Tim Cassedy
The Chinese Language in the Eighteenth-Century British Imaginary
By the eighteenth century, detailed knowledge about the Chinese language had been widely disseminated in Britain, and many British observers agreed that Chinese was superior to English in almost every way: its oral form was supposedly immune to slang and had persisted unchanged for hundreds of years; its written form was non-alphabetic and therefore precise, consistent, and potentially usable as a universal language; and its printed form lacked all of the corruptions of Grub Street. Discussions of spoken, written, and printed Chinese appeared in playscripts, newspapers and magazines, religious tracts, encyclopedias, travelogues, novels, and other popular and learned documents, engaging cultural and theoretical questions about the structure, function, and consequences of language. Writers used Chinese, both implicitly and explicitly, to talk about English -- defining, contesting, and complicating the emergent (and mostly disapproving) terms and assumptions by which they understood their own language and language culture.
Chinese was seen in this period as exceedingly stable, efficient, and logical, an ideal foil for the allegedly degraded, admixed, mediated, and inconsistent English language. A variety of cultural and linguistic claims about Chinese supported this interpretation, two of the most important being the purportedly total separation of spoken from written Chinese, and an improved relationship between signifier and signified -- both said to be effects of the non-alphabetic script. Furthermore, Chinese print seemed to represent what print could be in an uncorrupted form: the Chinese bound their books in silk, gathered up any stray printed pages with care, and regarded the printing industry so highly that even the makers of ink were accorded great respect; whereas British books were often produced as cheaply as possible, stray pages from worthless books were used for wrapping up cheese, and the printing industry was perceived to be polluted by scoundrels and whores. Chinese provided an occasion to articulate different possibilities for arranging print and language in a society, contributing to the types of thinking that produced the concept later called print culture. The new availability of eighteenth-century texts in searchable online databases allows us to understand the interest in the Chinese language with unprecedented focus, fundamentally transforming our ability to trace the increasingly complex evaluations of language, linguistic mediation, and culture observable in this discourse.