“A scholar like myself who is not a Sinologist and yet ventures the proposition that Chinese languages should be rewritten in the Greek alphabet (or "Romanized", to use the current term) is treading on uncharted territory (for him) and does so at his peril.”

"Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987) http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp005_chinese_greek.html

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A scholar like myself who is not a Sinologist and yet ventures the proposition that Chinese languages should be rewritt…" by Eric A. Havelock?
Eric A. Havelock photo
Eric A. Havelock 5
1903-1988, British classical philologist 1903–1988

Related quotes

“…a state is not the same thing as a society, although the Greeks and Romans thought it was. A state is an organization of power on a territorial basis.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Jacques Barzun photo

“Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

Source: Bernard Shaw in Twilight (1943), II
Context: Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory.
This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion — to say nothing of the shape of his sentences — are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness.

Thucydides photo
Frederic G. Kenyon photo
Alexander Pope photo
Ferdinand de Saussure photo

“Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.”

Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 111-112
Source: Course in General Linguistics
Context: Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. Philosophers and linguists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. here are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.

William H. McNeill photo

“Just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheistic.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

Related topics