寅恪

When hearing of the obituary of Ji Xianlin, I could not stop thinking of a - to me - greater linguist of modern China: Chen Yinke (陳寅恪).

If you think Ji was amazing for handling so many ancient (and modern) languages, have a look on this list of Chen: Mongolian, Tibetan, Manchu, Japanese, Sanskrit, English, French, German, Tripitaka, Persian, Turkic, Tangut script, Latin, and Greek.

More so, the main subject of his interest was not foreign languages - but the history of China in the Jin (晋) and Tang (唐) dynasty; he learned all those funny languages largely for studying relationship between the Central Kingdom and various western barbarians.

The story of Chen is a classic tragedy of fate. In 1941, he was invited by Xu Dishan (許地山) - at that time the chairman of the Department of Chinese Literature over the other side of the Victoria harbour - as the visiting professor. Two months later, Xu died rather suddenly, and Chen succeeded as the chairman. Later that year, Hong Kong was occupied by the Japanese army.

During that time, Chen was very well treated because he could speak fluent Japanese. Nonetheless, that was a hard time for all Chinese; the patriotic professor made an escape and flew back to mainland the next year.

And the rest is history; Chen died in 1969 during the cultural revolution.

Well, who care about those funny things spoken by the ancient - and modern - western barbarians ?

PS. Although often regarded as the most knowledgeable person in modern China, Chen had no university degree - all he got was a diploma from the Fudan School (before it was upgraded to be a university).