Sino-Cybernetics, pt. 1: Alice’s Adventures in China, or “How could I help thinking of her?”

Bertrand Russell was traveling in China in 1920. Since the famous logician and co-author of the Principia Mathematica knew a lot about the logic of language, but nothing about Chinese, a young and dapper mathematician and philosopher named  赵元任 Zhao Yuanren accompanied him as an interpreter. Zhao had studied mathematics and physics at Cornell and earned his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard with a thesis called Continuity: Study in Methodology.

After his travels with Russell, he stayed in China until the late 1930s, teaching mathematics at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He then moved back to the US, where he became the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1945. In the early 1950s, he was one of the first members of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, which was closely connected to the early days of Cybernetics. His linguistic work was groundbreaking. Together with his wife Yang Buwei, he published How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, in which he coined the term “stir fry”. His recipe for “Stirred Eggs” (Chapter 13) is considered a classic of American comic writing. He also translated Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Jabberwocky into Chinese. This, in turn, led to Chinese sequels, notably Shen Congwen’s 阿丽思中国游记 Alisi Zhongguo youji or Alice’s Adventures in China in 1928. Note that after Wonderland, there comes China. You might have heard of his most famous poem, Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den or 施氏食狮史 Shī Shì shí shī shǐ. It consists of 92 homophonous characters:

« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.

Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.

Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.

Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.

Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.

Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.

Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.

Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.

Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.

Shì shì shì shì.

《施氏食獅史》

石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。

氏時時適市視獅。

十時，適十獅適市。

是時，適施氏適市。

氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。

氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。

石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。

石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。

食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。

試釋是事。

« Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den »

In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.

He often went to the market to look for lions.

At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.

At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.

He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.

He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.

The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.

After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.

When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.

Try to explain this matter.

And of course, he also wrote Chinese pop hits, such as 教我如何不想她 How could I help thinking of her?

In 1953, he was a part of an incredible assembly of people dreaming up the Cybernetic future together with Norbert Wiener, Heinz von Foerster, John von Neumann, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Claude E. Shannon and others, when he attended the famous Macy Conferences, designed to develop a “general science of the workings of the human mind”. He gave a paper on language and meaning, in which he let us know that:

“In Hawaiian, there is a fish called a homohomonukunukuapua, and you cannot analyze that into smaller meaningful units. But at the same time, in that same language, there is another fish which is called ø.”

Watch out for part 2 tomorrow: In which Norbert Wiener travels to Beijing, has a cat named Pao, and does some circuit bending.