The Semasiology of Some Primary Confucian Concepts

Intercultural cross-pollination, natural or artificial, has long been a recorded phenomenon of human history, but at no time the slowly developing tragicomedy of mankind, until the eschatologically accelerated denouement of our era, have microsporic mists of multilingual and multicultural origin so densely pervaded the atmosphere. The resultant cultural hay fever threatens to become endemic throughout the globe. How much real cross-fertilization has thereby been accomplished even the most astute of our cultural geneticists would be reluctant to say. Students of the Orient can, however, point to startling mutations produced the lexicons of the great literary languages of Asia through the insemination of the proliferous Greco-Latin gametes of the Occidental scientific vocabulary. Their conjugation with native cells has indeed resulted the spectacular growth of truly international protoplasts. Thanks to this hybridization, whatever be the obstacles that still remain to retard free linguistic communication between two scientists coming from opposite corners of the earth, each has at his disposal a rich supply of universally viable lexical plasma that can be easily transfused, without danger of incompatibility, from one intellectual blood stream into another. For the humanist, however, linguistic barriers still stand as inviolable as if they were property lines of demarcation between cultural autarchies. Proud of his own heritage, often to the point of self-sufficiency, the humanistwho is essentially a philo-logist, that is, a lover of his native logos, or, at best, of that of his cultural area or subcivilization-is loath to permit the infiltration of the tiniest logospore of foreign extraction into the wellguarded precincts of his native literary tradition. In moments of magnanimity or spiritual weakness, he concedes the possibility of admitting a few such spores, but only for the purpose of observation the test tubes of his botanical laboratory. They may sojourn there under quaint labels some semilearned transcription, transliteration, Romanization, or Latinization, or in the native character, so that their exotic origin, and suspected virulence,