ABSTRACT
Sinology is most intimately concerned with Chinese language, both classical and modern. Sinologists have turned out a vast array of ideas, views, and arguments on Chinese language and writing. The dazzling variety is characterized by a unifying logic that fits into my conception of Sinologism: conditions of Chinese language are to be investigated from the Western linguistic point of view and the nature of Chinese writing is to be determined in terms of Western alphabetic languages. Not many have investigated the problems from the Chinese perspective and scholars who study Chinese language on its own terms, Chinese and Western, are generally dismissed or ignored. This chapter attempts to probe the conditions of Sinologism in language studies. I will re-examine the enduring controversy over the nature of Chinese language, especially writing, with the aim of seeing how scholarly issues may develop into discourse wars, which underlie the deep structure of Sinologism, and how phonocentrism and logo-centrism in Western metaphysics have evolved into a logic of the linguistic unconscious that dominates studies of Chinese language.
