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D14 Language Flows
Language Flows in Pre-Modern East-Asia: Literary Chinese
Coordination: Rudolf G. Wagner, Nicolae Cristian Statu
Abstract
While language normally serves as the basic medium of cultural transfer – it can facilitate it, hinder it, distort it – the present project shifts the focus on language as the very object of cultural transfer: it concentrates on the flow of linguistic knowledge between cultures, and specifically on the adoption of literary Chinese (wenyan, kanbun, hanmun) as a high prestige linguistic variety in pre-modern East Asia. All aspects of the complex flow of knowledge are considered (transfers of institutional framework, instruction practices, canonical texts, cultural “experts”), with a focus on the recreation and transformation of lexical fields.
The object of study
Over the course of the Han dynasty (traditional dates 202 BC – AD 220) Literary Chinese (wenyan 文言) emerged as a linguistic variety distinct from both classical Chinese (Ancient or Old Chinese) and spoken Chinese (vernacular). By the mid second century AD it was bound to a core corpus of canonical texts and it acquired a well defined grammatical and lexical basis and a standardized system of writing. A language of culture and administration in the Chinese empires through the centuries, LC has spread very early to neighboring cultures (Japan, Korea, Vietnam), where it has been adopted and has served a similar purpose until modern times. Concretely, this has involved the flow of a complex array of institutions, practices, and objects associated with the study of this linguistic variety in its original setting, such as textbooks, learning aids, lexica, canonical texts, curricula, academic institutions (the imperial academy and later on private academies) and the system of imperial examinations. The dynamics of the flow have likewise been complex, involving waves on intensive direct contact associated with such diverse phenomena as the spread of Buddhism or the export of Neo-Confucian ethics, as well as long periods of independent evolution.
