Dear Junior Campbell ,

Thanks for asking. It's an excellent question.

In Chinese culture and history, there are two classes people:

Richer or not richer, but get educated: Literacy is important. It relates the issues of what you mentioned about. The highest is the ethic moral cultivation.

Financial disadvantage and hard to get educated: Among them, some people do follow traditional Chinese culture and well family educated to maintain good Chinese ethic culture's five relationships in

However, as the western culture dominate the world or people get the western cultural education and adopted their value. The five relationships changed to be the western's.

No matter what, if deviated the five relationships, people are easy sick. There is a male whose last name is Liu in China teaches the five relationship to treat people's diseases even cancer.

The skill of using words in literacy or talking relates a person's fortunate.

Frieda

Thank you for those insights Frieda Mah.

How much do you know about the Chinese concept of language?

In my discipline, Linguistics, we are taught that language is primarily an oral phenomena. That means it is first and foremost a "spoken" thing.

Written "language" is considered secondary. It is viewed as a symbolic, visual representation of what we do when we speak - or think.

You can think of it as a map, outlining or representing a country, region or similar territory.

The study of the relationship between language and the thoughts that motivate it and in turn are communicated by it, perfectly or imperfectly, as the case may be, is called psycholinguistics and/or neurolinguistics typically, I believe.

I am primarily concerned with the study of language and literacy in this domain: I believe that this is basically the realm of the spiritual and equates roughly with what in Chinese culture you may call Qi.

In my book, The Bible: Beauty And Terror Reconciled, I make a clear distinction between both written and spoken words and thoughts or meaning. I treat words as vehicles and meanings as their passengers.

I do the something similar in my poem "Think":

Think How do you measure thought? Let me think. Can you really outline it on paper, as a writer does with ink? Do we really communicate it in the spoken world? Plato might say that idea is absurd. We measure thought in deeds of thoughtfulness. A true thought may be more But it is certainly no less.

Dear Junior Campbell ,

In Chinese medicine, no matter, written or oral in communication. They are all a practical "art". Both of them are important.

Written can do not put punctuation to mean different things. In oral communication, can use the same words but in different tones to lead to different thinking and results. How to skill use them? It's a wisdom.

Best Regards,

Frieda