Footsteps

John DeFrancis found his life’s purpose while traveling 4,000 miles through northern China during six months in 1935…

“ Now I know.  I want to direct it [my life] toward learning more, understanding more, about this country [China], and then helping others to understand it…”    John DeFrancis ¹

Sinologists – and those who would follow in his footsteps, or merely learn more about a family of cultures encompassing a fifth of the earth’s inhabitants – are beneficiaries of that purpose.

Before DeFrancis, much western “knowledge” of China was based on state-sanctioned chronicles, conjecture, and superstition.²  DeFrancis’ Visible Speech, Fact & Fantasy, and other general market publications helped correct the record.  His scientific writings, and application of rigor and interdisciplinary approaches, inspired two generations of Sinologists – an influence that continues to grow.  And although his advocacy of language reform³ disturbs some traditionalists, his position is arguably validated by recent trends within an emerging class of young upwardly mobile Chinese.⁴ 

More than 20,000 Chinese characters exist.  Mastering the “right” 2,400 is sufficient to read many modern writings – as few as 400 get you started.⁵  The question is, which 2,400 and which 400?  DeFrancis designed tightly integrated courseware (grammars, audio recordings, character texts, flash cards, and reading materials) based on well-conceived metrics⁶ before Deming, Rackham, and James pioneered similar statistical concepts in manufacturing, sales, and baseball. 

Years before Ross and Lakeoff, DeFrancis recognized explicit language and grammar convey only a fraction of the meaning within human thought and communication.  A significant amount of meaning – some claim the vast majority – is embedded, often physically and nonconsciously, in referents and metaphors.⁷  DeFrancis also recognized that written language “fluency” depends on more than memorizing a particular number of characters:  it requires experiencing their range of context and meaning.  To that end, DeFrancis collaborated with specialists to facilitate access to and appreciation of Chinese literature, culture and thought – including what Minsky and Rumelhart would later call frames and schemata in the mid-seventies.⁸  His collaboration with Victor Mair is particularly noteworthy. 

Mair uses his expertise as one of the world’s foremost translators of early Sinitic languages to explicate China's cultural roots.  His monumental Anthology ⁹ is full-body immersion via selections of divinations, philosophy, religion, verse, prose, fiction, and performing art.  His equally monumental History ¹⁰ complements the Anthology and ploughs new ground by interconnecting periods and genres, from divine to profane.  Research by Mair and his colleagues has occasionally caused a mainstream currency to deflate.¹¹  Mair is also general editor of the ABC Chinese Dictionary Series – including DeFrancis’ Chinese-English and Chinese-English/English-Chinese Dictionaries – which each year saves students and scholars many millions of hours of drudgery.  Mair’s classic 1986 paper, which begins with the following quotation, conquered the Chinese dictionary problem in a Russellian sense. 

“ As a working Sinologist, each time I look up a word in my Webster’s or Kenkyusha’s I experience a sharp pang of deprivation…”  Victor Mair ¹²

Several lifetimes of grueling labor by dedicated scholars were all that was needed to complete the journey.  By any measure, DeFrancis contributed 1½ of the required lifetimes.¹³  His Chinese-English Glossary of the Mathematical Sciences was published in 1964 by the American Mathematical Society.¹⁴  The team of contributors grew as colleagues and former students joined the mission. Desktop and pocket editions of his first cut at a general usage dictionary were published in 1996 and 1999.  A massive comprehensive edition was released in 2003 followed by his pièce de résistance in 2010. 

Dictionary makers are held to a degree of rigor more commonly associated with hard science than social science.  Linguists may philosophically pontificate about langue.  Character vs. letter chauvinists may pick and choose anecdotal evidence.  Even translators are afforded wiggle room.  Practical lexicographers, however, nail-down every word.  Equivocating isn’t an option.  They commit to decisions about a myriad of practical problems theorists rarely encounter.  DeFrancis faced more decisions than lexicographers usually do because “Pinyin style” is chaotic:  its Chicago Style Manual has yet to be written.  Capitalization, personal names, addresses, syllablization, tone changes, technical terms, whether numbers and measures should be joined, minority language transcription, and whether colloquial or formal style should have preference are examples of questions for which there are few standards.¹⁵  DeFrancis, Mair, and the extended “ABC team” have thought through the equivalent of a Chinese version of Words into Type.¹⁶ 

The 2010 ABC English-Chinese/Chinese-English Dictionary fulfills the original goal of producing a ubiquitous tool for students and scholars.  Hopefully, it will also help establish lexicographical standards.  It’s a “third generation” product featuring impeccable grammar, orthography (complex, simplified in addition to Pinyin), graded word lists,¹⁷ and stroke indexes (for use when character pronunciation is unknown.)  A rugged binding and convenient size make it portable:  at $20.00, no student or scholar need be without one. 

The endeavor also indirectly led to numerous unanticipated benefits such as a bilingual publication of Zhang’s translation of Zhou’s The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts – a recounting of China’s language reform and demonstration of exemplary reformed writing.¹⁸ 

Meanwhile, as general editor, Mair pushed the full ABC Dictionary Series forward.  The series includes special purpose lexicons specific to proverbs and classical texts.  An Alphabetical Index to the Hanyu Da Cidian, for example, is an efficient shortcut to a large body of classical literature.¹⁹ 

Mair’s oversight brings numerous advantages.  General purpose dictionaries benefit when obscure, seldom-encountered characters are relegated to specialized volumes.  A common “standard user manual,” with minor exceptions, facilitates access to a range of lexicographical tools.  His interest and expertise in ancient literature and scripts increased the potential corpus’ scope.  Mair has also been careful to structure the series’ databases as the backbone for a next generation computerized, AI enhanced, language system.²⁰  A glimpse of coming attractions in this “new world” can be seen in Wenlin 4.0 which incorporates DeFrancis’ dictionaries. 

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It is hard for anyone who began tackling Chinese language after the year 2,000 to fully appreciate how much more challenging things were before DeFrancis and his colleagues blazed a trail.  Learning Chinese is still difficult:  by comparison, Latin is a walk in the park.²¹  Today’s students, however, have the advantages of integrated courseware and reading materials, modern dictionaries, and access to an extensive and representative body of literature in translation – all compiled by scholar-teachers.  Students can be confident the words they learn are commonly used and that their multiple usages will be encountered in the reading material.  The translations provide context that facilitates internalizing the language.  And when the going is particularly tough, students have DeFrancis' work ethic and uncompromising scholarship as examples for inspiration. 

For students seeking more than workman-like facility with Chinese, the ABC brand offers a set of tools for acquiring proficiency that relatively few Chinese reach.  Coblin’s ‘Phags-pa Handbook, for example, is an introduction to China’s first alphabet²² which influenced future scripts and yields clues about early Chinese pronunciation.  Nevertheless, translating early scripts remains a painstaking process.  Professor Mair’s classical Chinese classes at PENN are not for the faint hearted.  Heavily attended by native Chinese with degrees in Chinese literature, the classes require deep digging, entering authors’ mental frames, and “feeling” one’s way to the most likely interpretations.²³ 

Danielle Miller-Coe, 2010
info@sybergroup.com

Notes

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  1.   Defrancis, John.  In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan  Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993   p. 281.  For a list of DeFrancis’ texts, see Professor John DeFrancis Chinese Language Learning Series. 

  2.   Many, who would approach statements by a Rove or Carville with healthy skepticism, suspend all caution with writings by Sima Qian and other early operatives – even writings of dubious or anonymous origin such as Zuo Zhuan.  (e.g.  cooption of Chuang Tzu by Confucianists and others – see Mair’s  Wandering on the Way  Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press 1998  pp xx and xxxvi-xiv) 

Sinologists have not monopolized the pathology:  two millennia of Plato veneration come to mind.  (Plato’s cooption of Socrates is rigorously dissected in Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Volume 1  Princeton: Princeton University Press 1971) 

China’s spell, however, seems unique.  Even arch cynic Bertrand Russell gives numerous canards a free pass in The Problem of China. 

  3.   Living natural languages continually mutate:  genetic engineering them, however, is dicey.  Proponents on both sides of language debates have occasionally been executed for their efforts.  And language pretty much does what it will – it’s arguably a complex system that can exhibit emergent behavior. 

Especially pronounced perturbations can be expected in China as increasing mobility brings its multiplicity of different language systems into contact.  Interaction between systems that appear linear or deterministic tends to increase instances of nonlinear (random-like) behavior. 

Data collected during a Syber Group study of Southeast China pidgins, for example, exhibit patterns that superficially fit models of electroplating percolation transitions.  Significantly more, and more granular, data points than are practical to collect during typical field work would be needed to determine whether the activity is chaotic or truly random.  If chaotic, modeling of data points collected by China’s ubiquitous communications monitoring has theoretical potential to more sharply focus language reform – by concentrating early intervention on disturbances most likely, during subsequent iterations, to lead to major deviations from “Standard Chinese.”  (Devising interventions that are corrective rather than destabilizing would require extensive modeling and testing.) 

At a macro level, “The Singlish Affair” in DeFrancis’ The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy demonstrates (with pedagogical flair) particular difficulties by analyzing surreal twists that Tojo’s secret committee encountered as they plotted a language policy for the United States and other countries on Japan’s hit list. 

Korea’s 500 year flight from Chinese characters to Hangul might have sputtered-out without nationalism's tailwind.  Mongolia largely abandoned Classical Mongolian Script (and Chinese characters) for Cyrillic, arguably to help nurture a Soviet hedge against China.  In Colonialism and Language Policy in Vietnam, DeFrancis describes Vietnam’s experiences with language reform. 

  4.   Every university student I met during a year of teaching in China, and on subsequent visits, knew Pinyin and used it to look-up words in dictionaries.  Many could not use stroke indexes with any competency. 

  5. “How many characters do you know?” is a question beginning students of Chinese are often asked.  DeFrancis points out that’s the wrong question – which characters and one’s mastery of them are what count.  “Don’t waste time talking about Chinese when you should be talking Chinese,” is classic DeFrancism (Beginning Chinese, p. xix). 

Nevertheless, literacy requires knowledge of some number of characters.  About 500 are introduced in Beginning Chinese, 700 in Intermediate Chinese, and an additional 835 in Advanced Chinese.  All are on independently complied lists of the 2,400-2,500 most frequently used characters. 

Chinese letterpress printers and typeface manufactures are another way of looking at the question – which weeds out variants better categorized as calligraphy than as characters.  Because of lead type’s expense, small operators often stocked a basic set of 4,000 characters in-depth and sent out for (or cast) different characters as needed to complete jobs  (Reed , Christopher A.  Gutenberg in Shanghai.  Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004.) 

China Type Design Ltd, a modern typeface supplier, mentions 45,000 characters in its sales material.  Dongyuan, a typesetting center for 800 years, has an exhibit of 40,000 wooden characters (People’s On-line Daily,  August 28, 2008.)  However, these numbers probably include some double counting because of ambiguity about the terms font, face, radical, character, and word. 

Zhou estimates more than 60,000 characters “probably” exist and “probably a bit more than 7,000” are used to write modern Chinese.  (Zhou Youguang, The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts, translated by Zhang Liqing, Ohio State University NEALRC, 2003  p 72)   He further describes factors contributing to character count flexibility. 

Today, the extended ABC family's well-groomed corpus is arguably one of the best sources of statistical information about Chinese language usage. 

  6.   DeFrancis, John.  “ Preface to the First Edition,”  Beginning Chinese Reader: Part I, 2nd Edition.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977  pp. xv-xxv.  Also, see Pedagogically Crafty. 

  7.   See Grasshoppers and Flat Earth Communication

  8.   Wittgenstein describes “language systems” as separate mental environments or “ways of life.”  Perfect (inter-mind) communication would be possible only between identical environments.   Wittgenstein, Ludwig.  Philosophical Investigations, (translated by Peter Hacker and Joachim Schulte)  Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 

  9.   Mair, Victor. ed.  The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature  New York: Columbia University Press, 1994

10.   Mair, Victor. ed.  The Columbia History of Chinese Literature  New York: Columbia University Press, 2001

11.   Their methodology could be described as... data, not opinion.    Or, in Mair’s words, “…political trends and disciplinary fashions may wax and wane, but hard evidence remains.  While the dedicated researcher who focuses on material, biological, and linguistic data may be ignored or even scorned for his or her findings because of reigning political and intellectual prejudices, the best remedy is simply to go on gathering data.  Eventually, one will accumulate so much evidence that only a fool would deny its existence and implications.” 

Mair, Victor. ed  Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World,  Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006 p. 7.

The team sticks to its code.  Unfortunately, acceptance of new evidence can be thwarted by conflicts of interest and embedded metaphorically-based opinions.  More fools may also exist than Mair appreciates.  Sometimes only a Marshall Maneuver (swallowing the bacterium) will do the trick.  In exploring China’s roots, Mair has sometimes scuffed an ill-defined line that separates being blackballed by the PRC and letting chips fall where they may. 

Contact and Exchange and The Tarim Mummies  (Mallory, J. P. & Victor Mair.  The Tarim Mummies,  New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000)  are examples of Mair’s work that stimulated cross-pollination between certain academic silos and, simultaneously, helped counter misinformation promulgated by popularizers such as Jared Diamond.  Overwhelming evidence suggests early humans “got around” more than is generally perceived.  And in doing so, may conceivably have exchanged some culture. 

12.   Mair, Victor H.  "The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries and Current Lexicographical Projects,"  Sino-Platonic Papers, 1986  1:1-31 

13.   American businesses, DoD, and the State Department faced a shortage of China hands to deal with an emergent China after many Sinologists had been red-baited into leaving the field.  Millions were thrown into developing a replacement cadre, but not a dime could be found for a dictionary. 

A unique coalition of academics took charge.  Mair wrote a statement of work (see his 1986 call to action paper) and rounded-up part time volunteers.  DeFrancis agreed to head-up the project as a full-time volunteer and arranged for administrative, grantsmanship, and other support from University of Hawai‘i and its Center for Oriental Studies.  Largely on DeFrancis’ nickel, enough of the initial ABC Dictionary was completed to demonstrate its value to nonprofessionals and the DoED ponied-up modest funding which saw the first edition published in 1996.  Although, the dictionary’s enthusiastic reception attracted additional grants, the project (somewhat like Linux) remains underfunded and highly dependent on expert volunteers who understand the need.  DeFrancis’s contributions include some twenty years of intense work, all royalties, and mid-six figures of cash. 

14.   A tattered copy of DeFrancis’ Glossary in Tianjin Medical University’s library “saved my life” while teaching calculus there. 

15.   Pinyin is an alphabetization of spoken Putonghua (a Mandarin dialect which is China's offical language.)  Its primary purpose is to increase literacy and promulgate Putonghua as China’s spoken and written language standard.  Pinyin is used as a tool to explicate Putonghua pronunciation and facilitate looking-up characters in dictionaries.  It is not intended as a replacement for characters or as a written communication vehicle. 

Any language change is contentious:  consider twixting.  Changes, especially standards, are often debated with more emotion than reason.  “Homographobia” is an example of DeFrancis elegantly desiccating an illogical position.  See… DeFrancis, John.  “Homographobia”  New China  v.6; Nov, 1985 pp 2-16  (republished by www.Pinyin.com)   Today’s Pinyin can therefore be thought of as Release 1.0 of a complex system.  Refinements will occur as “market forces” drive future releases. 

At an entirely different, more fundamental level, China’s hybrid system of characters and “letter tools” can help grapple with certain embedded epistemological issues obscured by communication systems that rely solely on characters or letters.  (e.g.  Map neurological cross-modal interactions and boundaries between perception and concept in synesthetes – in a certain sense all humans "have" synesthesia.) 

16.   Skillin, Marjorie E.  Words into Type, Third Edition.  Prentice-Hall, 1974. 

17.   Word counts help readers prioritize which characters to learn.  Mastering the 50th most common character, as opposed to the 10,000th, yields more bang per grey cell. 

18.   Zhou Youguang, The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts, (translated by Zhang Liqing) Ohio State University NEALRC, 2003

Zhou and DeFrancis were both trained economists who turned to Sinology and linguistics:  Zhou, to help Chinese understand their language(s);  DeFrancis, to help Westerners understand China. 

In 1955, Zhou – who has been called the father of Pinyin – was appointed head of a PRC committee charged with increasing literacy by standardizing an alphabet for “official” spoken Chinese.  There, he was at the center of the broader language reform movement. 

It was an exciting time for linguists.   Chinese language was undergoing rapid change.  A hundred Chinese topolects and dialects were being cataloged and studied.  Putonghua, a Mandarin dialect, was adopted as “the” Common Chinese Language.  Hundreds of characters were in the process of being eliminated: others, simplified.  Archaic writing styles were coming under “Writing 101” critique.  Several alphabets, such as Wade-Giles, were in use.  By some accounts, only ten percent of the population spoke Putonghua.  International interest in Chinese language and culture was growing.  DeFrancis describes the situation prior to 1950 in his Nationalism and Language Reform in China. 

Times were especially interesting for those in the fray.  Consider the practical and political consequences of simultaneously officially adopting Spanish and Cyrillic in the USA.  Such a change would be minor compared to what China faced:  there, no style manuals, reading material, or courseware existed for the new standards.  “Writings of ox demons” and “language of low class peddlers” are examples of phrases bandied during the inevitable debate.  Adding to the excitement, progress was interrupted when Zhou and others were hauled off for reeducation during the Cultural Revolution. 

Despite the hurdles, Pinyin was born and adopted.  Zhou’s book — published in 1997 by Tsinghua University Press (Beijing) as  中國語文的時代演進 — is a survey of conditions and events leading to language reform, including Pinyin.  It is also the basis of The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts which is, however, an entirely different work.

Three events fortuitously converged to shape Zhou’s “little book” as a bilingual, uniquely useful tool for English speaking audiences. 

a)  China’s latest language reform broke a lot of rice bowels.  An officially sanctioned framing of language history and condition was one of the most persuasive instruments that could be used to justify the tzuris.  A billion people’s inability to speak to one another and ninety percent illiteracy are unacceptable – no matter how attached one might be to traditional characters or a particular dialect.  Zhou’s book was aimed at a wide audience.  Publishing required a delicate touch.  A combination of erudition and plain language was needed:  erudition, to satisfy classical purists;  plain speaking, to be understood, and not be perceived as elitist, by apparatchiks and proletariat.  CPC dialectic surfaces on such matters as:  conflation of CPC and PRC;  PRC’s founding;  and, Taiwan’s status.  Certain other topics are avoided (e.g.  'Phags-pa). 

b)  When Zhou asked Zhang Liqing to translate his book she already had her hands full – proofing some 200,000 entries for DeFrancis’ ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary.  Over the next two years she completed both projects. 

c)  Ohio State University’s National East Asian Languages Resource Center (“NEALRC”) was seeking material to publish as a bilingual work in a particular register.  (NEALR uses the pedagogical technique of developing students’ competancy within a register or domain – and then expanding that competancy outward.)  Mair introduced Zhang’s translation to NEALR which published it. 

The resulting work delivers on several fronts.  It’s as much a preliminary style guide for writing “Modern Chinese” as a history.  Background information contributes insight about language reform objectives and potential future direction.  “English-only” readers will find Zhang’s text a succinct summary of a complex, contentious subject.  Politically fine-tuned treatment of touchy issues will help readers skirt political faux pas.  The Putonghua text serves as an example of exemplary orthography, typography, and writing style. 

On another level, the book illustrates certain complexities of developing an alphabet and hammering-out its associated conventions (e.g. pages 113-127 and Appendix II.)  The "Pinyin Project" set a lofty goal.  It aimed at producing a result in less than fifty years that took centuries to evolve in the West. 

19.   Mair, Victor H., ed.  An Alphabetical Index to the Hanyu Da Cidian  Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003. 

The Hanyu da cidian (“HDC”) is an unabridged dictionary of both modern and ancient Chinese.  It’s big, comprising 12 volumes, 20,000 pages, 340,000 entries, 23,000 characters, and 1.5 million citations.  HDC has been hard to use because it’s not arranged alphabetically – it’s arranged by radicals and residual strokes.  Mair’s alphabetic index provides user-friendly (DeFrancis-like) access to this important resource.  The index is also essential for computerized corpus analysis. 

20.   Wenlin and Second Life offer glimpses of what next generation language systems may look like – now that DeFrancis, Mair, and other pioneers have done the heavy lifting of creating comprehensive corpora, standards-based courseware, and dictionaries. 

Mundane, but highly useful, candidates for automation include:  dynamic asymmetric flashcards (with animated strokes);  dynamic indication of tone changes (with associated audio);  links from words and characters to example representative sentences of increasing complexity in corpora;  feedback for pronunciation and character drawing (with character and voice recognition);  vocabulary grade levels matched to PRC and other proficiency tests;  and, integration with Early Chinese dictionaries and literature. 

Total language emersion in a realistic virtual world is the next step, albeit one where Avatars can “break character” for an English or other metalanguage as needed.  Mair’s Painting and Performance, is an example of work that could be more fully put to use in virtual reality.  (Mair, Victor H.  Painting and Performance: Chinese Picture Recitation and its Indian Genesis  Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press,  1988)   Clinical speech therapy – similar to that conducted by Professor Donahue at Saint Joseph’s Foreign Language Department to prepare students for performances in French theater – is another candidate for automation support. 

21.   Regrettably, despite highly inflated claims by marketers of fad diets and products such as Berlitz and Rosetta Stone, no shortcuts exist.  Headway entails digesting the right stuff.  Anyone over the age of ten who wants to do more than mouth a few phrases faces a multi-year project requiring considerable investment of time and effort.  Mass market products often lead to bad habits and dead ends.  Significantly better ROIs can be obtained from an academically-grounded, integrated “family” such as ABC’s community (DeFrancis Series, ABC Dictionaries, translations, corpus, Wenlin, and the forthcoming AI system) which has been pedagogically honed by world-class educators and is impeccably correct in representing classical and current usage.  As a side benefit, students assimilate culture and develop lifelong skills in using associated tools such as dictionaries and Chinese word processing applications – and “club membership” conveys a certain cachet. 

22.   Coblin, South W.  (ed. Victor Mair)  A Handbook of ‘Phags-pa Chinese  Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. 

Westerners are poorly served by popularized accounts of Mongolian history.  Compared to what else was going on in Europe and China, the Mongol Empire was reasonably enlightened and well run.  (e.g. Scholars and artisans were encouraged to immigrate.  Multiple religions and philosophies were tolerated.  A “pony express” interconnected the empire.)  As governance and diplomacy grew more complex, language reform (and more words) were needed which led to 'Phags-pa’s Mongolian “alphabet” in the thirteenth century. 

See… “The rise of the Mongolian empire and Mongolian rule in north China” (Thomas Allsen  pp. 321-414) and “The Reign of Kublai Khan” (Morris Rossai  pp. 414-489) in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 6 edited by Herbert Franke & Denis Twitchett,  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.  Also... Rossai's Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times  University of California Press, 1989. 

23.   The process is somewhat akin to studying Old French and other modern language precursors. 

Early Chinese, of course, has been less ploughed.  So, the process more resembles Quine’s description of radical translation of newly encountered languages.  However, since direct access to the “speakers” is not possible, there’s more reliance on forensic analysis and entering authors’ frames of reference.  (Sinitic reconstruction techniques are different than the textual analysis and phonetic interpretation taught in mainstream “linguistic school” because classical scripts yield so few clues about pronunciation.) 

In The Art of Rulership, Ames explicates addtional hurdles.  Conceptual distinctions between Confucian, Taoist, and Legalist texts, for example, can easily be overlooked because early Chinese operatives tended to coop each other’s vocabulary (by redefining terms instead of inventing new terms for new concepts.)  As Ames puts it,  “A peculiarity of Chinese philosophical development… is that rival schools in the tradition have a shared vocabulary in advancing their different ideas.”

Ames, Roger T.  The Art of Rulership: a study in ancient Chinese political thought   Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.Roger T. Ames

Understanding the meaning of ancient texts thus requires an appreciation of how the same terms, metaphors, analogies, and allusions were differently perceived and used by particular schools of thought. 

The work by Mair, Ames, and other pioneers substantially facilitates access to early Chinese classics.  By describing the mental framework of philosophical schools, they remove the obstacle of needing to read everything before understanding anything. 

Endorphins reward those who first crack a turtle shell or Rosetta Stone.  All who follow in their footsteps receive more prosaic, practical rewards.  Their understanding of modern Chinese increases – in the way that English and French are conquered by learning Latin.  Appreciating differences and commonalities of the various Chinese traditions also lends perspective to contemporary philosophical and political attitudes.