Sinologists
Albert Terrien de Lacouperie
1845-1894

Albert Étienne Jean-Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie was of French origin, and his first works (Du Langage, 1867, and Les Noms Propres, 1868) were published in French. There follows a hiatus of a decade, after which all his publications are in English (starting with Early History of the Chinese Civilization, 1880). He was a member of the Royal Asiatic Society, and a member, and somtime Member of Council, of the Philological Society; he published in the journals of both societies. On the other side of the Channel, he was also a member of the Sociètè Asiatique. Little seems to be preserved of his biography. The credits on the title page of his 1887 book Languages of China Before the Chinese list him as Professor of Indo-Chinese Philology at University College, London. The postface to the same work gives us a detailed but brief glimpse of the scholar at work:

The scheme of this book was presented to the Philological Society and read as a part of the President's Address at the Annual Meeting, Friday, May 21st, 1886. As a delegate of the same Society to the Seventh International Congress of Orientalists held at Vienna last year, I read in French a résuméwhich was very favorably received by the fourth or Eastern section at the meeting of the 30th September, 1886.

My best thanks are offered to my colleagues the Members of the Philological Society for the publication of this work, which has appeared in full in the Philological Transactions for 1885-1886. It has been made partly with notes from my MS work China Before the Chinese, from my other work on The Beginnings of Chinese Civilization, in preparation, and from my lectures on The Science of Language, chiefly with reference to South-East Asia, which will soon appear,

It should not be inferred from the first paragraph of this that Terrien de Lacouperie was himself the President of the Philological Society as of its annual meeting in 1886. On the contrary, the outgoing President on that occasion, whose address included summaries of the work of several members, was the notable Walter William Skeat (1837-1912), editor of Chaucer (1899) and other Old English texts, and compiler of an Etymological Dictionary of English (1910).

Terrien de Lacouperie's work on pre-Chinese languages follows the rational lines that would be natural for any first attempt at the subject. One line was a survey of hints in the early Chinese texts, including the Fang Yen. Another was an attempt to define the grammatical character ("ideology") of the various languages, related and unrelated, of China and Southeast Asia. His formula of five elements incorporates such variables as a preference for VO versus OV order. This is a useful complement and corrective to the more usual comparison of individual words. Word information as such was not abundantly available to him; he quotes and in part duplicates the brief wordlists from various Southeast Asian languages that had been published, or in some cases left in manuscript, by early missionaries and travelers. Those lists are still all we know about some of the languages in question.

From the early texts, and despite the orthodox interpretations that were attached to many of them, Terrien de Lacouperie gained a sufficiently accurate view of the Spring and Autumn period that he realized, half a century before Chyen Mu and Owen Lattimore, that the "Chinese" territory of that period was in fact honeycombed with non-Sinitic peoples and even states.

Coming from yet another angle, he investigated early Chinese money, starting with two monographs of 1882 and culminating in a Historical Sketch of Chinese and Japanese Coins, first included as a section in the 1885 Official Catalogues of the British Museum, and published separately in 1887. This is still used as a reference by dealers, quite possibly because its dates are systematically too early.

As for the languages of the earliest Chinese themselves (which he called the Bak Tribes, and which he concluded were originally located in Mesopotamia), Terrien de Lacouperie's suggestion, in several papers of 1882 and 1883, was that the most fruitful extant point of linguistic comparison was Akkadian. This remains to be either verified or superseded.

E Bruce Brooks

Bibliography

 

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