Author: Mårten Söderblom Saarela Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812252071 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
A linguistic and historical study of the Manchu script in the early modern world Manchu was a language first written down as part of the Qing state-building project in Northeast Asia in the early seventeenth century. After the Qing invasion of China in 1644, and for the next two and a half centuries, Manchu was the language of state in one of the early modern world's great powers. Its prominence and novelty attracted the interest of not only Chinese literati but also foreign scholars. Yet scholars in Europe and Japan, and occasionally even within China itself, were compelled to study the language without access to a native speaker. Jesuit missionaries in Beijing sent Chinese books on Manchu to Europe, where scholars struggled to represent it in an alphabet compatible with Western pedagogy and printing technology. In southern China, meanwhile, an isolated phonologist with access to Jesuit books relied on expositions of the Roman alphabet to make sense of the Manchu script. When Chinese textbooks and dictionaries of Manchu eventually reached Japan, scholars there used their knowledge of Dutch to understand Manchu. In The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, Mårten Söderblom Saarela focuses on outsiders both within and beyond the Qing empire who had little interaction with Manchu speakers but took an interest in the strange, new language of a rising world power. He shows how—through observation, inference, and reference to received ideas on language and writing—intellectuals in southern China, Russia, France, Chosŏn Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script and explores the uses to which it was put for recording sounds and arranging words.
Author: Mårten Söderblom Saarela Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004687734 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 311
Book Description
This is the first book-length study of the roles played by the Manchu language at the center of the Qing empire at the height of its power in the eighteenth century. It presents a revisionist account of Manchu not as a language in decline, but as extensively and consciously used language in a variety of areas. It treats the use, discussion, regulation, and philological study of Manchu at the court of an emperor who cared deeply for the maintenance and history of the language of his dynasty.
Author: 馬思途Stuart M. McManus Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press ISBN: 9882372619 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
2023年，香港中文大學迎來六十周年校慶。值此重要時刻，當反思大學使命—「結合傳統與現代，融會中國與西方」的歷史意蘊與時代價值。大學圖書館藉此難得機會，舉辦紀念展覽，展示館藏中日益豐富的西方漢學珍本。 本圖錄記錄了展出的藏書，並一一簡述概況，涵蓋從十五至十九世紀中葉的書籍、地圖和手稿。珍藏之中不乏最優秀的早期漢學著作。其中許多作品均由利瑪竇、湯若望等知名耶穌會教士撰寫，他們縱然人數不多，但在深入接觸近代早期中國社會與文化的過程中，一手創立了近代漢學，留下了近距離觀察中國的珍貴記錄。隨著這些傳教士的著作傳回歐洲，關於中國的歐洲書籍愈加準確詳細，歐洲人對中國的了解也與日俱增。本圖錄透過豐富的圖像，以及細緻的介紹和描述，呈現出一幅生動的早期歷史圖景，展現西方對中國持久而深入的興趣和理解，以及中西淵源的交疊與關聯。透過本圖錄，讀者亦可藉此思索如何更好地「結合傳統與現代，融會中國與西方」。 In 2023, The Chinese University of Hong Kong celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of its foundation. This occasion provides a moment for reflection on the historical and contemporary meanings of the university’s mission “to combine tradition with modernity and to bring together China and the West.” To this end, the celebrations include an exhibition of the University Library’s burgeoning collection of Western rare books about China, which is recorded and contextualized in this catalogue. This splendid volume features books, maps, and manuscripts from the fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Among its treasures are some of the very finest works of early Sinology. Many of these were written by celebrated Jesuit missionaries like Matteo Ricci and Johann Adam Schall von Bell, who though few in number almost single-handedly founded modern Sinology through their deep engagement with early modern Chinese society and culture. As the writings of these missionaries percolated back to Europe, knowledge about China grew exponentially as European books about China became more accurate and detailed. Through its extended introduction, images, and descriptions, this catalogue illustrates the dynamic early history of the West’s longstanding and profound interest in China, thereby giving members of the university community and the public at large an opportunity to consider how we might better “combine tradition with modernity and bring together China and the West.”
Author: Glenn W. Most Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004527257 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 502
Book Description
This volume presents a selection of primary sources--in many cases translated into English for the first time--with introductions that provide fascinating historical materials for challenging notions of the ways in which premodern and early modern Eurasian scholars dealt with plurilingualism and monolingualism.
Author: Lawrence Wang-chi Wong Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press ISBN: 9882371779 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 525
Book Description
This edited volume investigates translations from the languages of China into the languages of Western societies, from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Rather than focusing solely on the activity of translation, the authors extend their explorations to cover the contexts within which the translators worked from different perspectives, touching on various aspects of the institutional and intellectual backgrounds that informed their writings. Studies of translation from literary Chinese into English constitute the majority of the contributions, but the volume is also illuminated by excursions into Latin, French and Italian, while the problems of translating the Naxi script are confronted as well. In addition, the wider context of the rendering of Chinese into other languages is explored through a survey of recent Japanese translation series. Throughout the volume, translation is presented not simply as a linguistic exercise but rather as a key element in world history, well worthy of further interdisciplinary investigation.
Author: Jing Tsu Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0735214735 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.
Author: Nathan Vedal Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231553765 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 217
Book Description
Winner, 2023 Morris D. Forkosch Prize, Journal of the History of Ideas The scholarly culture of Ming dynasty China (1368–1644) is often seen as prioritizing philosophy over concrete textual study. Nathan Vedal uncovers the preoccupation among Ming thinkers with specialized linguistic learning, a field typically associated with the intellectual revolution of the eighteenth century. He explores the collaboration of Confucian classicists and Buddhist monks, opera librettists and cosmological theorists, who joined forces in the pursuit of a universal theory of language. Drawing on a wide range of overlooked scholarly texts, literary commentaries, and pedagogical materials, Vedal examines how Ming scholars positioned the study of language within an interconnected nexus of learning. He argues that for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers, the boundaries among the worlds of classicism, literature, music, cosmology, and religion were far more fluid and porous than they became later. In the eighteenth century, Qing thinkers pared away these other fields from linguistic learning, creating a discipline focused on corroborating the linguistic features of ancient texts. Documenting a major transformation in knowledge production, this book provides a framework for rethinking global early modern intellectual developments. It offers a powerful alternative to the conventional understanding of late imperial Chinese intellectual history by focusing on the methods of scholarly practice and the boundaries by which contemporary thinkers defined their field of study.
Author: Alexander Vovin Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1317542797 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 572
Book Description
The Tungusic Languages is a survey of Tungusic, a language family which is seriously endangered today, but which at the time of its maximum spread was present all over Northeast Asia. This volume offers a systematic succession of separate chapters on all the individual Tungusic languages, as well as a number of additional chapters containing contextual information on the language family as a whole, its background and current state, as well as its history of research and documentation. Manchu and its mediaeval ancestor Jurchen are important historical literary languages discussed in this volume, while the other Tungusic languages, around a dozen altogether, have always been spoken by small, local, though in some cases territorially widespread, populations engaged in traditional subsistence activities of the Eurasian taiga and steppe zones and the North Pacific coast. All contributors to this volume are well-known specialists on their specific topics, and, importantly, all the authors of the chapters dealing with modern languages have personal experience of linguistic field work among Tungusic speakers. This volume will be informative for scholars and students specialising in the languages and peoples of Northeast Asia, and will also be of interest to those engaged with linguistic typology, cultural anthropology, and ethnic history who wish to obtain information on the Tungusic languages.
Author: Janet Y. Chen Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231557752 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world today. In China, a country with a vast array of regional and local vernaculars, how was this “common language” forged? How did people learn to speak Mandarin? And what does a focus on speech instead of script reveal about Chinese language and history? This book traces the surprising social history of China’s spoken standard, from its creation as the national language of the early Republic in 1913 to its journey into postwar Taiwan to its reconfiguration as the common language of the People’s Republic after 1949. Janet Y. Chen examines the process of linguistic change from multiple perspectives, emphasizing the experiences of ordinary people. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, a chorus of influential elites promoted the goal of a strong China speaking in one unified voice. Chen explores how this vision fared in practice, showing the complexities of transforming an ideological aspiration into spoken reality. She tracks linguistic change in schools, rural areas, and urban life against the backdrop of war and revolution. The Sounds of Mandarin draws on a novel aural archive of early twentieth-century sound technology, including phonograph recordings, films, and radio broadcasts. Following the uneven trajectory of standard speech, this book sheds new light on the histories of language, nationalism, and identity in China and Taiwan.
Author: Henning Klöter Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000201481 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
Language Diversity in the Sinophone World offers interdisciplinary insights into social, cultural, and linguistic aspects of multilingualism in the Sinophone world, highlighting language diversity and opening up the burgeoning field of Sinophone studies to new perspectives from sociolinguistics. The book begins by charting historical trajectories in Sinophone multilingualism, beginning with late imperial China through to the emergence of English in the mid-19th century. The volume uses this foundation as a jumping off point from which to provide an in-depth comparison of modern language planning and policies throughout the Sinophone world, with the final section examining multilingual practices not readily captured by planning frameworks and the ideologies, identities, repertoires, and competences intertwined within these different multilingual configurations. Taken together, the collection makes a unique sociolinguistic-focused intervention into emerging research in Sinophone studies and will be of interest to students and scholars within the discipline.
Author: Mårten Söderblom Saarela
Author: Mårten Söderblom Saarela
Author: 馬思途Stuart M. McManus
Author: Glenn W. Most
Author: Lawrence Wang-chi Wong
Author: Jing Tsu
Author: Nathan Vedal
Author: Alexander Vovin
Author: Janet Y. Chen
Author: Henning Klöter