Talk:Étienne Fourmont

Contradiction between lede and body

Thanks White whirlwind for your careful attention, but your edit here leaves me confused. The body of the article says that Louis appointed Fourmont to assist Huang and the article Arcadio Huang also says that Fourmont was Huang's assistant, not the other way around. Likewise other sources, including Jonathan Spence p. 22 So I am taking the liberty of changing this back.

I'm also not clear what a "semi-professional" sinologist is. Is this Honey's term? He uses "pioneering" in his title, but maybe you could give an exact quote. All the bestch (talk) 04:57, 20 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@CWH: what part of Spence (1992): p. 22, suggests to you that Fourmont was Huang's assistant? Spence simply says, "A new man was assigned to work with Huang, the scholar Etienne Fourmont..." Honey (2001) specifically states that Huang was Fourmont's "learned assistant".

Regarding "semi-professional", this was a term for Fourmont from my former teacher Prof. Knechtges. I'm not sure why the term is unclear to you. It means that Fourmont was one of the first Europeans to make some part of his living off of Sinology. White Whirlwind 咨 06:53, 20 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

My original question was about the difference between the lede and the body of the article. I'm away from a library, but further Googling supports the idea that F. must have been the assistant, since Huang was in charge of the project and F. came along as the third helper. Spence, who was working from archives on Huang, is clear that Huang was in charge, Leung's study of Fourmant says F. would later help complete the inventory that Huang started p. 136, Elisseef likewise, here

So maybe cut Honey's word "assistant" to leave: "stealing the work of Arcadius Huang, whom he had helped catalog the royal sinological collection, and that he frequently plagiarized the works of other scholars."ch (talk) 21:24, 20 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]