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The Chinese University of Hong Kong has invited Prof. Wolfgang Behr, Extraordinarius Professor and Traditional China Chair, The University of Zurich to host the Wilson T.S. Wang – New Method College Visiting Professor in Language Education Public Lecture on campus next Tuesday (23 September).  Professor Behr will speak on ‘Chinese Scribal Oddities’ in English.  Members of the public are welcome to join and register online at: http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/cpr/wolfgangbehr. 

In Western popular literature, the Chinese writing system is often portrayed as being mind-bogglingly complex and idiosyncratic, while the typical sinological narrative, in China as well as abroad, still prefers to analyse character structures in terms of the six categories of writing (liù shū 六書) inherited from the Shuōwén (說文) tradition, which tends to look for complexity in all the wrong places.  The Eastern Han liù shū theory and most of its later derivatives notoriously mix up functional and structural layers, emic and etic perspectives. It thus fails to capture some of the less mainstream character construction principles, odd at first sight, but intriguingly recurrent throughout the history of Chinese writing. 

Professor Behr will approach these fairly marginal character structures from the vantage point of a comparison with examples from other complex logographic writing systems of the Ancient world such as Egyptian, and Sino-Xenic logographies such as Sino-Miao and Yi.  It is hoped that such a ‘sidelong glance’ from the margins will help to address the perennial questions of why mainstream Chinese writing ‘failed’ to develop into syllabic or even subsyllabic writing. 

Professor Behr read Sinology, Slavic Studies, Indo-European and Comparative Linguistics and Sociology at universities in Frankfurt, Shenyang, Changchun and Moscow, receiving his doctoral degree in Sinology in 1997 from the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt. He held positions at institutes in Leiden and Uppsala and taught at the Ruhr-University, Bochum. He is now Extraordinarius Professor and Traditional China Chair at the University of Zurich. He is currently an Executive Board Member of the European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS) and the Swiss Asia Society and on the Board of Directors of the Li Fang-Kuei Society for Chinese Linguistics. He has served as President of the European Association for Chinese Linguistics (EACL) for four years. 

Professor Behr’s research interests include old Chinese phonology, morphology, etymology and paleography, Sino-Tibetan linguistics, external contacts of old and ancient Chinese, history of Chinese philology, epistemological foundations of historical linguistics, pre-imperial Chinese archaeology and history, early Chinese historiography, Sanskrit-Chinese translation and lexicography, etc. He has published extensively in scholarly journals and edited volumes including a book about rhyming bronze inscriptions and the origins of Chinese end-rhyme versification in 2008.  He is also the co-author of a textbook of Antique Chinese in 2005.  He is currently working on several book projects and the edition and translation of the Zhào wáng huĭ shì manuscript of the Shanghai Museum corpus. 

Details of the Wilson T.S. Wang – New Method College Visiting Professor in Language Education Public Lecture are as follows: