Chinese as a Classical Language of Botanical Science: Semiotics of Transcription Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo, Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh 1. Classical languages of science and botany The history of ancient and modern botanical science can only be studied properly if the Eurasian continent is treated as a connected unit with connected and disconnected cognitive worlds. Topics of interest in classical languages of science (Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic, Latin) and modern international languages of science (English, German, French, Russian, Chinese and Japanese etc.) are all connected to each other, but no scientific revolution is without linguistic conflicts. Languages function in this case as tools of integration and growth, but the influence of language remains often unconscious so that the “translation” of concepts, transcription of words, is often difficult or impossible. In the case of progressive vocabulary change in natural sciences we are often unaware of such problems, which causes not only linguistic but also scientific distortions. In the case of the standardization of notations terminological or orthographical ethnocentrism is an insidious, and often unrecognised, problem in scientific description. It occurs when words in one language, for example Chinese, Latin or English, are uncritically used to describe another scientific term with an inevitable distortion of code, meaning and classificatory dimension. On the other hand an extremely strong distortion is practically neglects scientific universes although the separate terms are referring to the same topic. How much can semiotics contribute to the study of botany? It is the purpose of this essay to approach this problem from the viewpoint of linguistics and to try to define language bound questions in the praxis of botany in connection to the East Asian botanical taxonomical tradition. In this essay we shall address 6 main points: 1. First we will review the historical steps in the linguistic connection of Chinese and Japanese to Western scientific language and postulate the difficulties of the Western treatment of these languages. 2. Secondly, the question of whether or not the linguistic transmission of Eastern matters to the Western discourse in the beginning of the 21 st century is equal and well balanced? KODIKAS / CODE Ars Semeiotica Volume 28 (2005) • No. 3-4 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen 318 Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo / Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh 3. Are there any semiotic reasons for the difficulties in the transmission of the nomenclature of botany? How can we prove linguistic distortion in botanical terminology? 4. The next step is a discussion of the semantics of Western and Eastern botanical taxonomy. 5. As the next topic, we have to deal with the importance of the fact that the medium of botanical discourse language is connected to institutions and international legitimating. As nature and human environment are connected to botany we will proceed to characterising legal questions. What are the legal problems from the linguistic point of view? 6. If we apply ourselves to such a task from a semiotic point of view, we may provisionally establish working hypotheses for the research of international botany in the future. 1.1 Classical Chinese and Japanese in Western scientific and linguistic tradition First we should consider the history of linguistics working in intercultural language contacts. Classical science, as it was developed in Europe in the 17 th , 18 th and 19 th centuries, had adopted, as a basic assumption, the idea that science has to deal with an already existing objective reality, independent of the observer and remaining the same during its description. Classical Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Sino-Japanese and Japanese were at that time used as languages for scientific description for a long time (Classical Chinese has a 3500-year-old tradition). The first attempts to describe Chinese and Japanese language were a result of the widening geographical and political world. The impressive investigation of the Chinese and Japanese language was a practical aim for the first missionaries during the 16 th century and the beginning of the 17 th century. At that time it was self-evident to base it on the Latin grammar as an objective frame. For the missionaries it was not easy to treat ideographic writings systems appropriately. The aesthetic and cognitive qualities of ideographic systems may be convincing for all modern linguists and one may naturally expect at the beginning of the 21st century both writing conventions can profitably be applied to the analysis of terminological facts; but there are serious problems in connecting the differing visual universes 1 . For effective work the theory of notation was crucial but because of the dominance of alphabetic systems in international communication languages writings, the Chinese writing systems are always handicapped. Although there is good reason to expect that alphabetic and ideographic systems both have advantages, alphabetic standards were connected to the Western scientific tradition and there were no perfect methods to apply ideographic systems to alphabetic conventions. In our article we concentrate on the language factor of our time that often has serious consequences when representing scientific notation. 1.2 Western knowledge about Chinese grammar and script Ever since the 16 th century Europeans have often expressed their amazement at the fact that the Chinese language seemed to have no fixed word classes. Specialists of Chinese in Chinese as a Classical Language of Botanical Science 319 later times, such as Karlgren (1926: 16), also declared that Chinese lacked features like the complex phonologies, system of conjugation and declension that are common to European languages. But the elasticity of Chinese grammar is restricted; even though classical Chinese may be flexible with regard to grammatical function, the lexical items are not indifferent to the way they function. Lexical items have certain preference otherwise Chinese could not function as a human language with sets of rules (cf. Harbsmeier 1998: 123). The American descriptive linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1933: 44) stated that Chinese is not a single language but a family of languages made up of a variety of mutually unintelligible languages. Although historical and dialect dictionaries of local languages can also be discussed as studies on different languages (cf. Harbsmeier 1998: 76) from stand point of scientific terminology it would appear that there is a real core of Chinese realised in the standard way of reading and writing the Classical Chinese language, as in literary and scientific Chinese. This is not to deny the fact of the importance of the variations of Chinese or other languages in the area. The Portuguese-Dominican friar Gaspar da Cruz commented in 1569 that the Chinese (Mandarin Chinese) have no fixed letters in their writing rather that they compose words and characters. Each thing is signified by one character as in the case of heaven, earth and man (Boxer 1953: 161-2). The Italian-Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci 2 (1552-1610) has a more authoritative description of Chinese writing that was adopted by Nicola Trigault (1615: 25-29, 144). The Chinese have a system of writing similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics and they do not express their concepts by writing with a few alphabetic signs like most of the world, rather they paint as many symbols as there are words. Each word has its own hieroglyphic character; there are no fewer symbols than words. The great number of characters is in accordance with the great number of things, though the number of characters does not exceed seventyto eighty-thousand. In a collection of missionary reports and essays in the 18 th century, Ko Jéf presented his view of Chinese characters: They are composed of symbols and images, and that these symbols are images, not having any sound, can be read in all languages, and form a sort of intellectual painting, a metaphysical and ideal algebra, which convey thoughts by analogy, by relation, by convention, and so on (Mémoires 1776: 24). Chinese characters where then systematically compared to Latin words. Marshman (1841: 33) reported on a manuscript Latin-Chinese dictionary that classified the characters according to their names. He calls the names primitives and notes that all the dictionary characters (about nine thousand) were formed from eight hundred and sixty-two characters, through the addition of only one element. Von der Gabelentz (1881: 501) presented characters formed by combining radicals and phonetics. A few radicals combine with a few phonetics to form a number of characters that are phonetically related through their common phonetics and semantically differentiated by their different significs. In the 19 th century more and more character dictionaries were published. Another important point to mention is that Chinese has received a lot of loan-words from neighbouring civilisations. Written Chinese has Latin-like functions as the East Asian lingua franca for Korea, Japan and Vietnam. They are around about 50, 000 hanzi (Chinese for characters) 320 Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo / Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh or kanji (Japanese for characters) and many variations of the signs have been used in the Chinese script area ever since former. 1.3 Japanese grammar and script The first step in the Western description of Japanese was the work of Portuguese missionaries. The quality of linguistics at that time is famous. As Maës had pointed out in his discussion of the missionaries attempt - Rodriguez’s (? 1561-1634) (cf. Maës 1975: 12) Rodriguez grammar, Arte breve da Lingoa Japoa, demonstrates a considerable understanding of the differences between Japanese and Latin grammar. To illustrate this phenomenon let us discuss the social deictic field and the question of pronouns in Japanese. Rodriguez was aware of the fact that Japanese has no agreement marker and that it has a large amount of pronouns which are used elliptically. It is not easy to understand from the perspective of Latin grammar, but Rodriguez preferred a double solution: on the surface to production of Latin-like grammatical paradigms, in order to describe Japanese, in this case to give a fictive declination for the six-person-paradigm in Japanese and to deal with all different nouns and pronouns marking one person individually on the pragmatic level of Japanese. Enumerating 40 nouns and pronouns for the second person means also to know many Chinese characters. Honorifics are connected to the complex writing system. The Japanese language has been studied by several philologists and orientalists in Europe such as H. J. Klaproth, Georg von der Gabelentz, August Pfizmaier, Abel Rémusat, Léon Pagés and Johann J. Hoffmann. Johann Joseph Hoffmann (1805-1878) worked on Siebold’s material for Japanese and, though he had never been in Japan, developed in his Japanese grammar almost the same as Rodriguez. The spread of Non-Indo-European languages, as a part of linguistic scientific research in the 19 th century, helped linguists to understand that language is a record of cultural practices; or phrased differently, a syntactic and semantic representation of what is important or salient in that culture (cf. Lyons 1977). That is to say, languages are far from neutrality, but they are systems of interpretations, values, attitudes and interests handed down through history. Since Humboldt’s time linguistic thinking has become strongly influenced by the fact that our perception of the world is structured by our mother tongue. Language is not only a tool for human beings but linguistic categories can influence our experience (cf. Trabant 2003). The Japanese writing system is much more complicated then the very specific Chinese one. For this reason, missionaries tried to use other writing conventions in order to be able to quickly use Japanese for oral communication. They called the Japanese writing system the language of evil because of the complicated practices of adaptation of the Chinese into the grammatically different Japanese; as in reading Chinese characters in Sino-Japanese or in many Japanese variants. When missionaries abandoned the original Sino-Japanese and Japanese script for the treatment of the spoken Japanese language and used only their own romanized transcription, it was very useful for practical communication but absolutely unacceptable for genuine Chinese and Japanese scientists. Since then, the process of orthographic diversification has continued on and different systems have come to complicate the representation of ideographic hanzi and kanji in Mandarin and Japanese in modern times. In spite of all the systematic difficulties, Japanese Chinese as a Classical Language of Botanical Science 321 writing conventions are very well researched and lexicalised by now. Therefore, there is good reason to expect that there are no serious problems in adapting Chinese or Japanese writing systems for Western scholars if they are able to read in non-alphabetic convention. 2. Equal transmission or semiotic orientalism Linguistics can be suitably combined with appropriate means of linguistic research but it can also contribute to the formation of myths that a language is unique. Chinese and Japanese orientalism can strengthen the idea that special qualities of those languages are part of the representative culture; such as vagueness and illogical argumentation. This psychological isolation has also historical, geographical and linguistic genetic reasons. If, however, we treat Chinese and Japanese as international languages, we will notice that Chinese and Japanese are members of the group of the most widely spoken language among the languages in world. By 2000, the overall consensus among those concerned with linguistics was that some form of knowledge of Chinese and Japanese is necessary as a basic tertium comparationes for theoretical linguistics and for the description of English. In the Japanese case, the need for information on special Japanese examples is further highlighted by the attraction of orientalism. The excessive adulation of exotic facts is a little bit troubled by the dilemma that some of the authors cannot read Chinese and Japanese and therefore only use second hand information. Hand in hand with the colloquialization of knowledge about Chinese and Japanese syntactical and pragmatic facts, is the lack of opportunity to prove the information from Chinese and Japanese materials or linguistic literature. Today’s attitude towards the observation of information is that communication is creating the communication process by itself and that it’s not only a repetition of already existing facts. As Michael Foucault argues the discourses must always be seen as moments of power as well; as information power is invariably implicated in any effort to produce and represent knowledge. Although Chinese and Japanese studies outside of the home countries had shown sensitivity to questions of orientalism, there have been no attempts to understand linguistic orientalism especially when directed toward the continuously growing common sense as linguistic tradition. On the whole one can say that information concerning naming entities or orthographical questions in both Chinese and Japanese are very spare in lexicons in Western languages. This means that that while language contacts are very common, adaptations of the knowledge about these languages is only possible for specialists. The implications in connection with the use of scientific terms are quite complex and shall be explained for different ranges of use. 2.1 Possibility of transmission - a state of helpless obscurity In studying Chinese and Japanese we are interested in exploring the further possibilities and limitations of modern linguists. When we compare Chinese linguistics from China and Japanese linguistics from Japan and Western Chinese and Japanese linguistics or Western general linguistics, we often make an extremely poor form in terms of comparison. In 322 Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo / Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh addition, we have persisted far too long in thinking of the relations between the two worlds in narrow bilateral terms. Think of the changes that have taken place in the two worlds in the course of the linguistic development in the twentieth century. The history of Chinese and Japanese linguistic thought in China and Japan and in contact with Western traditions is well documented from one side from the Asian perspective. On the other side, beneath the brilliant surface achievements in the role of Chinese and Japanese in Western linguistics, scholarly interest in the study of their history seems not to exist in the Western perspective. In the beginning phases, Western linguists specialized in Chinese often make acquaintance with the author of the ancient Chinese work on lexicology and semiotics Shuowenjiezi 說 文解字 (‘Explaining Graphs and Characters’, +100) from Xu Shen 許慎 in the Han dynasty and that of the phonological masterpiece Qie Yun 切韻 (‘Carved Rhymes’, +601) from Lu Fa-yan 陸法言 in the Sui dynasty. The rhetorician Liu Xie 劉勰 (+465-552) is known for his Wenxindiaolong 文心雕龍 (‘The Carving of Literary Dragon’) and the grammarian who introduced Western linguistics, Ma Jian-zhong 馬建忠 , is recognized by his comprehensive work Mashiwentong 馬 氏 文 通 (‘Mr Ma’s Comprehensive Treatment of Chinese Grammar’, 1904). Needless to say, one often has one’s own preferred linguists. As for the modern linguists who are known in the Western linguistic field we should mention Hu Shi 胡適 , Lin Yu-tang 林語堂 , Chao Yuan-ren 趙元 任 , Wang Li 王力 , Li Fang-gui 李方桂 , Zhou Zu-mo 周祖謨 and Lü Shu-xiang 呂叔湘 . The Chinese linguistic tradition is of extraordinary interest to the global history of linguistics, but there are very few translations into Western languages. Language barriers also exist in the Japanese case - with only a few exceptions - linguistics written in Japanese is little known to foreign scholars. Doi (1977: 272) called this state in Japan “a state of helpless obscurity” as there are almost no translations of Chinese and Japanese linguists into European languages. The tendency is just to neglect this problem, though of course not without honourable exceptions 3 . Among those fortunate linguists, who are capable of reading and speaking Japanese this problem may be not vital. But it is vital to all linguists working about these languages, but who are lack sufficient knowledge of Chinese and Japanese. Ignoring this question is a popular technique for the most general linguists, who maybe suppose that there is sufficient knowledge of Japanese in English materials. Nevertheless, one might still ask ‘what is going on? ’, when factually all linguistic classics are not translated into any “readable” language. Classical botanical works are also very rarely translated. Furthermore, we can observe that there are almost no modern translations of linguistic works in languages other than English into Chinese or Japanese. As a result, we desperately need to create academic systems capable of overcoming these barriers and to allow languages other than the main scientific languages, to thrive in the linguistic community. If we treat the situation in terms of sociological analysis we can take the famous Japanese sociolinguistic distinction of uchi (inside) and soto (outside). The following list characterizes the situation faced by general linguists when dealing with Chinese and Japanese: Chinese as a Classical Language of Botanical Science 323 Information source for general linguistic research in China, Japan and Europe for the study of Chinese and Japanese China and Japan Europe Language materials inside outside Linguistic materials inside outside Materials about linguists inside outside Writing system inside partially inside, partially outside Grammatical categories inside outside Writing standards inside outside Dangers: Homogenisation Isolation from the western context Belief in the unique character of the mother tongue No control over the instances of discourse Orthographic problems Dangers: Homogenisation, neglecting dialectal and stratificational varieties, neglecting the delicacies Isolation from the Asian linguistic context Creating information for the convenience of the specific theory Oversimplification in typological thinking No control about the instances de discourse Orthographic problems In connection to the problem of inside-outside scientific spaces we should remember Needham’s visions as the visions of the greatest European scholar in the field of research of East-Asian natural sciences: Next comes the spacious story of the Chinese botanical literature, until now almost unknown to Westerners and others who lack acquittance with the script in which it was written. First we talk about the lexicographic and encyclopaedic texts, because there is in them a vast wealth of botanical information, hitherto very little drawn upon by historians of the plant sciences. Then follow the imperial florilegia (unique to the Chinese tradition), the classified compendia, and the dictionaries of origins, together with those based on script, sound and phrase. If these could all be made to yield up the knowledge about plants which they contain, then in spite of a certain amount of mutual copying, and allowing for a modicum of legendary lore, great benefit would accrue to the oecumenical history of mankind’s understanding of the plant world (Needham 1986: XXVIII). 3. Semiotic spaces: connected and disconnected 3.1 Distorted scientific communication in natural sciences due to language inequality There are strong common links between natural sciences in our modern world. In the international scientific world English and Latin/ Greek serve as link languages that allow the scientists of different countries to communicate with one another. The spread of neutral international scientific languages facilitates international communication but because of 324 Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo / Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh the difficulties of different traditions there is strong evidence that points to distortion in the communication that takes place in international scientific matters. We define distorted communication according to Mueller (1973) as all forms of restricted and prejudiced communication that, by their nature, inhibit a full discussion in issues and ideas that have public relevance. Distorted communication can be politically directed, arrested because of restricted or more elaborated codes and constrained, consuming time and energy. The basis of the scientific standards in East Asian botany was the classical Chinese language and script. Distinguishing the common and the learned names for plants we can find in the text of Theophrastus, and we find that his contemporaries in China in the 300 BC century The Chinese traditional botanical names are the Chinese inventions, although systematically very similar to the European botanical classification (Graham 1969, Needham 1986: 165): Our thesis is that there was an exact parallelism between East and West in the choice and a construction of plant names. (…) Whatever aura of advanced science may hang about the accepted Latin generic names of today is really illusory, for there is an exact analogy between the principles on which they were framed and those that gave the Chinese the nomenclature. Most of the Chinese herbal names are adopted from famous ancient herbal works, such as Bencaogangmu 本草綱目 (‘The Great Pharmacopoeia, the Pandects of Natural History’, 1596), Jiuhuangbencao 救荒本草 (The Pharmacopoeia written by Zhu Su, 1406), etc. A traditional and commonly used naming methodology is: First a noun is subscribed as the head to name plants in the same genus, e.g. cao 草 (grass), hua 花 (flower), and jue 蕨 (fern). Then, according to the appearance, habitat, place of orign and fruitage of the plants (cf. Hsiung 1998: 57, 60), a modifier is chosen to distinguish the genus, e.g. bai he cao 白鶴草 (white crane grass; Rhinacanthus nasultus). The description of the appearance of the plant as the modifier is the most productive method. The flower of bai he cao (white-crane-grass; Rhinacantus nasultus) is white and the Chinese believe that the form of the flower resembles a crane. Cultural perception is often noticed here. A crane carries a positive connotation and linguistic concept for the Chinese and thus is often adopted in naming. Morphemes as such as shan 山 (mountain), hai 海 (ocean), shui 水 (water) are used to describe or to distinguish between the different habitats of those celeries grown in water and those on land, e.g. shui qin cai 水芹菜 (water celery). Moreover, yang 洋 (foreign) and fan 蕃 (barbarian) often serve as contrasts to distinguish two entities in the same species as indigenous or exotic. For some trees, the economic value lies in the fruits they bear, so these trees are named after their fruits, e.g. pin-guo shu 蘋果樹 (apple tree). The various ways of referring to plants in the Chinese scientific vocabulary 4 : 1. Chinese traditional names 2. Vernacular names: The vernacular names (also called common names) are named by local biologists or local people and such names are popular in non-academic herbal literature, e.g. wu-gong cao 蜈蚣草 (a ciliate desert-grass). 3. The popular alphabetic names: e.g. 銀杏 gingko (in these cases Chinese names will be mentioned too). Chinese as a Classical Language of Botanical Science 325 4. The international scientific names (Latin): A full list of scientific names with Chinese correspondent terms is sometimes provided in the appendix of the given articles or books. 5. Chinese traditional names and any of the above mentioned names. 6. A combination of all the aforementioned categories. As Needham stressed, the greatest difference between China and Europe in the plant nomenclature and taxonomic language is that the latter had a dead language in its past from which scientifically defined names could be derived. Latin was a permanent barrier for the common names in specific languages. Chinese ideographs could not function the same way as a “scientific fence” separating scientific names from common names (cf. Needham 1986: XXVII). It is well-know fact, that modern Japanese has adopted thousands of lexical entities from Classical Chinese and Western languages its scientific vocabulary. For the extensive territories of modern terminology there are still many neglected facets of lexical innovation and compatibility. While borrowings are now mostly from English, the basic concepts of the original scientific vocabulary can be divided into 5 groups: 1. Japanese words proper 2. Sino-Japanese words, which have been imported from the Chinese language since the beginning of the 6 th century, but are disappearing gradually nowadays 3. Latin and Greek loan-words as internationalism 4. European loan-words - mostly English 5. Combination of all categories The Japanese description can be based on the Western and on the Eastern taxonomynormally it is a mixture of both of them. Satakes (1993: 146) description of Oleacae gives Latin information on the higher level-Family, Genus, not mentioning the Latin termini and at level and gives no information on the Chinese scientific terminology. All the following bold items are added to the original source: Family ---- モクセイ科 (Mokuseika) Oleaceae Genus トネリコ属 (Tonerikozoku) Fraxinus シオジ (shioji) (Fraxinus platypoda) Chin. Scient. Kuan bing bai la shu, Chin. Vulg. shui jiou マルバアオダモ（ marubaaodamo) (Fraxinus sieboldiana) Chin. Scientific guang la shu, Chin. Vulg. xi bo bai la shu シマトネリコ (shimatoneriko) (Fraxinus griffithi) タイワンシオジ (taiwanshioji) Chin. Scientific, Bai ji you, Chin. Vulg. 0 This source presents only one case of the correlations between Latin and Japanese botanical taxonomy. As predicted, two language and processing systems are necessary for comprehension. 326 Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo / Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh The results of the research of the National Language Research Institute prove there is actually a great terminological instability in Japanese (cf. Miyajima 1981). Many terms are in concurrency to each other; clarification is needed in scientific and everyday language life. In the context of scientific communication, loan-words can also cause a lot of work and, in many cases of distorted communication. The reason for their instability is the process of intercultural mediation (an orthographic and semantic process) affects human cognition is not necessarily consciously recognized, because the language one uses is taken for granted and interchangeable; and only in cases of disturbances can language be recognized, as an important fact - a reality of its own. As to the types of disturbances: we examine semantic and orthographic problems as overt restrictions upon freedom of expression. 3.2 Hanzi/ kanji-universe - alphabet universe The dominance of alphabetic systems in international and intercultural communication often creates serious consequences in representing languages from the hanzi/ kanjiuniverse, as Chinese and Sino-Japanese are always handicapped. The immediate importance of proper orthographic tools for scientist can be seen in noting the most common errors and difficulties. Over time, Chinese and Japanese botanical terms have been extended to the Latin specification of botanical terminology, but these specifications include a great variety of designations that belong to different sections of vocabulary. Qualitatively, Chinese characters may denote the same or a different plant, in connection to Latin, in a diglossic situation. Latin botanical terms may be connected to a great variety of Chinese and Japanese botanical names and clarify the concept. The Japanese language is well known for its heavy debt to Chinese; it not only began as a written language using both Chinese ideographs and phonetic symbols based on them, but borrowed in the long history of cultural contact heavily from Chinese vocabulary. It is a clear phenomenon that kanji in Japanese may have another sense as in Chinese. As far as such hanzi/ kanji is in a specific context - information is recoverable. Implications in connection with the use of Chinese, Japanese and Latin botanical terms are quite complex. The representation of Japanese plant terms displays variants in different codes - in Japan there is a triglossic situation. Chinese as a Classical Language of Botanical Science 327 Botanic Terminology in Chinese and Japanese with orthographic variation Chinese scientific botanic terminology CHINESE TRADITIONAL NAMES (hanzi) CHINESE vernacular names (hanzi) Romanization More than 20 Pinyin Taiwan 5 LATIN Alphabetic Chinese popular plant names Vernacular (hanzi) Dialect variation (hanzi) Historical variation (hanzi) Japanese scientific botanic terminology Usual writing TRADITIONAL SINO- JAPANESE NAMES OR JAPANESE TERMINI (katakana) JAPANESE vernacular NAMES (katakana) Romanization More than 12 Hepburn Kunrei LATIN Alphabet Writing variation Kanji, katakana, hiragana Katakana-kanji Japanese popular plant names Vernacular (kanji, hiragana, katakana) Dialect variation (kanji, hiragana, katakana) Historical variation (kanji, hiragana, katakana) The total number of plant species known in the world is around 225,000, with an average of eighteen species to each genus. The Sino-Japanese flora is much richer than that of Europe and China has some 30,000 species and in the north temperature zone where Japan only has 5,500 (cf. Needham 1986: XXVI). The identification of plant names in the north temperature zone is a huge scientific field, even when only talking about the lexicographic matters. Before entering into the question of lexicology, through it seems necessary to mention that lexical and orthographic differences could be seen as non-significant details but we should remind ourselves that in modern data technology minimal variations are significant. Alphabetic conventions are very sensitive to all sound deviation in orthography. 3.3 Homographic terms - camellia or cedar? Due to the long borrowing tradition of Chinese characters and words Chinese and Sino- Japanese have many varieties of writing in artificial and natural language usage. Different plants with the same Chinese character can appear as a homographic question. In the next step, we enumerate the consequences of using the same hanzi/ kanji 椿 for different plants for the botanical description of Japanese: Sazanka or Sasanqua; “The Japanese Rose”. The name Camellia Japonica was given by the East India Company 328 Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo / Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh (1702) though the plant, popular in Europe in the nineteen-forties, was essentially Chinese 6 . The Chinese name for ornamental camellias is chahua 茶花 ‘tea flower’ or sancha 山茶 ‘mountain tea’. The relationship between ornamental flower and tea caused many problems for European botanists, who for a long time could not decide whether the generic name should be Camellia or Thea. Now, the general content name Theaceae is retained for the family, but the tea has the name Camellia sinensis. Theaceae as a generic name (gakumei 学名 ) is called Japanese Tsubakika ツバキ科 and the next classificatory step (zokumei 属名) is Camellia called Tsubakizoku ツバキ属。 Therefore variations of the scientific and vernacular names can still be confusing today. Camellia japonica, Camellia Sasanqua Chinese shancha 山茶 (‘mountain tea’ or according to Kaempfer Sa Sa or vulgo Jamma Tjubakki, Kaempfer, Amonitates exoticae 1712) Camellia reticulata But shancha could also stay for Camellia reticulata, the Yunnanese cultivation of flowers with various red shades Chinese chamei 茶梅 (‘tea plum’related to Camellia oleifera, native in China, where it is used as cosmetic oil 7 haishiliu 海石瑠 (‘see stone coloured glaze’) Japanese vernacular name tsubaki 椿 The usage of the same character fort he scientific name of cedar in Sino-Japanese. Cedrela sinensis. Juss. Roem Japanese Chanchin 香椿 チャンチン Chinese Chun 椿、香椿 Polygraphic and polysemic problems Chinese: chahua ‘tea flower’, shancha ‘mountain tea’, chamei ‘teaplum’, haishiliu ‘see stone coloured glaze’, chun ‘cedar’ etc. Japanese: sasanka, sazanka ‘tea mountain flower’, (Sasanqua), Yama tsubaki or yabu tsubaki ‘mountain/ bush camellia or cedar’, Hime sazanka ‘princess tea mountain flower’, Hime tsubaki ‘princess camellia or cedar’, tsubaki ‘cedar’ etc. Western-Latin: Sasanka, Sasanqua, Camellia Japonica, Camellia sasanqua, Yama tsubaki, Camellia sinensis, Camellia japonensis, Camellia reticulata, Camellia oleifera, Schima wallichii, tsubaki, cedar Practical use Camellia: tea, oil, flower, art Cedar: oil, art, building As the usage of camellia and cedar can be very different we can see that homographic problems can cause serious mistakes in the use of plants. Next a few words on a similar Chinese as a Classical Language of Botanical Science 329 case from Needham’s description of a plant called chhin phi 秦 ‘the bark of the chin tree’ synonymous with kku shu (ku shu 苦樹 ) in Pen ching or its full title Shen nung pen chao jing 神農本草經 (Shen nong ben cao jing, ‘Classical Pharmacopoeia of the Heavenly Husbandman’, 1596) which is a compendium of medical plants discovered in antiquity up until later Han time (cf. Needham 1986: 478). Ku shu could be Celastrus angulata Maxim a member of the Celastrace, but it is also supposed to be the bark of the chin tree: There is considerable uncertainty about its botanical identity. Porter smith called it Fraxinus pubivernus, while Read preferred Fraxinus bungeana. The Genus Fraxinus would be the plant of Oleaceae. The Kang Mu states that chhin phi kills invertebrates (sha chung) and leaves can be used for washing clothes. Porter Smith confirmed the value of the bark as astringent, and that it is effective as a wash for snake and insect bites (Needham 1986: 484). Such controversies are not purely academic questions, especially if we are searching for medical or biological-washing materials. Botanical compendia of high international reputation cannot always help Western scholars to solve the problem Harvard’s Flora of China as a taxonomy includes some hanzi/ kanji but the Swedish one from the Botanical Institute of Göteborg University does not. The problem of the romanization approach is not the use of the alphabetical termini but the fact that connecting two types of ‘signifiants’ as carriers of combined or different items builds significant barriers. 3.4 Homophonic problems - the same name for many plants The duality of reference in applying botanical terms is also reflected in the great number of possibilities for the transcription into alphabetical systems. As far as Japanese plant names are referred to in alphabetic systems, homophonic cases can appear. For instance the Japanese vernacular plant name kanran can be used for five plants, from which cabbage and olive are rather different. One of these plants is called kanran also has a scientific name. Let’s take some Sino-Japanese and Japanese examples. If they are written with Sino-Japanese kanji or syllabic distinctions in katakana, the usual way of writing them can help to differentiate: Kanran 8 - 5 plants Brassica oleracea var.capitata L. 甘藍 Cimbidium kanran Makino 寒蘭 Canarium album Lour. Raeusch. Chin Olive 橄欖 Olea europeae 橄欖 Burseraceae Canarium, Dacrydodes, Santiria カンラン For plant information it is impossible to identify this species by alphabetic convention. However, let us assume for the sake of argument that in spite of all these actual difficulties, the international communication is working on the prospective common definition of complicated items 9 . The very informative Flora of Japan (www.foj.info) Kodansha database in English gives information on the Japanese scientific names in katakana and not in kanji. Presenting the items in katakana is correct as a scientific convention, but as it is not referring to Chinese scientific conventions or the Japanese vernacular usage in kanji, it is 330 Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo / Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh not in the authentic script. The authentic information is only represented on the Japanese sites. The present findings suggest that the linguistic spaces are not equally connected. 3.5 Phonetic adaptation - a lot of letters for the same phoneme Scientific terminologies were developed hundred years ago; changes in codification are only natural. Orthographic and semantic variations are possible in the Western scientific terminology but the possibilities are restricted to some cases: y-i as Wilde Malve, Malva syvestris/ silvestris capital letter Sylvaticussylvaticus hyphen Tollkirsche Atropa Bella-donna, Atropa belladonna Synonyms Graminae = Poaceae (Reis) Homonyms chinensis = sinensis Vowel or consonant variation Napauliensisi =nepalensis, nipalensis (Yamahara 2000) The variants of representation in cases of spoken and written natural or scientific language are quite complex and shall be explained for different ranges of use in the natural or scientific language use; semantic features of the Western and Sino-Japanese scientific inventory will be distinguished in section 4. We can now proceed to orthographic facets of language borrowing. In the vast range of possibilities, Chinese and Japanese writing systems play a key role. Because of the variety of writing conventions in Japanese and in the transcription of Japanese into alphabetical systems, the same artificial or everyday word for a plant can appear in many confusing variations. When writing Chinese or Japanese plant names, a number of phonetic realizations are possible and the recoverability of information is often seriously damaged. Although it is true that there are certain transcriptional techniques, which are most readily identifiable as spelling in higher-order Indo-European languages, it must be noted that romanization is not an invariably carrier of clear conventions. Variations of different romanization and the time factor: The botanical name - Camellia sasanqua 山茶花 is an adaptation of Latin with Sino- Japanese, but the same plant can appear as Sazanka (Kunrei or Hepburn system) Sasanka (Kunrei or Hepburn system) The second case is a clear illustration of the time factor: The botanical name Schima wallichii has nothing to do with shima ‘island’ in Japanese but is a variation of hime (‘princess’) also called Himetsubaki in modern Japanese. Schima can be correct in the sense of dialectal or individual variety when pronouncing hime, which was probably preserved in a German transcription sometime. Needham mentions (1986: 439) this plant with its Japanese specific name as chha mei 茶梅 (‘tea plum’) as a plant that continued to intrigue scholars, who were sent to Fukien in the 18 th century. As the Japanese cultivation became fashionable 43 species or varieties were classified before becoming popular in the middle of the 19 th century in the West. Chinese as a Classical Language of Botanical Science 331 3.6 Transcription systems for Chinese The recoverability of information is distorted by many transcriptional systems. Codifications in Main China and in Taiwan are different. Though there are now international efforts to achieve some botanical unification today, we should take it as granted, that every library in the world has the own different way of romanizing Chinese. Linguistically the process is far from being perfect. Looking for books is for example not an easy matter. For Chinese terms in German speaking context one should familiar with the following code-conventions (Kaden, 1975: 121 modified): Code-name Year Couvrer 1890 Dietz publishing house 1958 Franke 1930 Forke 1927 Gwoyeu Romatzyh 1928 Haenisch 1929 Lessing/ Othmer 1912 Palladius (Kafarov) 1888 Piasek 1957 Pinyin with accent As number 1958 Pinyin with accent as Marks 1958 Pinyin without accent 1958 Stange 1963 Latinxua Sin Wenz 1931 Vissière 1902 Wade/ Giles 1867 Yale-University 1943 Zhuyin Zimu 1918 Despite the circa 20 conventions for the romanization of Chinese, Western languages adapt lexical innovations from the Chinese in alphabetic orthography. Of course one should have a useful orientation for the loan-words. As we clarly see, the phonetic form has a crucial role in the loan-word adaptation of a foreign language - linguistics can serve as a mediating bridge in the transfer processes of Chinese terms. Phonetic issues are also qualitative aspects of lexical borrowing - the penetration of foreign expression into language usage can be much more effective if codification has already been decided. If the flood of Chinese loan-words into German continues through the variations of Pinyin, the codification of historical and obsolete forms is needed for integration. 椿 ch’un 1a long-lived tree, Cedrela 香椿 Cedrela odorata ch’un, ch’un 1 (Wade/ Giles), chun, chún chun, chun (Pinyin), 332 Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo / Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh pinyin chun (4 tones) API tsh Dietz tschun Gwoyeu Romatz chhun Forke/ Stange tsch’un Haenisch ch’un Lessing/ Othmer tschun Vissiére tch’oun Wade Giles ch’un With such variations, data mining is really troublesome: the most extreme case is er, where almost no vowel and no consonant remains the same. When searching for er, one must consider: ör (Dietz), el, erl, eel, ell (Gwoyen Romatzyh), örl (Lessing), eul (Vissière), êrh (Wade Giles) As we can see in romanization the recognition of a word unit involves specific difficulties: We do not know what something is unless we know what it is not. Curiously, positive and negative recognition are important. If we want to know, for example, what an X is, we hardly feel enlightened if we are told only that it is neither x or y. Similar considerations apply to other botanical names. In studying an unknown plant, the scientist must crack the language code in the specific context. He must find and learn to recognize the phonemes and the letters or signs, which allow as specific unit to be understood. In order to adequately learn about plants in Asia, he must learn to recognize and utilize languages from an insider’s perspective. Variation can affect philological mistakes through the addition, replacement, or deletion of some plants. To work effectively we have to work on the theory and technique of notation. 3.7 Transcription systems for Japanese Here we mention the main orthographical types of Japanese written in alphabetic convention: Portuguese 1591 Dutch Studies 17th 18th century Siebold 1827 Hepburn 1867 Revised Hepburn 1905 Japanese official System kunrei 1885 Kunreireform 1937 Kunrei reform 1946 Meyer 1971 French, Landresse 19 th century Chinese as a Classical Language of Botanical Science 333 If we return to the example of Camelliatsubaki, we have at least the following names tcubaki (Portuguese), toebaki (Dutch), tsubaki (Siebold), tubaki (Japanese official kunrei), zubaki (Meyer), tsoubaki (French). Kunrei or Hepburn transcription of Japanese into alphabetic systems often ignores long vocals, which causes instability: sansho - sanshô, is often unspecified. As it is often translated as ‘Eschesamen’ ‘ash seed’; it is complicated to follow it up scientifically, as it has not closely connected Fraxinum to ash but according to various lexicons connected to Family Cornaceae / Genus Cornus officialis, sanshôzoku サンショー属 and Family Rutaceae, Genus Zanthoxylum piperitum. Sansho サンショ sansio, sansho, Or with a long vowel: sanshou, sanshoo, zanshoo, zanshou, Sanshô 山椒 Oleaceae, Fraxinus sansho sanshou zansho zanshou Blütengewächse Cornaceae Oleaceae Rutaceae Cornus officialis Fraxinus Zanthoxylum piperitum (cf. Satake 1993: Cornus, Flora of Japan database: Zanthoxylum) In German lexicons sanshô is often referred to a sort of Fraxinum like ‘pepper’ - as Eschesamen ‘ash seed.’ But if we look at the scientific terminology we can recognize that Fraxinum and Zanthoxylum/ xanthoxylum are not the same. The mistake is probably the result of reading of the kanji as the same shô, which can also mean the ash tree. For the discussion of effective adaptation and romanization of Japanese we can reconsider Lewin’s (cf. Lewin 1990) arguments pro and contra Hepburn and kunrei-norm as the most accepted systems, but it would not really help in practical questions as they are as variable and ambivalent as the many conventions for the alphabetic retranscription of Chinese. 3.8 Are internationalisms transparent? Unfortunately not. An appropriate way to solve this problem would be trivial if scientific terminology were international. In the case of Japanese plants, whith names that are international words, such as tulip or aster the situation would be more comfortable. Unfortunately the pronunciation of plant names and the convention of writing them in hanzi, kanji in phonetic variant or katakana (a syllabic and not an alphabetic convention) guarantee new problems in transcription. Under the heading of transcription or phonetic problems we can enumerate a lot of international plant names as: 334 Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo / Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh CHINESE internationalisms tulip chûrippu crocus kurokkasu aster asutâ geranium zeranyûmu margarit mâgaretto The practical problem with these names is due to because of Japanese phonology; they are hard to grasp for the retranscription into the original language - and therefore not helpful. The linguist and the botanist are not conscious of the relationship between their respective fields of research. It should be easy to recognize that language is best treated as a system on its own and that researchers in botanical issues need training in natural sciences. Nevertheless, despite a well recognized relationship between lexicology and plant names, the practical value of the work of people engaged in translating Chinese or Japanese with special linguistic training are often overlooked and their necessity vaguely defined. At any rate, it would seem that we should make more use of lexicological knowledge when dealing with the many semantic and definitional problems, with the linguist engaged in Chinese and Japanese is constantly confronted. 4. The coherent semantics of botany 4.1 Divided linguistic spaces - essentially connected semantics In Saussurean sense, the term concept designates, basically, the conventional meaning we get from a sign, which can serve useful classificatory functions. Distinguishing, for instance between camellia and cedar as a botanical term constitutes conceptual patterns that obviously serve various practical, literal and scientific purposes cross-culturally. The semiotic functions from such distinctions are according to Rosch’s suggestion (1973) to superordinate as a classificatory function (e.g. ‘animal’), to be basic type (e.g. ‘cat’) or subordinate with providing details (e.g. ‘Siamese’). Denotative, connotative and metaphorical concepts and their networks have to be identified for scientific purposes. For the present purposes, it is sufficient to point out that they are interculturally nontransparent and in order to connect them we need various kinds of linkages. Scientific languages are languages of discovery. The language of botanic research is much more heterogeneous as the best representative scientific language is the language of mathematics. For the further semiotic analysis of scientific and natural languages we demonstrate the following inventory of taxonomical questions using Marcus’s definition of features of scientific languages (cf. Marcus 1979: 29-30). 1. Scientific language is the optimum expression of the rational hypostasis of human thinking, which is realized with a high syllogistic density. The heuristic function of scientific language relies upon its conciseness. 2. The syllogistic density leads to an axiomatic deductive structure, outlined by definitions and proofs, which require infinite synonymy, because they involve successive transformations of various assertions into others that are semantically equivalent to them. Replacements are essential. Chinese as a Classical Language of Botanical Science 335 3. The problem of style is very similar to thisas it consists of the choices between various synonym strings. 4. Translatibility is viewed as a particular form of transformation between synonymous strings. There are eight types of translation of s.l. in view of the fact that the infinite synonymy belongs to both natural and artificial component. 4.a replacement of the natural component by another natural component 4.b replacement of an artificial component by another artificial component 4.c replacement of the natural component by an artificial component 4.d translation of the artificial component into a natural language. 4.e conjunction of a. and b. - different symbolism and terminology 4.f conjunction of a. and d. 4.g conjunction of b. and c. 4.h conjunction of c. and d. is possible, but not common 5. Scientific language implies the primordiality of the cognitive function with respect to all other Jakobsonian communicative functions. 6. Scientific language can be learned only particularly before it is used. The metalinguistic function is essential. Only the continuous practice of science may lead to a deep knowledge of the operational behavior of some of its scientific objects and concepts. We can now proceed and clarify possible disturbances in the usage of botanical terminology and analyze the types of equivalency and distorted translation between natural language and scientific usage in comparison to English, German, Chinese and Japanese in botanical terms suggesting that most disturbances of our botanical taxonomy arise at the fourth level 4. Natural and artificial components of different languages will be demonstrated. We take the tree Fraxinus-Esche ‘ash-tree’ (Chinese) and compare natural language usage (common name = c.n.) dictionaries and botanical dictionaries written in katakana (‘syllabic alphabet’) or alphabet (scientific term = s.t.) and descriptions: Ash-tree is existent in Japan in the following variants (Satake 1993): Toneriko トネリコ、とねりこ " shioji 塩路 ‘salt way’, yachidamo 谷地だも ‘valley place ashtree’, miyamaaodamo ミヤマアオダモ ‘in the mountain blue/ green ash-tree’, marubaaodamo マル バアオダモ ‘round leave green/ blue ash-tree’, shimatoneriko シマトネリコ ‘island ash-tree’, aodamo アオダモ ‘blue/ green ash-tree’, yamatoaodamo ヤマトアオダモ ‘Yamato blue/ green ashtree’, shimatako シマタゴ ‘island tako’, tonerikoba no kaede トネリコノカエデ ‘Eschen-Ahorn’ 336 Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo / Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh Japanese Scientific name J. Western scientific name L. in Japanese German/ English common name Chinese scientific Name Chinese common Name Common name toneriko Fraxinus Esche/ ash Toneriko Type mokusei Toneriko and Sino-Japanese mokusei Fraxinus excelsior or fraxinus japonica oleacae 0 gao bai la shu 高白臘樹 yang chen 洋梣 shioji shioji Fraxinus platypoda 0 kuan bing bai la shu 寬柄白 臘樹 shui jiou 水 揪 yachidamo yachidamo Fraxinus madshurica var. japonica 0 ri ben shui qu liu 日本水曲柳 shui qu liu 水 曲柳 miyamaodamo miyamaaodamo Fraxinus apertisqumifera 0 luo lin ye bai la shu 裸鱗葉白 臘樹 0 marubaaodamo marubaaodamo Fraxinus sieboldiana 0 xi bo bai la shu 西伯白臘樹 0 shimatoneriko shimatoneriko Fraxinus griffithi 0 guang la shu 光臘樹 bai ji you 白雞 油 aodamo aodamo Fraxinus lanuginosa f. serrata 0 mao ju chi ye bai la shu 毛鋸 齒葉白臘樹 0 yamatoaodamo yamatoaodamo Fraxinus longicapis 0 chang hua xu bai la shu 長花 序白臘樹 0 shimatago shimatago Fraxinus floribunda 0 duo hua bai la shu 多花白臘 樹 0 toneriko no kaede Toneriko no kaede Acer negundo Eschenahorn feng shu 楓樹 feng shu 楓樹 In fact, studies in Sino-Japanese botanical science are inextricably bound to databases and systems in these languages. Looking at the International Association for Plant Taxonomy database or the database of the Botanical Institute in Göteborg (www.sysbot.gu.se/ ) we have absolutely no understanding of the Chinese names of plants. Chinese flowering ash Fraxinus sieboldiana Blume, simply has no Japanese name. If we would consider it for the United Nations Convention of Biological Diversity and Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, we would have to contact Chinese databases. Otherwise there is some help to be found in the Harvard Flora of China (hua.huh.Harvard.edu/ ) database supplying the Pinyin transcription lu shan qin without tone and hanzi with a question mark. In the case of Flora of Japonica (ww.foj.info) we can rely on the Latin and Katakana written Japanese names without reference to kanji. So we could name the plant properly Chinese as a Classical Language of Botanical Science 337 using many databases but this does not mean that we have all cross-references at the same timeso we are in need of treating a specific item. Who could tell us whether Chinese Flowering ash is Fraxinus sieboldiana or Fraxinus chinensis? Although we now have the possibility to have a look at the photos of its hermaphrodite inflorescence in Osaka as its leaves in Göteborg and the fruits in London. The database Biosis is a high quality English database with limited transparency. The reader then, in addition to developing botanical skills, must also master language and orthographic skills in order to regulate the appropriate resources. The present data also demonstrate that different processing strategies are necessary for Western and Chinese and Japanese botanical information systems as the subjects responding to our research are factually different in connection to the orthography. Japanese pepper sanshoo Xanthoxylum piperitum zanshou sansho 1 PREV200100040731 1 1 1 2 PREV200200115223 1 1 3 PREV200100189018 1 1 4 PREV199497461729 1 5 PREV199800404017 1 6 PREV199799571274 1 7 PREV200200377461 1 8 PREV199799547975 1 1 9 PREV199799502222 1 10 PREV199699252178 1 11 PREV199396056435 1 12 PREV199598181402 1 1 13 PREV199799742372 1 14 PREV199799742367 1 15 PREV199799648325 1 16 PREV199799383628 1 17 PREV199598428643 1 Sum 10 1 5 1 6 Budo-Zanshou Asakura-Zanshou Since the biosis database is written solely in the alphabetic convention, we cannot expect to get connection to the Chinese medical system as we see in the next entry in the database (cf. Liu, Ito, et al. Accession Number PREV 199799648525). Here once again we can show that differences in orthography are not irrelevant in coding information. As Japanese pepper Jiaomu was used as a diuretic in traditional Chinese medicine, it is derived from the genus Zanthoxylum, the family Rutaceae and of the same origin as huajiao. On the 338 Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo / Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh other hand, it is difficult to identify Zanthoxylum seeds because of their similar external morphology and the difficulty in sectioning them to observe their inner structure. This text is designed to provide information on an article published in the Journal of Japanese Botany 1997, but without the original kanji or hanzi further investigations are nearly impossible 10 . Botanical nomenclatura is divided into geographic and linguistic spaces for historical reasons. But it seems to be nonsense that there are almost no databases combining different languages for reference and search in an appropriate way. For instance it is nearly impossible to search for the Chinese and Japanese scientific name or for ephitets from the Western perspective that would help to differentiate the geographic spaces for the location of specific plants in the world. In addition an interesting field of research is the cultural analysis in the semantic field of common botanical names in Chinese and Japanese as it is connected to cultural history through the names of mythology, heroes etc. As for the technique of translation specific concepts are very important. In matters of religious culture or philosophy the problems of translations are often the most perplexing. The names for deities are a continual difficulty because of heavy connotative significance (cf. Hsieh 2001). It is obvious that botanical questions are very important for medical matters. The first Chinese drug code was printed in 1930 In this code we can see the bi-codification of plant names according to the Chinese and the Western tradition. It is in essence the transfer of the material medical and related pharmaceutical procedures as they were described in the official pharmacopoeias of various European states. The first drug code of the People’s Republic of China was published in 1953. Chung-guo yao-tien The order of the monographs, in the main text follows the number of strokes of (the first character of) their Chinese names. Each substance (listed) in the main text is described, if applicable, according to the following criteria: 1. Chinese and Latin name of the drug. 2. Chemical structured formula. (cf. Unschuld 1986: 278). For searches inside this system the knowledge of Latin would be insufficient. As in the ideographic distinction various characteristics and properties of plants are utilised. We could suggest that a suitably improved ideographic name for a plant would be much better than a Latin name or quasi-numerical computer codes. Ever since the spread of Western scientific terminology, Chinese and Japanese scientific terms and Latin scientific terms are almost coded as a norm. We could show botanical names are double in China (Chinese-Latin) and in Japan triple-coded (Chinese, Japanese, Latin). The unbalanced situation is also observable in the case of common names where a lot of words are not translatable. The Japanese and the Latin scientific terms are often listed in parallel lists - classification and naming are not coherent. Natural and artificial components are often confused - dictionaries and scientific publications are often unclear. Pragmatically Latin terms do not have the same status as Sino-Japanese or Japanese scientific terms in international science (cf. Takayama-Wichter 2001). Chinese as a Classical Language of Botanical Science 339 5. Legal conventions 5.1 Dividing or connecting through codification Codes are necessary for the combination of knowledge in the global world. Botanical species are not natural things, defined by common essential properties as they were treated for a long time, rather botanical species are divided by shared derived charactersprototypes of cognitive recognition. Nomenclatura made by scientists are culturally differing but in cognition common based. For the international scientific and ecological work codes of taxonomical nomenclatura are essential. For promoting the efficiency in the dissemination of information we could show the importance of orthographic norms. The United Nations, the International Standards Organization and other international bodies have adopted official rules. As the rules are not sufficient for non-alphabetic systems the ideographical systems are not perfectly matched to alphabetic systems - the exhaustive treatment of various issues is the future work of international scientific teams. Of course not all problems can be solved but we should understand that orthographic matters have vital implication on information processing and policy. Multicode-systems are possible and very effective in codification. We should use the chance for “stratified linguistic and information space” for mankind in the 21 st Century (cf. Szépe 2002). As we know, we are very far from equal communication as the international botanical conventions are based only on Latin. The International Code of Botanical Nomenclature by the International Association for Plant Taxonomy 2001 (Tokyo Code) is unfortunately excludes all other languages with regulations like or forming specific ephitets, like 11 : a) To use Latin terminations insofar as possible. b) To avoid ephitets which are very long and difficult to pronounce in Latin. c) Not to make ephitets by combining words from different languages. d) Not to adopt ephitets from unpublished names found in correspondence, traveller’s notes, herbarium labels, or similar sources, attributing them to their authors, unless these authors have approved publication. e) To avoid using the names of little known or very restricted localities, unless the species is quite local. (www.bggm.org/ iapt/ nomenclature/ code/ toky-e/ art) The idea of non-alphabetic ordering and writing conventions is simply nonexistent in the international convention for the mankind. Chinese and Japanese are very intensively researched topics in computational linguistics in Japan and outside. In the complexities of all these cases and orthographical problems, the scientist is very frequently confronted by many difficulties in interpretation or equivalence. New standard-setting instruments as WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) and UNESCO, can give recommendations for international convention to member states. Scientific communities like Plants systematics and linguistics can increase the overlapping of information and focus on indigenous knowledge in international terminology as defining it as an intangible cultural heritage and safeguarding the scope of its domains (UNESCO, Preparation of a new international standard-setting instrument for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage, Paris 2001). 340 Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo / Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh As a historical anecdote we can mention that ideographic notifications where also used for plants in Europe. As a schoolboy, Linnaeus copied the alchemical signs from the Pharmacopoeia Leovardensis (1725, cf. Needham 1986: 179) and in later life applied them for botanical taxonomy adding a good many more: So far as we know, no Western botanist ever thought of suggesting that it might be convenient to denote all plant species by ideographs such were used by those ‘quaint Chinamen’, whose nursery gardens were providing such valuable spoils, and whose forests held such allure of species in thousands yet unknown to Western science: ideographs which would show at the merest glance to which division the plant or the animal belonged. It naturally never occurred to Western Botanists, not merely because European usages were implicitly those of the world of modern science, but also because, not being sinologists, they knew nothing of the radical system, nor the possibility of its improvement beyond what the Chinese themselves had ever attempted (Needham 1986: 178). 6. The semiotic future in natural sciences - data mining and terminology 6.1 Chinese or other languages for scientific purposes We can see the process of increasing culturization of East Asia and aestheticization especially in modern media. The East-Asian image has changed from Marco Polo and Rodriguez Shôgun to modern feng shui and computer animated Pokémon. We can see a range of consumer culture sites which have become increasingly important in everyday life - shopping with Asian products, European products with Chinese and Japanese brand names, computer amusement, Manga industry, animation, sports, films. Chinese and Japanese aesthetic features and objects become more important in our everyday environments. These countries are here in the everyday world around us. The computer standards from the last few years in the world allow us easily to write Chinese and Japanese. Chinese and Japanese texts are common in advertisement, tourism. Chinese and Japanese as exotic languages are existent in contemporary Europe. This process entails a shift from classical important languages to important new languages in the world. At the time of Rodriguez’s semiotic thinking, in East and West were probably independent. Chinese and Japanese are now becoming normal languages in European school education. If, however, Chinese and Japanese are not fully demystified linguistic ideologies and prejudices can be propagated on the basis of the vehicle of the language. Every semiotic practice presupposes an ideal awareness of its laws. It is difficult to say whether Chinese and Japanese and Western theories on the Japanese language have the same semiotic development or not. However, in many cases we have a certain common syntactic, semantic and pragmatic basic knowledge. Since the Chinese and Japanese script represented in our linguistic universe is already mediated and semiotized before data arrive, linguistics has to investigate the channels of many stages in the process of mediation. It is interesting to observe that such an open perspective of sources and levels of interpretation is quite abandoned. Original sources may also not be objective and we have to ask questions about these sources whether the author was able to break away from his own nativism, because nativism still inspires the Chinese and Japanese imagination to heights of self-conceit and cultural narcissism. Chinese as a Classical Language of Botanical Science 341 Because linguistic knowledge is part of our existence there are a lot of peculiarities in Chinese and Japanese compared to Indo-European languages. Western linguistic nativism could be the reason for neglecting the great impacts of Chinese and Japanese to the scientific community and to everyday life. To deal with the special variety of semantic and the written code universe, the tools of adaptation have to be defined on an equal level. 6.2 Semiotic connections and codification With such scepticism concerning the assumption of a semiotic reality behind the Chinese and Japanese lexicological studies, linguistics is still able to make its own contribution to the study of realities and myths in the age of the global scientific community. 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Taipei. Notes 1 Cf. Eschbach, A. Eschbach-Szabo, V. 2002. 2 His original manuscript was written in Italian and first published 1942 (DeFrancis 1990: 134). 3 Cf. Harbsmeier 1998. 4 A number of familiar Western scientific ideas fall by the wayside if we accept the shifting from classical scientific categories to prototype-based categories of modern semantics. According to Lakoff (Lakoff 1990) biological species are memory based entities constructed by shared derived characters. Biological species are not natural kinds defined by common essential properties. 5 The phonetic system for transcribing Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan is used diversely. While children are learning zhu yin fu hao 注音符號 (Mandarin Phonetic Symbols) in the school, the mass and the public (such as street signs) are using Wade Giles and the academic publications (such as linguistic and biological related articles) tend to adopt either Wade Giles or Mainland Pinyin system is also adopted in this paper. 6 Cf. Needham 1984: 434-435. 7 Cf. Needham 1986: 439. 8 Chinese kanlan ‘soapnut’ for washing clothes cf. Needham 1986: 110. 9 The international botanical net of Kodansha is working now on a system based on DNA information but the long botanical history should be also included into compiling databases. 10 For various help in searching in databases I would like to thank Andreas Marcel Riechert, Tübingen. 11 Prof. Dr. Franz Oberwinkler director of the Botanical Garden of Tübingen University has provided incisive and crucial comments on plant taxonomy.