Edward Sapir gave me a moment to study language universals together with Sergej Karcevskij

​Edward Sapir gave me a moment to study language universals together with Sergej Karcevskij


​TANAKA Akio


Edward Sapir's LANGUAGE AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF SPEECH 1921 gave me a moment for study in 1980s while I was roaming about the darkness of not- getting any aim to study on language. I ever wrote a short paper being influenced in 2005 and after also wrote a memo on his book in 2014.

Substantiality / 2005
Edward Sapir, Language, 1921 / 2014

A moment came from his famous concept drift. At the near-end Chapter 7 Sapir wrote "the three major drifts", that were the next.

"The drift toward the abolition of most case distinctions"
"the correlative drift toward position as an accompanied"
"the drift toward the invariable word"

This "the three major drifts" are all apparently seen in Chinese, especially in the classical written language. At my age 20s and 30s I continuously had read Qing dynasty's classical linguistic books and papers.  WANG Guowei, ZHANG Binglin, DUAN Yucai, WANGYyinzhi were the most reliable works for me.

Meaning minimum / 2013
The Time of WANG Guowei / 2011
The Days of Ideogram / 2017

This paper is unfinished

Tokyo
27 July - 28 July 2017
Sekinan Library