Ideographic Myth: Advocacy of the Critique Keywords: Ideographic Myth, John DeFrancis, Victor Mair, J.

Marshall Unger, Lawrence J. Howell The first paragraph of Victor Mair's Foreword to J. Marshall Unger's Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning is characterized by truculent, even bellicose terminology: pernicious lies and nave myths that swirl around the sinograms; ubiquitous and outrageous tall tales concerning the sinograms; ... embattled warriors do their best to combat them. We can find DeFrancis using similarly contentious language (or plain speaking, if one prefers). For his part, Unger (in his 1993 reply to Hansen) takes things to an extreme with the discreditable use of argumentum ad hominem. The degree of stridency with which the critique has been advanced strikes me as disproportionate for a theory about language and writing; this style of disputation is more often seen in cases where something much greater is at stake. For those interested in knowing exactly what Unger wrote, here is the relevant passage from a Communication to the Editor printed in the Journal of Asian Studies (Vol. 52, No. 4; Nov., 1993): ... the quality of Hansen's scholarship is so poor that I feel someone must apprise readers who are not specialists in linguistics of facts and sources Hansen fails to cite. There are equally wrongheaded writers, such as Donald (1991), who deal with the relevant literature (even if they sometimes misinterpret it), get most of the basic facts straight, write clearly, have something original to say, and may be excused for their missteps because they don't know an East Asian language. None of these qualifications applies to Hansen ... Mair is above the use of personal attacks. However, we find him misrepresenting the

positions of other scholars who address ideography or the Critique of the Ideographic Myth. For example, in a Language Log post of 7 January 2009, Mair avers: The current trend in studies of the construction of Chinese characters is that there are essentially no pure ideograms, or if there are any ideograms they are exceedingly rare. Scholars who subscribe to this point of view include Peter Alexis Boodberg, the late and much lamented John DeFrancis, William Boltz, J. Marshall Unger, and David Prager Branner. On the other side of the fence are those, including Herrlee Glessner Creel, Chad Hansen, Franoise Bottro, and David Lurie, who are quite comfortable with the idea that the Chinese script is replete with ideograms. Is it actually true that Franoise Bottro and David Lurie are ... quite comfortable with the idea that the Chinese script is replete with ideograms? It is not. My reading of Bottro's and Lurie's writings concerning the Chinese script indicates no tendency toward the position Mair claims they hold. Lurie's crime seems to be that in his 2006 essay Language, Writing, and Disciplinarity in the Critique of the 'Ideographic Myth': Some Proleptical Remarks he examines the Critique evenhandedly, without taking care to kneel and kiss the myth-as-debunked-by-DeFrancis ring. Meanwhile, what it is that might constitute Bottro's infraction is even more of a mystery. I urge Mair to quote for our benefit the relevant passages he believes supports his designation of the two. Whether he does so or not, I submit that in fact neither Bottro nor Lurie is ... quite comfortable with the idea that the Chinese script is replete with ideograms, and that this erroneous ascription is nothing other than an example of partisanship beclouding objectivity. From the above, we find the Critique being advanced by means of personal attacks, misrepresentation and accusations of pernicious lies, with its chief proponent likening himself and his allies to embattled warriors. Invective, distortion, allegations of mendacity, a bunker mentality: It's all more

reminiscent of a defense of the true faith (or its secular cousin, a political campaign) than a sober defense of a scholarly position. The wonder is that the Critique of the Ideographic Myth has managed to go nearly three decades without attracting the critical attention it deserves. Lawrence J. Howell 7 April 2012 Adapted from a post originally uploaded to the Kanji Networks Blog