Not joking. While I agree that Chinese have had periods of pioneering endeavour. I do believe they went off the boil.
So what great nation hasn't? Sumer? Egypt? Greece? Olmec? Rome? India? Persia? Bulgaria? Spain? Ottoman? England? The other dozen or two that didn't spring to mind? When the formula is discovered for indefinite renewal of one's fifteen minutes of fame, whether an individual, corporation, culture, or other entity, that will be quite a milestone in the history of civilization.
China has endured
as a continuous political and cultural entity for more than three thousand years. I'd say that's quite an accomplishment, especially considering that for most of that time it has been the world's largest such entity, in both area and population.
In order to do this, it has developed the ability to withstand foreign conquest, assimilating the new motifs that it finds valuable and sloughing off the rest, and ultimately assimilating the invaders themselves. The Mongols married into Chinese families, began speaking Chinese and adopting Chinese mannerisms, and eventually vanished by absorption. The Manchurians did the same thing, and it wasn't just the occupying force that was absorbed, but
the entire country of Manchuria. Now it is dealing with its greatest challenge, the invasion of communism from neighboring Russia. And once again China prevails, crafting a form of communist government and industry that actually works, by hybridizing it with Confucianism.
It was the Confucian culture that inhibited the development of science, because respect for one's ancestors and living elders damps the urge to find revolutionary new ways of doing things. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," could be the country's motto. But instead they have one that I love, although to be precise it is a
curse: "May you live during interesting times." Don't we Americans, and perhaps all Westerners, feel right now like some Chinese guy must have put that curse on us?
They've maintained a continuity with their revered ancestors, back to a time when the Romans were a Neolithic tribe experimenting with agriculture, which gives them a comforting sense of family, community, and
predictability, even during the worst times. It sure ain't our way, but it works for them.
So I would glean from your answer that it was more to do with social conditions than it was to do with the language spoken (many believe the oppressions of islamic religion caused the arab world to slow its scientific endeavours), the reason Chinese culture and development seemed to stagnate?
Actually the flowering of Arab science occurred at the beginning of the Muslim era. It has been persuasively argued that, on the contrary, it was Christianity in Europe that suppressed scholarship, research and innovation during the thousand years of ignorance and squalor that we affectionately call the Dark Ages. (Which are more than a little exaggerated but the name is not unwarranted.) The Arabs kept Greek proto-science, mathematics and philosophy alive (including the books themselves) while we waited for our Reformation, Renaissance and Enlightenment. Which, to cite another persuasive argument, was suspiciously coincidental with the importation of coffee from Ethiopia to a population that had been drunk on beer round-the-clock because their water was too polluted to drink.
What effects does a language feedback into a culture? Seems that the English language is a very potent scientific tool?
I have wondered about that as much as anyone, as my posts on SciForums frequently indicate. I've given a few examples.
- A language that uses fewer syllables to express an idea can be spoken more slowly, allowing more thought to go into each word and making it easier for people from further away, who speak a different accent, dialect or language, to understand and build a larger community to pool its intellectual energy.
- A language that does not compartmentalize the universe into arbitrary predefined compartments, such as present-past-future or noun-verb-adjective-adverb-preposition-whatever--allows thoughts to expand in new directions.
- A language that makes it easy to create new words allows new ideas to be shared more readily.
I'm sure Chomsky writes about this stuff, but at my age I'm not patient enough to wade through deep non-fiction while Alan Dean Foster is writing novels faster than I can read.
The promise of ancient China was never fulfilled.
And who are we to define its promise? Continuity is a great source of emotional comfort, and here we sit in a country that is only in its third century and may be on the verge of ruin, as its retired citizens uncaringly roam around in four-ton recreational vehicles with bumper stickers declaring, "We're spending our children's inheritance."
While I really do respect their history and past achievements, I would be fascinated to know what happened within their culture to slow it down so much.
You don't seem to regard continuity as an "achievement," but they sure do. Slowing down progress also slows down dissolution. Regardless of our degree of spirituality, all of us in the West live in an Abrahamic culture, which teaches us to trust in fate. The Confucian culture of the East teaches its members to trust in the wisdom of those who came before. That attitude wrestled the communist bear to the mat and ultimately domesticated it, so there must be something to it.
Seems to me adaptability is a big asset. But also the inventiveness of speakers of the English language is a hard thing to compete with in modern times (I mean the biggies).
Although as an (amateur) linguist I think that Chinese is a more adaptable language than English, for practical purposes English is nonetheless adaptable enough to be a resource in a rapidly changing world. Over the centuries we have simplified our grammar to loosen the constraints of the Proto-Germanic language of the Bronze Age. But now we are even
changing the grammatical paradigm itself, for example by inventing a new kind of word, the noun-adjective compound, which loosens the constraints of the entire Indo-European way of viewing the world, which was formed in the
Stone Age.
What do you know of the relatively new study of the language a person speaks, and the effect it has in the brain? The psychological effects of the language spoken; the wiring in the brain of individuals who speak certain languages and the possible benefits or weaknesses this hardwires into the mind? It makes sense that there are differences. Is it possible that one language in particular has evolved to the point where it bestows a creative advantage to its speakers? Or is there too much more to these differences to pin them down to one tool of humanity (given it is a possibly the most potent application of mind at present)?
Sounds like Chomsky's territory again. Nonetheless, it's clear that like a muscle, the brain can be shaped by exercise. The classic example is the brain of the London taxi driver, which has more cells than ours in the area that stores geographical information, so they can take you from any point in the city to any other by the most efficient route without stopping to ponder and plan.
