The document discusses Ernest Fenollosa's article "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry". It acknowledges that while Fenollosa makes some overgeneralizations, such as that every Chinese character is a picture, there are also grains of truth. It provides examples of characters where the radical or components are pictographic, like the characters for wood, person, water, fish and bird. It argues that Chinese has grammatical flexibility rather than no grammar, as the characters can function as multiple parts of speech. Overall it aims to provide nuance to Fenollosa's claims by acknowledging both limitations and insights.

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Of myths, overarching generalizations, and grains of truth
Hi-
The subject line explains my thoughts on the Ernest Fenollosa article, “The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry” (Prose Keys to Modern Poetry, p. 136-155). Namely, there
are overarching generalizations that border on myth. I’m more generous on said generalizations
than Alvin Cohen, who rather bluntly (although not without reason) wrote that the “every
character is a picture” idea is a myth. Yet these generalizations also contain some grains of truth.
To take one simple example, let’s go back to “every character is a picture.” In absolute terms,
that’s true for a few to some characters.
However, the “grain of truth” in this context is that a radical, which serves as the “root” set of
strokes in a character and thus allows you to look up a character, can be and sometimes is
indicative of something in the world. In other words, a few to some radicals are, in a way,
pictures.
Also, each character is based on and contains a radical (in a few to some cases, the radical is the
character). The radical contributes to the character’s meaning.
Let’s take some examples. You probably already know that the character for “wood” is:
木 (mu4)
As you can see, this character looks like a tree. Incidentally, this character is also the root for the
character for tree, which is:
樹/树 (shu4)
Given that a tree consists of wood, the connection here is easy to make.
Likewise, characters that refer to “forest,” “underbrush,” “wilderness,” etc., are:
森林 (sen1lin2)
As you can see, both characters are based on the same radical. They also represent multiple trees,
which a forest basically consists of.
Now for another example. The character for “person” is:
人 (ren2)
Just two strokes, but they represent the legs of a person – kind of like a stick figure.

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As you may have already learned, this character is the radical for pronouns like “you”
(masculine):
你 (ni3)
Likewise, the pronoun for “he” or “him” is:
他 (ta1)
The characters for both pronouns are based on the radical for person, which is drawn differently
but still has the same number of strokes. It’s located to the right side of each character, appearing
as a slanted line that’s joined in the center by a vertical line. Given that the pronouns refer to
other people (“second-person” and “third-person”), you can see the connection here as well.
I have three more examples left before I move on, so bear with me……
The character for “water,” as you know, is:
水 (shui3)
It’s also the radical for many characters that relate to water, such as the character for “river” or
“stream”:
河 (he2)
Likewise, the character for “lake”:
湖 (hu2)
The character for “water”,” also the root for the two characters I just listed, is located to the left
but drawn differently. It’s drawn as three strokes or, if you will, three dashes. Two downward
dashes and one upward dash. In Mandarin Chinese, this re-writing or re-drawing is called
三點水/三点水/san1dian3shui3. Literally, “three drops of water.” Those three dashes
basically represent water currents.
Finally, the characters for “fish” and “bird,” respectively, are:

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魚/鱼 (yue2) and 鳥/鸟 (niao3)
These characters are also radicals for many characters that involve fish and birds (e.g., specific
species and breeds, “standard” physical features of fish and birds, etc.).
Now, moving on to Fenollosa’s remarks on Chinese grammar. He draws far too wide a brush by
writing, “The Chinese language naturally knows no grammar” (p 145). To state the obvious, any
language has a set of grammatical rules. But, of course, context matters. Fenollosa introduces
examples on pages 139, 140, and 154 which point to the direct, blunt, and concise qualities of
written Chinese, whether in the vernacular, the classical, or the so-called “four-ideogram
phrases,” which are essentially Chinese slang and/or proverbs in condensed form. These qualities
basically allow a Chinese writer/speaker to grasp and elucidate the essentials of a given situation
that s/he is describing.
The Denma Translation Group notes said qualities in its explanation (“About the Translation,” p.
225-229) of its own translation of 孫子兵法/孙子兵法/Sūnzĭ bīngfǎ, or Sun Tzu’s The Art
of War (this translation first appeared in 2001/2002 and became reprinted in 2009:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-War-Translation-Commentary/dp/1590307283 ). The group
writes, aptly, “Classical Chinese reads more slowly than the vernacular-based languages of the
modern world. It has a blocky, measured rhythm, partway between our conceptions of poetry and
prose” (p. 225). Given that this group did a translation of The Art of War backed up with
extensive commentary (section by section as well as conceptually), it only mentions the
grammatical “nature” of classical Chinese (文言文/wen2yan2wen2). However, the vernacular
Chinese (白話/白话/bai2hua4) also has a similar “quality.”
Let’s return to Fenollosa’s own examples. For example, “man sees horse” in p. 140. This is
probably the easiest and most straightforward example that we can work with. Let’s reproduce
the sentence:
人見馬/人见马 (ren2jian4ma3)
As Fenollosa writes, the translation is pretty straightforward. The literal translation is essentially
correct: “Man sees horse.” There’s a direct correspondence between each Chinese character and
English word. But in “actual” or “fluid” English, “Man sees horse,” is not enough. In and of
itself, “Man sees horse” reads like a fragment that merely represents an idea, in this case a person
seeing a horse. Obviously, in “proper” English, a better presentation of that translation would be
“A man sees a horse,” “The man sees a horse,” “A person sees a horse,” or “People see horses.”
Yet in the original Chinese, to write “Man sees horse” (in characters, of course) is neither
grammatically awkward nor grammatically erroneous. Character by character, word by word,

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you get the basic idea without “extra” yet “necessary” wording (“necessary” in English, that is)
such as “a” or “the.”
As Pierre Ryckmans, better known as Simon Leys, notes, “[Ezra] Pound correctly observed that
a Chinese poem is not articulated upon a continuous, discursive thread, but that it flashes a
discontinuous series of images (not unlike the successive frames of a film)” (The Burning
Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics, p. 12). Likewise, Leys adds, “The pictorial
resources of classical Chinese free the poet from all such verbose detours and from the need to
express logical connections; he does not explain, he does not narrate – he makes us see and feel
directly. What he presents the reader with is not a statement but an actual experience” (The
Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics, p. 13). Both quotes come from the
section “Painting and Poetry,” pages 8-15, in “Poetry and Painting: Aspects of Chinese Classical
Esthetics” in Ryckmans/Leys’s The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics
(1986/1987). Of course, he was writing about classical Chinese literature such as poetry, but his
essential point just as well applies to a simple sentence about a person seeing a horse, which
Fenollosa uses as an example.
Fenollosa should have written, instead, that there is grammatical flexibility within Chinese. He
more or less alludes to it throughout the article. You see that flexibility when Fenollosa writes,
“The fact is that almost every written Chinese word is properly just such an underlying word,
and yet it is not abstract. It is not exclusive of parts of speech, but comprehensive; not something
which is neither a noun, verb, or adjective, but something which is all of them at once and at all
times” (p. 146). Let’s take two examples. Here’s the first - the character for “sickness,”
“disease,” or “illness” is:
病 (bing4)
Clearly, it’s a noun. But it becomes part of an adjective when you refer to a sick person, in which
you write:
有病的人 (you3bing4de5ren2)
Literally, the phrase says “with sickness (of) person.” Of course, in “proper” English, it means
“sick person” or “ill person.”
Now here’s a second example. The Chinese term for “socialism” is:
社會主義 /社会主义 (she4hui4zhu3yi4)

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It’s also a noun. But with the character 的 (which, depending on the context, you can translate as
“of.” It basically refers to characteristic and/or possession, very generally speaking), it becomes
an adjective when we write “socialist country”:
社會主義的國 家/社会主义的国家
(she4hui4zhu3yi4de5guo2jia1)
Literally, it reads in English translation as “socialism (of) country.” In “fluid” English, it’s
“socialist country.”
Long story short, although Fenollosa makes sweeping generalizations that an actual Sinologist
can, for good reason, dismiss as myths, grains of truth still exist which are helpful for any student
of Mandarin Chinese.
References:
Fenollosa, Ernest, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (p. 136-155), in
Karl Shapiro, Prose Keys to Modern Poetry, Joanna Cotler Books, December 1962. Link:
http://www.amazon.com/Prose-Keys-Modern-Poetry-
Shapiro/dp/0060459506/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434315719&sr=8-
1&keywords=prose+keys+to+modern+poetry
Leys, Simon. The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics. New York: Henry
Holt and Company, 1986, 1987. Link: http://www.amazon.com/Burning-Forest-Chinese-
Culture-Politics/dp/0805003509/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434315839&sr=8-
1&keywords=The+Burning+Forest%3A+Essays+on+Chinese+Culture+and+Politics
Sun Tzu and the Denma Translation Group (tr.). The Art of War: Translation, Essays &
Commentary. Boston & London: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2001, 2002, 2009. Link:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-War-Translation-Commentary/dp/1590307283