Experiments have a good name. They are the daily bread of the scientist, the touchstone of theory, the source of proven knowledge.

Of course, not every experiment can be called laudable. There is, for example, a branch of the art of healing labelled "experimental medicine" which engages in large scale destruction of life and constitutes a pitiful anachronism despite all claims to the contrary. (1)

But let us not get lost in complaints about those aberrations. Experiments in general are the time-honoured token of science and thus, somehow implied, of progress whatever the latter might entail.

This holds true more or less for the West. But what, we may ask, does "experiment" mean to the largest chunk of humankind, at least in linguistic terms?

Here we set foot into interesting territory. For Chinese, the "experiment" is a newcomer. As a matter of fact, there are two terms, both in some sense new or re-introductions, which warrant attention.

One is the common noun shíyàn which is attested already in the famous treatise Lùnhéng by Wang Chong (27-ca. 100 CE) (2). Modern lexicography explains it as meaning "actual effect". (3) A couple of centuries later, Yan Zhitui (531-590 CE) (4) used shíyàn in the sense of "real (since personal) experience." (5) But to express "experiment", shíyàn had to wait for more than a millennium.

It may have been Liang Qichao (1873-1929 CE) (6) who introduced it into scholarly discourse (7), and since a) Liang played a role in transplanting Japanese neologisms into Chinese (8) and b) jitsuken (Chin. shíyàn) is the Japanese for "experiment" (9) there is every reason to regard it as part of the originally Chinese vocabulary which, endowed with new meaning, re-entered Chinese through the language of Nippon since the second half of the 19th century. It looked exactly like an old word, but since the new meaning it referred to was no native extension but an addition from outside we might well say there are two shíyàn -one originally Chinese pointing to "actual effect" or "real (because personal) experience", the other a loanword meaning "experiment".

The situation with the second term for "experiment" we have to consider here, shìyàn, is somewhat similar. Like many other scientific or technological terms, it was incorporated into the Chinese lexicon only in the second half of the 19th century.

Admittedly, this understanding is not shared by everybody. Federico Masini, for example, holds that the bisyllabic noun shìyàn (experiment) belongs to those pre-19th century Chinese words which are often mistakenly regarded as recent innovations. shìyàn, says Masini with reference to the Zhongwen dacidian, was already used in the Song Dynasty. (10) This, however, is not without problems. Let me air one quibble here -and then a real question.

The minor objection deals with the timing of appearance. China has seen two Song dynasties, the Liu Song (420-479 CE) and the Zhao Song (960-1279 CE), the latter of which is further divided into the Northern Song (960-1127 CE) and the Southern Song (1127-1279 CE). So it might have been a service to the reader to mark which one was intended here.

Moreover, the poem quoted in the Zhongwen dacidian entry is by Liu Ying, a man of letters who passed away in 1180 CE under Jin rule in the North. (11) Modern Chinese publications tend to give his dynastic affiliation as Jin (1115-1234 CE) which makes sense.

But not only this. If we want to believe dictionaries, the first appearance of shìyàn is by no means as late as the 12th century: Gan Bao used it eight-hundred years earlier, Zheng Qi (died 899 CE) in the Tang Dynasty. (12) To prove thatshìyàn is indigenous and old, it would have been much more effective to refer to these examples.

However, the real problem lies in the fact that in none of these instances does shìyàn imply "experiment." The shìyàn po wéi dà of Liu Ying's poem, for example, has to be understood as "is very effective"(13), that is shìyàn here points to "effect", a sense in which yàn alone is already known in quite early sources. (14) According to the Hanyu dacidian, shìyàn is further used in four meanings, three of them indicating verbal function, only one serving as a noun: "to engage in a certain activity in order to check the facts about a situation or the nature and functions of some object", "to give an examination"(e.g. in a school), "to train", and "experience". (15)

Of all these definitions, the first one seems closest to, but is till not identical with "experiment" in a verbal sense. (16) Yet a further look at the textual illustrations given in the dictionary has a sobering effect. Only the second example, that by Chen Tianxiang who lived in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368 CE), fits somehow into this definition since shìyàn xiányú jiàoliàng gong zhúo form an evident parallelism and shìyànjiàoliàng can be understood as "to check or measure in order to ascertain".

As to the first sample which happens to be that by Gan Bao, it could mean something altogether different if we avoid looking atshìyàn instinctively as the modern binom we are used to. I suggest to split it apart and analyse the whole sentence as hé xí bù yí shì yàn zhi which conveys the meaning of "why are you afraid and don't give it a try to see whether it is effective". And in the last illustration, a quote by present-day author Xiao Hong,qichu ta shìyànguo just means "at first, she'd given it a try". (17)

This leaves us with the really astonishing situation that even the biggest modern Chinese-Chinese dictionary fails to giveshìyàn in the meaning of the noun "experiment" despite the fact that the word is actually understood in this sense -Tashi Tshering's English-Tibetan-Chinese Dictionary for example offers shìyàn; shíyàn as gloss for the noun "experiment" and jìnxíng shíyàn (hùo shìyàn)for the corresponding verb(18)- and that it is even older than shíyàn.

According to Marsini, William Alexander Parsons Martin used it in his Gewu rumen which was published in 1868. (19) Now, Parson was an American working in China, and the Natural Philosophy counts among his major translations. Thus the shìyàn he employs in order to render "experiment" is, quite similar toshíyàn, not the result of simple semantic extension of the old shìyàn. It is a loanword.

With the passing of time, some difference is discernable betweenshíyàn andshìyàn in present day usage, at least in Taiwan. The former is employed when reference is made to scientific experiments which try to prove a hypothesis for example, while the latter indicates the testing of, let's say, a new machine.

Nevertheless, as just shown, both words have been used in modern times as translations for "experiment". What seems to have escaped the attention of scholars of Chinese so far is the fact that many years earlier, shìyàn already found its way into other Chinese translations of a very different kind -those of Buddhist scriptures. The underlying Sanskrit is known (or supposed to be known) in a few cases (20) but the complex has not yet been treated as a whole.

Last not least I would like to draw attention to the fact, that not only the two modern Chinese terms for "experiment" have been formerly used in the sense of "experience", but also the English "experiment" itself. There is reason to assume that this is not mere coincidence.

If we look at the meanings of shíyàn, shìyàn, and yàn alone (21), a certain pattern or correlation seems to emerge:

"Common sense" tells us that a temporal first-then relationship is involved here. Language, however, uses one and the same word to denote both, action and experience. This could be anything but fortuitous. It might well be a reflection of our existential situation or, to put it scientifically, "the unbroken coincidence of our being, our doing, and our knowing." (22)

And thus we can only marvel at the learning and genius of the translators who used "examination/proof of the factual situation" (shíyàn) and "attempt to check/prove (the effects of... on... in order to gain relevant experience/knowledge)" (shìyàn) to translate "experiment" from West to East.

Notes

1) See e.g. Hugh LaFollette, "Animal Rights and Human Wrongs" in N. Dower (ed.), Ethics and the Environment (Gower Press, 1989) pp. 79-90; Hugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks, "Animal Experimentation: the Legacy of Claude Bernard" in International Studies in the Philosophy of Science (1994) pp. 195-210, and by the same authors "Util-izing Animals" in the Journal of Applied Philosophy (1995) pp. 13-25 and "Two Models of Models in Biomedical Research" in the Philosophical Quarterly (1995) pp. 141-60. These articles are now available at Professor LaFollette's website which is well worth visiting. It also offers an introduction to his Brute Science: Dilemmas of Animal Experimentation (Routledge, 1996) and a number of other thoughtful papers.

2) For the dates, see Tan Zhengbi, Zhongguo wenxuejia dacidian (Taipei: Heluo tushu chubanshe, 1978) p. 46, entry 125.

3) See Luo Zhufeng, editor-in-chief, Hanyu dacidian (Shanghai: Hanyu dacidian chubanshe, 1989) 3.1612.

4) See Wu Yuqi and Wang Xiuxia, Yanshi jiaxun yizhu (Changchun: Jilin wenshi chubanshe, 1998) p. 5.

5) See Luo Zhufeng, op.cit., 3.1612-1613.

6) SeeTang Zenbi, op.cit., p. 1743, entry 6841.

7) See Luo Zhufeng, op.cit., 3.1613.

8) See Huang Heqing, tr., Federico Masinsi, Xiandai hanyu cihui de xingcheng (Shanghai: Hanyu dacidian chubanshe, 1997) pp. 120-123.

9) See Obunsha's Sunrise Japanese-English Dictionary (Tokyo: Obunsha, 1988) p. 610.

10) See Huang Heqing, op. cit., p. 240.

11) SeeTang Zenbi, op.cit., p. 706, entry 2485.

12) For the dates, see Tang Zenbi, op.cit., p. 133, entry 434 and p. 491-492, entry 1696.

13) See Luo Zhufeng, op.cit., 11.142.

14) For example Huainanzi, seeHanyu dazidian (Wuhan: Hubei cishu chubanshe, Sichuan cishu chubanshe, 1990) 7.4580.

15) See Luo Zhufeng, op.cit., 11.142.

16) See John Sinclair, editor in chief, Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1988) p. 494: "If you experiment with something or experiment on it, you do a scientific test on it in order to prove that a theory is true or to discover what happens to it in particular conditions."

17) See Luo Zhufeng, op.cit., 11.142.

18) See Tashi Tshering, English-Tibetan-Dictionary (Delhi: Sherig Parkhang Sonam Tsering, no date) p. 338.

19) See Huang Heqing, op.cit., p. 240. Concerning Gewu rumen, cf. Huang Heqing, op.cit., pp. 54-56; for some notes on Martin's biography, see Ma Zuyi, Zhongguo fanyi shi (shangjuan) (Hankou: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1999) p. 550-551.

20) See Akira Hirakawa, Buddhist Chinese-Sanskrit Dictionary (Tokyo: The Reiyukai, 1997) p. 1075, character 3455.

21) For the latter, see Hanyu dazidian 7.4580-4581.

22) See Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding ((Boston & London: Shambhala, 1992) p. 25.