History of "information" in more languages

There’s a lot on the term information as it developed in Europe/USA in the 20th century, and some reaching back to Latin, but what about other language families? I’m teaching in China this term, where “information” is 信息. Embedded in the symbols are ideas of self, heart-mind, and speech. I would love to see more histories/philosophies of information in non–Indo-European languages. Surely some exist already?

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There is one relevant article that I know of: global privacy in flux: illuminating privacy across cultures in China and the U.S., in which Kenneth Farrall mapped out the words/languages surrounding the term privacy in Chinese.

For my own dissertation research, I will be looking into and compare the two languages of English and Chinese, in the hope of mapping out the semantic space surrounding the concept of privacy.

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Love this! Thanks for the article, and of course I’m excited to see your dissertation, as we talked about.

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Coming back for a second comment on this topic.

Allow me put it in a dramatic way :sweat_smile:, I would suggest that, to trace the history of information in Chinese history, using the word “信息/information” can be misleading if not completely useless. For these particular characters “信息”, I would guess, are pretty recent development if not a totally imported one in the semantic/cultural sense. This also brings up the question of what does it mean by the term “history”, because just studying the past few decades’ history of the term “信息/information” could be a valid topic by itself. But for anyone interested to know beyond the most recent decades, 信息/information might not be your research keyword.

Perhaps I can use the Chinese Library Classification (CLC) System as an analogy to illustrate my point on 信息/information. CLC was developed in the 1970s (Zhang, 2003) based on Western classification principles. And it is the functioning library classification system in many if not all libraries in mainland China. So does China have its own document classification system before CLC? Fortunately, the answer is yes. Unfortunately, these systems are not functioning in the current society, except for perhaps in the minds of a limited number of scholars? (For more discussions on this topic, see in Jiang (2007), Zhang (2003)). Simply speaking, leveraging 信息/information is like leveraging CLC, it can only take you back to the 1970s.

Instead of 信息/information, to trace the real history of information in China, one might need to employ a number of keywords other than information (for example, classics/jing 经, book/shu 书), and also look into the studies of Chinese classics. So you can tell that here the language itself becomes the first challenge for anyone who are trying to research this topic. The challenge is not just for researchers who do not know the Chinese language, but also for Chinese natives nowadays (who are mostly only proficient with the simplified Chinese, not the classical Chinese.)

Lastly, discussions on this topic are not only limited in number in English (which is the dominant language in academia), and I would guess that it may not be a hot topic in Chinese language/academia. :frowning:

And I would love to hear stories of other languages! :slight_smile:

Reference:
Jiang, S. (2007). Into the Source and History of Chinese Culture: Knowledge Classification in Ancient China. Libraries & the Cultural Record , 42 (1), 1–20. Retrieved from JSTOR.

Jiang, S. Y. (2007). Lost in Translation: The Treatment of Chinese Classics in the Library of Congress Classification. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly , 45 (1), 3–14.

Lee, H.-L. (2012). Epistemic foundation of bibliographic classification in early China. Journal of Documentation .

Zhang, W. (2003). Classification for Chinese Libraries (CCL): Histories, Accomplishments, Problems and Its Comparisons. Journal of Educational Media & Library Sciences , 41 (1), 1–22.

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