TANAKA Akio
I learned the language study from CHINO Eiichi at Tokyo in 1970s.
He taught me the Llinguistic Circle of Prague and the existance of KARCEVSKIJ Sergej.
One day he admonished me not to study the hard problems such as language unversals that are the themes worked on by the geniuses like WITTGENSTEIN Ludwig.
But I chose the theme probably by my youth.
For long time I kept thinking on language universals being aided from KARCEVSKIJ’s paper, “Dusualisme asymétrique du signe linguistique“.
I roamed the vast field of language wondering the streets of Tokyo.
The time passed.
CHINO suddunly died by the fatal disease in 2002.
I wrote the original note on language universals at Hakuba, Nagano in March 2003.
The note were fundamental but conceptive.
The title was ” On Time Property Inherent in Characters“.
It was written on the written language of ancient Chinese characters inscribed on tortoise shells.
WANG Guowei was the pioneer scholar on that field.
I had liked his papers that were almost contained in his most important work, “Guantangjilin”.
I bought the book Kanda, Tokyo in the earky 1970s.
The bookshop name was “Haifeng Shudian”, that are now removed to Chiba Prefecture.
Oh how many times I went to the shop and bought the Chinese classics.
Qing Dynasty produced the linguistic scholars who almost all researched the Chinese characters for their scholastic basis.
I also liked ZHANG Binglin, DUAN Yucai, WANG Niansun, WANG Yinzhi and so on.
In my first note I quoted WANG Guowei and DUAN Yucai.
They are the precursors of the study of language universals for the prime of life.
The study was traditionally called “Small study” in China.
But I coud not remain standing in the conceptive place influenced from Small study.
The second note was “Quantum Theory for Language“, that were also written at Hakuba in August 2003.
The third note was “Distance Theory“.
In the early stage of my research, “distance” was one of the important concepts for language unversals.
The concept was inevitably related with time and space.
So I began to think the themes on Language universals based on mathematics that were another prime time theme of my youth.
Tokyo
20 December 2011
Sekinan Research Field of Language
The Time of WANG Guowei
