlds, it comes closest to its classic form of one-syllable-one-tone in the languages and dialects of China. The lexical function of tone in Chinese is well known. A much less explored area is how tones behave when they come together, and how they interface with the other grammatical structures. This too is focus for much linguistic research, that is having an impact on linguistic at large.

All things considered, then, I feel that those of us working on the languages and dialects of China are in a particularly privileged position. Our work is clearly of fundamental importance both to understanding China and to understating human language. At the same time, it is crucial that we maintain a broad perspective, assimilating as much as we can the relevant results from each other as well as from allied disciplines.

In addition to the authors represented in this volume, there were several other contributions, which added greatly to the success of the conference. The first session was perhaps the liveliest, with a paper from L. L. Cavalli-Sforza on the parallels between biological and linguistic research, and a paper from W. Labov on methodological aspects of dialect investigations. Although these two papers did not deal with Chinese data per se, they were extremely helpful in forging links between Chinese linguistics and other related areas of research.

Another paper from the conference not included here is one on the application of Wave Theory to the study of Kejia dialects, presented by the late M.Hashimoto. It is an important contribution, sprinkled with many exciting insights. We hope to publish it as an independent article in JCL before long, after solving some technical problems in dealing with the maps it contains.

Finally, thanks are due to Lien Chinfa, Bob Sanders, Shen Zhongwei and Chuch Wooters for helping to make the conference run smoothly. Shen’s contribution toward the publication of this volume is especially appreciated. The conference was financed by a grant from the Wang Institute of Graduate Studies. Research on China during the 1980’s, especially scholarly work in the United States, was greatly facilitated through the generosity of Wang An, the late president of that Institute. Through these contributions, he demonstrated by deed the meaning of the phrase, yin shui si yuan.