Bulletin Number Two 1987

he was asked to teach Chinese as well as English in a middle school in his native xian did L ü Shu-xiang take an active interest in the grammar and structure o f his mother tongue. This interest quickly consumed him, however, as he became involved in amajor debate w ith the celebrated Zhu Zi-qing (朱自淸） over the place o f the Subject in the Chinese sentence. Zhu maintained that the Subject is absolutely necessary. L ü said it is not. Mr. Chancellor, as a linguist yourself and one who is conversant in many Chinese dialects, you w ill agree that usage is on the side o f Mr. L ü . This famous war o f words led to the writing o f his first major work on the grammatical structure o f the Chinese language. Entitled The Essentials o f Chinese Grammar, the book by L ü Shu-xiang, gen erally considered an important ground-breaking work, became a best seller. Other books, papers and treatises followed. In a career spanning over sixty years, L ü Shu-xiang has produced over twenty books and more than a hundred major papers and articles. Like Fowler, he has also edited a dictionary dealing exclusively w ith usage ， the first o f its kind in the Chinese language. He had taught at five major universities in China and was the architect of the simplified Chinese characters. He is, even today at the age o f eighty-three, an adviser o f the National Committee on the Reform o f Chinese Characters and an honorary director o f the Institute o f linguistics o f the Chinese Academy o f Social Sciences. It would be wrong to surmise from what has been said that Mr. L ü 's interests are confined to language, linguistics and literature, broad as those subjects may be, for he also studied history, chemistry, geology, biology and psychology. Between 1936 and 1938 he read anthropology at Oxford University and library science in the University o f London. His acquaintance w ith science has made him not just a theorist in the study o f languages but also an empiri cist. In a passage which Professor Ting Chao Chung w ill find ready agreement w ith, L ü Shu-xiang had this to say o f theoreticians whose work is not grounded in factual observation and experiment: ‘I have an impression that a great many people are interested in working w ith theories, but not so many o f them are quite as ready to spend time on observation and experimentation. . . . The late Professor Rao Yu-tai o f Peking University once lamented the fact that nine out o f ten physics students had their minds set on theoretical physics; they did not realize that w ithout experimental physics, theoretical phys ics could not go forward.' Being an empiricist, Mr. L ü also supports the idea o f learning from the West. On this he has said, 'the important thing is to learn from Western scholars in their study o f language, their methodology, and not the mechanical adaptation o f their research results.' Mr. Chancellor, my own humble command of the English language cannot convey to you the wisdom, the sophistication, and the nuance in Mr. L ü 's words. They have been distilled, no doubt, from a life-time o f learning, o f observation, o f empirical research and, at the end o f it, o f theorizing. This is aman who has applied the rigour o f scientific enquiry to the study o f a discipline which belongs in the humanities. His encyclopaedic mind, his painstaking, methodical approach through over sixty years have produced for us a wealth o f information and explanation now generally taken for granted in the study of the Chinese language. Going through some o f this work myself, I found Mr. L ü has written books and chapters o f books in the classical Chinese style, in the modern Chinese style, as well as in the English language —excelling, needless to say, in all three. Mr. Chancellor, The Chinese University has as its ideal the fusion o f Chinese culture and that o f the West. We are also committed to a bilingual education. That being the case, we can find no more shining embodiment of our own ideal than in the person o f Mr. Lu Shu-xiang. Mr. Chancellor, for his immense contribution to the study o f the Chinese language, for his many pioneering works which are impossible to list in a citation, for his advocacy o f the scientific approach in language studies, and no less for his advocacy of learning from the West and thereby keeping the universality o f universities a living ideal, I present to you L li Shu-xiang for the award o f the degree of Doctor o f Literature, honoris causa. NEWS 5