Mariana Münning's Sound, Meaning, Shape is the first comprehensive and in-depth introduction of the Chinese linguist Wei Jiangong (1901–1980) in the English language. Taking Wei as a prime but heretofore understudied representative of the language and script reformers of 20th-century China, Münning expertly demonstrates the deep intertwining of linguistic and philological scholarship, practical reforms and the politics of self-determination.
It is a fine choice to focus on Wei Jiangong as a prism into the knowledge production and practical reform of modern Chinese language and writing. An accomplished linguist – specifically, phonologist – and an active language and script reformer with official capacity in both the Republic of China (ROC) and the People's Republic of China (PRC), Wei occupies a “unique position between conceptualization and implementation” (p. 22) of the linguistic and scriptal future of modern China. Compared to his May Fourth teachers who started the script revolution, Wei was of a younger generation that played a more substantial role in implementing and negotiating reform ideas. Wei's position is unique due to his official positions in promoting language and script reforms in both the ROC and the PRC, showcasing the surprising continuity of reform efforts across the Strait despite acute political and ideological differences.
Münning tells the life story of Wei in nine chronologically arranged chapters divided into three parts – “sound,” “meaning” and “shape” – reflecting the three aspects of the Chinese script. Part one on “sound” introduces the readers to Wei as an emerging scholar of linguistics who was trained by well-known script revolutionaries such as Qian Xuantong and Li Jinxi at Peking University and who became a loyal champion of the national language (guoyu) movement from an early stage (chapter two). Wei defined and defended guoyu, specifically, the new national pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect. On the one hand, he and his coterie worked on the historical heritage and hence legitimacy of the new guoyu (chapter four). On the other, he combated such conservative “tigers” as Zhang Shizhao, who sought to reverse the historic tide of the unification of speech and writing (chapter three). In addition to his work on the mainland, Wei experimented with teaching the new national language in Korea (chapter three, section three) and sought meaningful ways to negotiate the relationship between Minnanese and guoyu while promoting the national language in Taiwan (chapter five). Part two (chapter six) moves onto “meaning” and focuses on Wei's contribution to making of the world's most popular dictionary, the New China Dictionary (Xinhua zidian), which adopted a pro-language approach that reconceptualized the Chinese word and reorganized the actual compilation of the dictionary. Part three (chapters seven and eight) examines Wei's script reform activities in both the ROC and the PRC, respectively, which in principle embraced character abolition but in practice supported simplified characters. Chapter nine reiterates the three central claims of the book: first, linguistic and scriptal planning legitimized the status quo as well as its changes; second, changes had roots in “traditional Chinese scholarship”; third, Wei's concept (Begriff) (p. 22) of language and writing “stayed the same” (pp. 235; 30–31).
One key concept that serves as the hinge that unites the whole book is Münning's definition of Wei's concept of language, which takes “language as a tool for communication” (p. 20). Grounded in Wei's vocation of linguistics, the primacy of language, its unquestioned utilitarianism and its power over writing constitute the supreme organizing principles under which sound, meaning and shape cohere. From Wei's investment in the phonological tradition of the Beijing dialect to his redefinition of dictionary entries not as characters but as words that describe “the morphology of language” (p. 176), from his linguistic principles (dubbed as “ten characteristics”) guiding the compilation of the New China Dictionary (p. 179) to his championship of both ROC's and PRC's character simplification based on their phonetic capacity demonstrated by ideo-phonographs (p. 222), the dominance of linguistic principles (as Wei describes it) is unmistakable. In addition, pivoting the book on the central concept of language makes a particularly convincing case for the consistency of Wei's life's work (Münning's third claim) as well as the continuity between Chinese philological tradition and modern Chinese language and script reforms.
The book is at its finest when it substantiates two instances of continuity: first, the phonological construction of the Beijing dialect as an old, prestigious language ready to shoulder the responsibility of a new national language; second, the apt point that simplified characters had historical origins and were a shared enterprise by both the ROC and the PRC. Münning's reading of Wei's 1929 article “Gu yin yang ru san sheng kao” (Study of the three tones yin, yang and ru in Old Chinese”) in conjunction with Bai Dizhou's work illustrates “how the two discourses on tones – the highly technical philological discourse and the practical, implementation-oriented language planning discourse – merged” and “nurtured the image that modern guoyu is based on tradition” (p. 110). Following a similar train of thought, Münning gives concrete examples of traditionally simplified characters such as 历，迁，运，战 and 证 (p. 225), and ingeniously argues for the case of simplified characters as “new traditional characters” (p. 226). Münning is particularly judicious in her resistance against the constructed but problematic binary between traditional and simplified characters, opting instead for a more scholarly informed comparison between complex and simplified characters.
Overall, through the case study of Wei Jiangong, the book succeeds in establishing the consistency and generative entanglements between academic research, language planning and script reform, anchored in a linguist's conviction in, and loyalty to, language. The book provides further food for thought with interesting moments of tension pointing to the unsettling question of what writing has been and could be to language. As Wei's work (like this book) is organized around the three aspects of Chinese writing (sound, meaning and shape), an important oversight that Münning spots in Wei's work is his presumed silence in relevant discussions about Tang Lan's groundbreaking theory of san shu shuo (three principles of character formation), which covered these very three aspects (p. 208). What the book does not confront but could not help but suggest was a series of provocations: does Tang Lan's well-known critique of the primacy of language (phonocentrism) and affirmation of writing require a self-reflection that Wei the phonologist was unprepared for? How did Wei understand the all-too-often contradictory tendencies of character abolition that was utterly pro-language and his major achievements with the New China Dictionary and character simplification that negotiated with, if not outright critiqued, phonocentrism? If, as Münning suggests, the endgame of the script reform in the PRC was indeed the rediscovery of “the phonetic characteristics of the characters,” which leads to “the self-assertion” that “the Chinese script cannot do less than the Latin alphabet, but more” (pp. 236–237), then would the phonologist not be compelled to re-examine and rethink his basic concept of language? These critical questions and more prompt future research on 20th-century Chinese linguistic and scriptal modernity, to which Münning's Sound, Meaning, Shape makes a valuable contribution and serves as an important reference.
