Re: Chinese, and vulcanite, and tripods

[pgs@thillana.lcs.mit.edu (Patrick Sobalvarro)]

   From: David Josephson <david@josephson.com>
   Date: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 19:30:24 -0800 (PST)

     I don't read or speak Chinese fluently,
   but as much as I learned while living in China was enough to make me
   understand why there was serious debate long before the Greeks and
   Romans about whether to use Arabic or Chinese as the standard language
   of science.

This is wandering kind of far afield from Leicas, but I'm having a
little trouble with what you've said here.

That very powerful set of ideas that most people in the world call
"science" today, involving notions of hypothesis, experiment,
evidence, deduction and conclusion, is a Western invention, and quite
a recent one at that.  So the notion that there was "serious debate
long before the Greeks and the Romans" about what was to be the
standard language of science strikes me as, well, unlikely.  Also, the
language we call "Arabic" today was not associated with any major
civilization before the Greeks and the Romans.  Certainly there were
major Semitic civilizations before this time, but I don't know of any
that were speaking Arabic, and if you are thinking about the
Egyptians, they did not speak Arabic until the Islamic conquest in
about the seventh century A.D.  Also, I could be wrong about this, but
to my memory there is no known evidence of contact between Western
(including Semitic) peoples and Chinese until around the time of
Alexander the Great, so the necessary circumstances for a debate about
which language to choose did not arise before the Greeks and the
Romans.

So I'm kind of wondering what you're talking about here.