The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Language and Culture [1 ed.] 1138052477, 9781138052475

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CHINESE LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Language and Culture represents the first English anthology that delves into the fascinating and thought-provoking relationship between the Chinese language and culture, exploring various macro and micro perspectives. Chinese culture boasts a history of 10,000 years, while the Chinese language’s recorded history spans at least 3,000 years, dating back to the Shang dynasty oracle bone inscriptions. This handbook is composed of 17 chapters from 18 scholars, including Victor Mair and William Shiyuan Wang. Many chapters approach their respective topics from a comprehensive and historical outlook. Certain extensive subjects are addressed in multiple chapters, complementing one another. These topics include the following: • • • •

The languages and peoples of China and the southern Chinese dialects Mandarin’s evolution into a national language and its related writing reforms Language as a propaganda tool in the Cultural Revolution and in contemporary China Chinese idioms and colloquialisms

This book offers an approachable exploration of the subject, appealing to both specialists and enthusiasts of the Chinese language and culture. Liwei Jiao is Senior Lecturer of East Asian Studies at Brown University. His research interests include Chinese phraseology, lexicography, language and culture, and language instruction. His publications include a series of Routledge dictionaries, such as 500 Common Chinese Idioms, 500 Common Chinese Proverbs and Colloquial Expressions, and A Cultural Dictionary of the Chinese Language. He has also contributed three entries, including one on Yuen Ren Chao, to the Encyclopedia of China (third edition, 2022).

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CHINESE LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Edited by Liwei Jiao

WiTH ConSULTing EdiToRS ViCToR H. MAiR And WiLLiAM SHiYUAn WAng

D First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, oxon oX14 4Rn and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, new York, nY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Liwei Jiao; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Liwei Jiao to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Jiao, Liwei, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of Chinese language and culture / edited by Liwei Jiao. description: Abingdon, oxon ; new York, nY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge language handbooks | includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: LCCn 2023041196 (print) | LCCn 2023041197 (ebook) | iSBn 9781138052475 (hardback) | iSBn 9781032687674 (paperback) | iSBn 9781315167800 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Language and culture—China. | Chinese language—Social aspects. | LCgFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P35.5.C6 R68 2024 (print) | LCC P35.5.C6 (ebook) | ddC 495.1—dc23/eng/20231206 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041196 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041197 I I I DOI Typeset in Times new Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For my parents

CONTENTS

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgments

x xi xii xv

introduction Liwei Jiao

1

PART I

Writing, Sounds, and Culture

9

1 Chinese Manuscript Culture Imre Galambos

11

2 A Century of Chinese Writing Reform Victor H. Mair and Jing Hu

27

3 Chinese Phonology and Cross-Cultural Exchange in History Chu Chia Ning

42

4 Monosyllabicity of Chinese in a Quadripartite Classification of World Languages: Exceptions Explained Chen Weiheng

vii

65

Contents PART II

Philosophy, Politics, and Culture

81

5 The Linguistics of Chinese Philosophical Keywords Paul R. Goldin

83

6 Power and Persuasion: Language and Politics in China Fengyuan Ji

99

7 Chinese Exceptionalism: Linguistic Construction of a Superpower Liu Kang 8 distinguishing Between Early Modern and Modern Chinese Lexicons: Mandarin’s Journey to Becoming a national Language Shen Guowei PART III

Words, Expressions, Discourse, and Culture 9 Chinese idioms and Culture Liwei Jiao

113

126

145 147

10 Colloquialisms and Chinese Culture Zhou Jian

163

11 Chinese Place names Zhuqing Li

172

12 Chinese Emotions: Words, Meaning, and Culture Zhengdao Ye

192

13 Research on Classroom discourse in Chinese as a Second Language Fangyuan Yuan

207

PART IV

China, Chinese, Dialects, and Culture

221

14 Sinophone Studies Edward McDonald

223

15 A dynamic Perspective on the Languages and Peoples of China William Shiyuan Wang

237

viii

Contents

16 on the origin of Han Chinese and Chinese dialects of South China Deng Xiaohua

256

17 The Common Language, dialects, and Chinese Cultural Traditions Zheng Wei

269

Index

280

ix

FIGURES

0.1

Place names containing 化 and the sphere of the center of (early) Chinese culture. 1.1 The two ends of an 8.7-m-long scroll. 1.2 Two adjacent leaves from a pothi manuscript. 1.3 A Republican-period manuscript in a typical thread-bound form. 1.4 nineteenth-century manuscripts in a thread-bound form. 1.5 Section of a Sui dynasty scroll (dated 617). 3.1 A sample page of a rhyme table. 3.2 A sample page of Siddham of ancient india. 3.3 A sample page of “Four grades” of a rhyme table. 3.4 A sample of a “～she 攝” rhyme table. 3.5 A sample of a “ZHUAn 轉” rhyme table. 3.6 A sample of a “Menfa 門法” rhyme table. 3.7 A sample page of an early rhyme table: Qiyinlue 七音略. 3.8 The first page of an early rhyme table: Yunjing 韻鏡. 3.9 A palm, five fingers, and “Qieyunzhizhangtu 切韻指掌圖”. 3.10 A sample page of the Song Yuan rhyme table “Sishengdengzi 四聲等子”. 3.11 A sample page of the Song Yuan rhyme table “Qieyunzhizhangtu 切韻指掌圖”. 3.12 A sample page of the Song Yuan rhyme table “Qieyunzhinan 切韻指南”. 9.1 Salience of idiomaticity in 15 types and 19 diagrams. 9.2 Two traditional auspicious patterns: an ju le ye (left) and huan tian xi di (right). 15.1 Major neolithic cultures and their interactions. 15.2 The Western Zhou He zun bronze inscription. 15.3 A sample page in the Song dynasty rime book Yunjing. 15.4 Pitch contours of the Standard Chinese lexical tones.

x

4 18 19 21 21 23 43 44 46 47 47 48 48 49 50 50 51 52 149 153 238 240 244 246

TABLES

0.1 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 11.1 15.1 15.2

Twenty-four county-level place names containing “化”. Female writers and their works for a survey of idioms. Male writers and their works for a survey of idioms. Writers who repeat Chinese idioms more frequently. Chinese idioms and Japanese Yojijukugo in shared structures. Japanese Yujijukugo with 天地 and their Chinese equivalents. distribution of dialectal words in Fujian place names. Tones and rimes in the Shijing. Correspondence of tone systems between Standard Chinese and Cantonese.

xi

4 154 155 156 159 159 187 243 246

CONTRIBUTORS

Chen Weiheng is Professor of Linguistics at the School of Linguistic Sciences and Arts, Jiangsu normal University and doctoral Supervisor at Beijing Language and Culture University. His research interests are in historical and theoretical linguistics. Among his many publications is Correlation between Syllable and Meaning and between Phonology and Lexicalization, Grammaticalization, Subjectification: A Theoretical Study of Bianyin (Chinese Morphonology) in Northern Yu Dialects (2011). Chu Chia Ning is Professor of Chinese Linguistics at the Academy of Sinology, University of Wales, UK. He specializes in the ancient phonology of the Chinese language. Previously, he served as Chairman of the department of Chinese at national Chung Cheng University; Visiting Scholar at EHESS, France; Committee Member of iACL, USA; and Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna, Austria. Among his 20-plus books are Yuyan Fengge yu Wenxue Yunlü (Language Style and Literary Prosody, 2001) and a standard textbook on historical Chinese phonology, Shengyunxue (1991, 1992). Deng Xiaohua is distinguished Professor at Fujian University of Technology and Professor at Xiamen University. His research fields include linguistic anthropology, Chinese dialects and minority languages, comparative linguistics, cultural heritage, ethnic groups, and regional culture. Among his many publications are Language, Ethnicity and Evolution: Tradition and Transcendence of Linguistic Anthropology (2019) and Classification of Languages and Dialects of China (2009), co-authored with William Shiyuan Wang. Imre Galambos is Professor of Chinese at the University of Cambridge. He is a specialist of Chinese manuscripts, mainly working on materials from sites along the historical Silk Road. He has published extensively on Chinese and Tangut manuscripts from dunhuang and Khara-khoto, exploring both their physical aspects and the translations of Chinese texts into other languages. Paul R. Goldin is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Rituals of the Way: The Philosophy of Xunzi (1999), The Culture of Sex in Ancient China (2002), After Confucius: Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy (2005), xii

Contributors

Confucianism (2011), and The Art of Chinese Philosophy: Eight Classical Texts and How to Read Them (2020). in addition, he edited the revised edition of R. H. van gulik’s classic study, Sexual Life in Ancient China (2003), and has edited or co-edited six other books on Chinese culture and political philosophy. Jing Hu is Lecturer in Foreign Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research is focused on Chinese writing reform and modern Chinese literature. She has an extensive publication record, including a co-edited anthology, Appreciating Classics of Modern Chinese Literature (2023), and her translations in Ming Dynasty Tales: A Guided Reader (2022). Fengyuan Ji is Associate Professor in the School of Culture, History, and Languages at the Australian national University. She is the author of Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao’s China (2004), the editor of two other books, and the author of many papers on Chinese political discourse. She is currently researching China’s “linguistic landscape”. Liwei Jiao is Senior Lecturer of East Asian Studies at Brown University. His research interests include Chinese phraseology, lexicography, language and culture, and language instruction. His publications include a series of Routledge dictionaries, such as 500 Common Chinese Idioms, 500 Common Chinese Proverbs and Colloquial Expressions, and A Cultural Dictionary of the Chinese Language. He has also contributed three entries, including one on Yuen Ren Chao, to the Encyclopedia of China (third edition, 2022). Zhuqing Li is Visiting Associate Professor in Brown University’s department of East Asian Studies. She also heads the University Library’s Center for Library Exploration for East Asia. Her publications include three books on Fuzhou and Minnan dialects, one on Chinese returnees, and a memoir about lives in China and Taiwan. Liu Kang is Professor of Chinese Studies at duke University and Elected Member of the Academy of Europe. He is the author of 12 books and writes widely in scholarly journals in both English and Chinese on issues ranging from contemporary Chinese media and culture, globalization, to Marxism and aesthetics. Victor H. Mair is Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. His current research is focused on the Yijing (Classic of Changes) and Middle Vernacular Sinitic. He is the author of many works on dunhuang popular narratives and is the editor of The Columbia History of Chinese Literature. Edward McDonald (The Compleat Wordsmith) has taught linguistics and Chinese language at universities in Australia, China, and new Zealand. Recent publications include Learning Chinese, Turning Chinese: Challenges to Becoming Sinophone in a Globalised World (2011), Grammar West to East: The Investigation of Linguistic Meaning in European and Chinese Traditions (2020). Shen Guowei is Retired Professor at the Faculty of Foreign Language Studies and Research Fellow at the institute of oriental and occidental Studies at Kansai University in Japan. Currently he is distinguished Professor at Zhejiang gongshang University School of oriental Languages and Philosophy. His research interests include lexicology, comparative studies of Chinese and xiii

Contributors

Japanese lexicons, pedagogy of Chinese vocabulary instruction, and the history of lexical exchange between China and Japan during modern times. His major publications in the past five years include “Research on Two-Character Words in Modern Chinese: Language Contact and the Evolution of Chinese in Modern Times” and “Exchange of new Words: Language interactions between China and Japan during the Modern Era”, among others. William Shiyuan Wang (王士元), Chair Professor, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University of California at Berkeley; Honorary Professor, Peking University. His research interests include language structure, typology, and change; human and language evolution; neuroscience, cognitive decline. He has 400-plus publications. google Scholar lists over 12,000 citations, h-index = 54. His representative works include “Competing Changes as a Cause of Residue”, Language (1969) 45: 9–25, “Three Windows on the Past” (1998), and “Language and the Brain in the Sunset Years” (2019). Zhengdao Ye is Senior Lecturer at the School of Literature, Language, and Linguistics, Australian national University. Her teaching and research interests encompass meaning, culture, and translation. She is the editor of The Semantics of Nouns (2017) and the co-editor of Happiness and Pain across Languages and Cultures (2016). Fangyuan Yuan is Professor of Chinese at the United States naval Academy. Her research interests include L2 Chinese acquisition, form-focused instruction, and task-based language teaching. She has authored two monographs and three textbooks, co-edited two books, and published more than 30 book chapters and journal articles. Zheng Wei is Professor of Chinese Linguistics at East China normal University. His current research interest focuses on Chinese historical phonology, languages, and writings used by the minorities in Southwest China, among others. He has written and edited several monographs, including Chinese Historical Phonology: Methods and Practices (2018), Retention and Renovation: The Academic History of Philology in China and the West (2021), and Selected Essays on the Transliteration of Chinese Characters by Japanese Scholars (2022). Zhou Jian is Professor of Chinese at the Center for Linguistic Sciences, Beijing normal University. His research interests include Chinese lexicology, lexicography, and the history of Chinese. He serves as Vice President of the China Association for Lexicography and as Chairperson of the Subcommittee on Phraseology within the national Technical Committee for Language Standardization. He has published over 160 journal papers and has authored, co-authored, or edited more than 38 books. Among his notable books are Cihui Lun (on Lexicon) and Hanyu Cihui Yanjiu Bainian Shi (A Century of Chinese Lexical Studies).

xiv

ACKnoWLEdgMEnTS

The editor would like to express sincere gratitude to Professor david Crystal for his unwavering support and valuable suggestions during the early stages of this book’s development. Special thanks also go to Ms. Emily Rust, a diligent student from Brown University, for meticulously checking the consistency of formats and translating Chapter 10, “Colloquialisms and Chinese Culture”, from Chinese into English. Additionally, heartfelt appreciation is extended to Ms. dorothy Behre of the American Mandarin Society for skillfully translating Chapter 8, “distinguishing Between Early Modern and Modern Chinese Lexicons: Mandarin’s Journey to Becoming a national Language”, from Chinese into English. We are profoundly indebted to the contributors of this book, whose remarkable scholarship and dedication shone even amid the challenges posed by the unexpected global pandemic that persisted from 2020 to 2023. They have made this book possible. Professor Zhengzhang Shangfang (1933–2018) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Professor Jia Jane Si (1978–2020) of Fudan University agreed to contribute to this volume. Their kindness will be fondly remembered. Last but not least, the editor would like to sincerely thank the editors at Routledge, Andrea Hartill and iola Ashby, for their patience and support throughout the process of this book.

xv

INTRODUCTION Liwei Jiao

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Language and Culture (RHCLC) drew inspiration from The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture (Sharifian 2015) not only in its conception but also in its title. The RHCLC aims to be a multidisciplinary survey of the relationship between Chinese language and culture, focusing primarily on its historical perspective due to the length and complexity of the Chinese language and culture. In the following, we embark on an exploratory journey into the depths of Chinese language and culture.

1.

Chinese Language and Culture 1.1

The Importance of Writing

Language plays a vital role in Chinese culture. First, take writing for instance. Throughout much of Chinese history, a common language and standardized pronunciation were lacking, and Chinese characters played an indispensable role in preserving and transmitting Chinese culture. In the book Huainanzi (淮南子), edited by Liu An (刘安, 179 bce–122 bce), the King of Huainan during the Western Han dynasty, it is mentioned, “When Cangjie created characters (仓颉造字), then heaven rained millet and ghosts cried at night (天雨粟, 鬼夜哭)”. This alludes to the mysterious nature of writing. Writing is also considered sacred, and there has always been a tradition of cherishing paper with writing on it (敬惜字纸). The famous line by Su Shi (苏轼, 1037–1101), “人生识字忧患始” (Misery of life starts at literacy), has become a common maxim among the people. When expressing ideas through writing, one must be meticulous and careful. Confucius, while compiling the Spring and Autumn Annals (春秋), employed a specific writing style called 春秋笔法 (the Style of the Spring and Autumn Annals). It involved a roundabout way of talking about disgrace of one’s superiors, mistakes of a virtuous people, and illness of one’s parents all in a roundabout way (为尊者讳耻, 为贤者讳过, 为亲者讳疾). For instance, in the 28th year (i.e., 632 bce) of Duke Xi of Lu (鲁僖公) in the Spring and Autumn Annals, there is a sentence that says, “天王狩于河阳” (King Xiang of Zhou 周襄王 went hunting in Heyang). However, it actually meant that Duke Wen of Jin (晋文公) summoned King Xiang of Zhou to endorse his hegemony. Later, histories often used the term “狩” (hunting) euphemistically to indicate that an emperor was being manipulated. DOI: 10.4324/9781315167800-1

1

Liwei Jiao

For example, in the History of Song, Emperors Hui and Qin of Song were taken captive and forced to go to the Great Jin 大金 capital in the north. The orthodox history described this as “二圣北 狩” (the two sages [emperors] went hunting in the north). Similarly, in the Qing dynasty’s history book Gangjian Yizhi Lu (纲鉴易知录) Volumes 46 and 47, the phrase “**年, 春正月, 帝在房 州” (in the year of . . . in the lunar January in the spring, the emperor was in Fangzhou) was duly mentioned 12 times. In reality, Emperor Zhongzong of Tang, Li Xian, was held under house arrest by Wu Zetian in Fangzhou. When pursuing the Complete Library in Four Sections (四库全书), it is evident that whenever a Qing emperor before Emperor Qianlong is mentioned, his name is written in a new column and taller than the normal characters. This distinction is even more prominent in The Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty (清实录) and The Imperial Code of the Qing Dynasty (清会典). Even the term “列祖列宗” (ancestors and forefathers) must be split into two parts, that is, 列祖 and 列宗, and listed separately, higher than the normal column. This meticulousness about wording went too far. The Ming and Qing dynasties were notorious for their literary inquisitions (文字狱). In contemporary times, the regulation and censorship of language are not much weaker than in ancient times. For example, “the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation” is expressed as 中华民族伟大 复兴 in Chinese, not 中华民族的伟大复兴, which is nevertheless more grammatically rigorous by adding the possessive particle 的 (de).

1.2

The Importance of Sounds

Language and culture are inherently intertwined. When Chinese people read ancient regulated verse, there is a strong sense of rhythm, with the meter often being 2–3 or 2–2–3. Ancient poetry requires rhyming, and an interesting phenomenon is that the rhymes in popular famous poems today are mostly relatively easy. For example, in Li Bai’s poem “静夜思” (Homesick in Bright Moonlight), the rhyme is “ang”. The pronunciation of this rhyme is nearly the same across the country, which contributed to popularity of the poem. Wang Zhaopeng et al. conducted a controversial but pioneering and interesting study on the popularity rankings of Tang poems (Wang and Sun 2008; Wang et al. 2011). Upon quick inspection, it becomes evident that the main vowel in the finals of the rhymes is the schwa /ə/, with the finals including “ou, en, an, ang, eng, em”, and others. Entering tones are generally harder for most northern Chinese people to differentiate and produce, and they disappeared in most Mandarin dialects. As expected, the first popular poem rhymed with entering tones is ranked 17th on the previously mentioned list. The poem is Liu Zongyuan (柳宗元)’s “River Snow” (江雪), and the rhyming characters are 绝, 灭, 雪. Chinese official histories have recorded few language phenomena, but they have documented the role of folk songs, especially children’s nursery rhymes, in defaming individuals and subverting political regimes. For instance, during the Northern Qi dynasty (北齐), the renowned general Hulü Guang (斛律光, 515–572) repeatedly defeated the Northern Zhou (北周) army. Unable to defeat Hulü Guang in battle, the Northern Zhou resorted to trickery. In 572, General Wei Xiaokuan (韦孝宽, 509–580) enticed the children in the capital of the Northern Qi to sing a children’s nursery rhyme that subtly hinted at Hulü Guang’s ambition to usurp the throne. The lyrics went, “百升飞上天, 明月照长安” (100 liters ascend to the sky, the bright moon shines over Chang’an); 100 liters is equal to one 斛, and the bright moon shines 光. As a result, Hulü Guang was soon executed by the king. Throughout most of ancient China, systematic naming taboos existed, and these taboos were often related to sound. For example, to avoid the syllable “long” (隆) in Emperor Xuanzong of

2

Introduction

Tang’s personal name, “李隆基”, the 隆庆坊 (Longqing Ward) in Chang’an during the Tang dynasty was renamed Xingqing Fang, with 隆 being changed to 兴. Similarly, to avoid the syllable “shi” (世) in Emperor Taizong of Tang’s personal name (李世民), the bodhisattva 观世音 became 观音, with 世 being removed from this name. Rhetorical devices based on sounds have persisted into contemporary times and are increasingly valued. Due to the relatively simple syllable structure of Standard Mandarin, it is easy to create tongue twisters and catchy sentences. For example, Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982), the father of modern Chinese linguistics, was a master of puns and tongue twisters. His famous language play “Shi Shi Shi Shi Shi” (施氏食狮史, Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den) consists of 94 syllables with the same pronunciation “shi”.

1.3

Chinese Culture 文化

The term 文化 (or to be exact, the form of “文化”) appeared in Liu Xiang’s (刘向, 76 bce–6 bce) Shuo Yuan (说苑, Garden of Stories) Volume 15 指武 (Depending on Military Strength), and the context is “圣人之治天下也, 先文德而后武力. 凡武之兴, 为不服也. 文化不改, 然后加诛. 夫 下愚不移, 纯德之所不能化, 而后武力加焉” (A wise ruler governs the country with culture and virtue as the first means and then force. Whenever force is used, it is because of the presence of disobedient people. Force is only used when cultural education [wenhua] fails—translation quoted from https://www.chinesethought.cn/EN/shuyu_show.aspx?shuyu_id=4664). The meaning of “文化” in this context is clear: to use the Chinese ritual and music system (礼乐) to shape the minds of outliers through education (教化). The opposite of “文化” is “武力” (force). The word “文” has an immensely positive connotation in Chinese culture. Yi Zhou Shu (逸周书) Volume 54 Shifa (謚法, the order of posthumous names) summarizes the following virtues and achievements as qualifications for the posthumous title “文”: 经纬天地 (capable of planning world affairs), 道德博厚 (possessing broad and profound virtue), 勤学好问 (diligent and inquisitive in learning), 慈惠爱民 (kind and loving), 愍民惠礼 (merciful and courteous), 锡民爵位 (willing to bestow titles of rank on the people). Uffe Bergeton (2013) found that “metacultural uses of wén referring to the abstract concept of ‘(patterns in) conventionalized behavior’ developed in the Zhànguó period (481–221 bce) from the earlier meaning of ‘awe-inspiringly beautiful’”. As mentioned in the paragraph preceding the last, the original purpose of “文化” was to educate and shape the minds of outliers. The implementation of “文化” left traces in place names containing 化. According to Daming Xinghuafu Zhi (大明兴化府志, 1503) Volume 1, “(北宋) 太平兴国四年(公元979年), 太宗阅泉福图志, 念游洋洞地险, 思欲以德化之, 乃即其地立兴 化县” (In 979, Emperor Taizong of Song read the atlas of Quanzhou and Fuzhou, considering that Youyang Dong’s land was rugged, he thought to transform the local people with imperial mercifulness, therefore ordered to establish a county named 兴化). Another example is the name of Zunhua (遵化), Hebei, which has this origin: 遵循孔孟之道, 教化黎民百姓, which literally means “to follow Confucian doctrines and shape the minds of the ordinary people” (Zunhua Annals 遵化县志 1990: 36, 河北人民出版社). Since the Eastern Jin (东晋, 317–420), 化 appeared in the place names of prefectures and counties, almost all containing the connotation of 教化 (shaping the mind through education). Suppose a place name containing 化 denotes the place was once 化外之地 (literally “a place inhabited by uncivilized people”). In that case, we can observe the area of 化外之地 by listing all place names containing 化 on a map. Then we can attempt to draw a maximal circle between

3

Liwei Jiao Table 0.1 Twenty-four county-level place names containing “化”. Hebei: 遵化 Zunhua, 隆化 Longhua, 宣化 Xuanhua Neimenggu: 化德 Huade Jilin: 通化 Tonghua, 敦化 Dunhua Heilongjiang: 绥化 Suihua Shandong: 沾化 Zhanhua Jiangsu: 兴化 Xinghua Zhejiang: 奉化 Fenghua, 开化 Kaihua Fujian: 宁化 Ninghua, 德化 Dehua

Hunan: 安化 Anhua, 怀化 Huaihua, 新化 Xinhua Guangdong: 从化 Conghua, 仁化 Renhua, 化州 Huazhou Guangxi: 大化 Dahua Sichuan: 昭化 Zhaohua Qinghai: 化隆 Hualong, 循化 Xunhua Taiwan: 彰化 Zhanghua (Shaanxi: 淳化 Chunhua is excluded because it got its name from a reign title.)

Source: https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/中华人民共和国县级以上行政区列表

Figure 0.1

Place names containing 化 and the sphere of the center of (early) Chinese culture, generated on Google Maps.

the places, which can, in a sense, denote 王化之地 (the sphere of early Chinese culture). The map in Figure 0.1 is only a preliminary endeavor. The 24 places are currently in use, and they are given in Table 0.1. In Figure 0.1, the maximal circle includes the major areas of Henan, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong, Anhui, and Hubei, with a clear indication that Henan is the center of the circle. This is in accordance with the origin places of early Chinese civilization.

1.4

The Relationship Between Chinese Language and Culture

The relationship between Chinese language and culture, in the narrowest sense, can be expressed with this example “爱老虎”. 爱 (love) is an abstract human emotion and can be viewed as a part of culture. 老虎 (tiger) is a Chinese word and can be viewed as a token of language. Then their 4

Introduction

relationship in this regard is “How is the concept of 爱 (love) expressed in the Chinese language?” and “What does 老虎 (tiger) reflect in terms of Chinese culture?” Our observations in this regard are mainly in the chapters in Part III of this book. However, what we discuss in this book goes much beyond the narrowest sense. It can be as broad and far-reaching as the origins of the languages and peoples of China, the examinations of Sinitic-language cultures and communities around the world under the lens of a contemporary view of heterogeneity of all races and languages, the sound and writing systems of the Chinese language and dialects throughout history, and philosophical or political views of some language phenomena. The chapters in Parts I, II, and IV are, in a much broader sense, on the relationship between Chinese language and culture.

2. A Sketch of Research on Chinese Language and Culture 2.1

Early Research on Chinese Language and Culture

In the field of research on the Chinese language and culture, a significant milestone was reached with the publication of a book named 语言与文化 (Language and Culture) written by Luo Changpei (罗常培) in 1950. Due to his profound understanding and research in historical phonology, modern phonetics, dialectology, minority language studies, and general linguistics theory, Language and Culture became an inspiring work and the pioneering book in Chinese cultural linguistics. In fact, the interpretation of language phenomena through culture had already been explored. For instance, 陈寅恪 (Chen Yinke 1950) used the belief system of 天师道 (the Way of Celestial Masters) during the Six dynasties period (六朝) to explain the occurrence of the character 之 (zhi) in many names, such as Kou Qianzhi (寇谦之), Wang Xizhi (王羲之), and Wang Xianzhi (王献之). In his later years, Yuen Ren Chao also showed great concern for the relationship between language and culture. His 1976 work, Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics, included several articles that touched on the relationship between language and culture. He discussed various topics such as the dimensions of the term “信” (fidelity) in the three translation standards “信达雅” of Yan Fu (严复), the relationship between language and logic, and the phenomenon of ambiguity in Chinese. He also addressed the sociopolitical overtones of the Chinese place name “Taiwan” in a short essay. He mentioned that people often use the citation tones when it comes to new place names, but when he was young, he heard “Taiwan” pronounced as Tai2wan, not Tai2wan1. Therefore, he urged for the restoration of the traditional pronunciation of Tai2wan. After the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese linguistic community was eager to join in and learn from the international linguistic community, which was marked by the renaming of the journal 国外语言学 (Linguistics Abroad) in 1980. After several years of study, some Chinese linguists realized that simply adopting foreign linguistic theories could not solve many practical issues specific to the Chinese language. As a result, they began to emphasize the uniqueness of the Chinese language. However, due to the strong desire to start a new venue, the foundation of their work was not always solid. Furthermore, some conclusions were overly generalized, such as “the Chinese way of thinking”, leading to strong opposition as the tide of cultural linguistics rose. This controversy became a major focal point in the Chinese linguistic community for over a decade around the 1990s. The outcome was that even with the publication of the online version of the third edition of 中国大百科全书·语言文字卷 (The Encyclopedia of China, Volume Language and Philology) in 2022, neither 文化语言学 “cultural linguistics” nor 语言与文化 “language and culture” were included as separate entries (with the exception of Luo Changpei’s book Language and Culture). However, this wave of cultural linguistics still inspired Chinese linguists and yielded insightful achievements. For example, there have been studies on dialects and Chinese culture (Zhou and 5

Liwei Jiao

You 1986), loanwords (Shi 1991), and Chinese place names and culture (Li 1998). The culmination of these efforts can be seen in the 1995 article collection 文化语言学中国潮 (The Chinese Tide in Cultural Linguistics), edited by Shao Jingmin (邵敬敏). 张文轩 (Zhang 1991) did a detailed survey of 352 Chinese idioms (成语) about the sequences of the four constituent characters’ tones in Middle Chinese, that is, ping, shang, qu, and ru (平上去入), and found that the metrics of Chinese idioms are astonishingly similar to those of regulated verse (近体诗), which prefer combinations of hetero tones (异序列) and tone sequences accordant with the sequence of 平上 去入, among others. 陳新雄 (Chen Hsin-hsiung 2009) surveyed the literary giant Su Shi’s (苏轼, 1037–1101) poems and explored the relationship between Su Shi’s masterly expression of mood in literature and his knowledge in phonology and poetic meters. 郑张尚芳 (Zhengzhang 1996) used his vast knowledge in Chinese historical phonology and modern dialects and summarized the Wu Chinese (吴语)’s influence on literature. He even researched and concluded that the Bailang Song (白狼歌), which was recorded in the Book of Later Han (后汉书), was based on the pronunciation of ancient Burmese (Zhengzhang 1993). Besides the aforementioned achievements, there are numerous popular subtopics related to language and culture, such as numerals, terms of address, personal names, color words, idioms, proverbs, Chinese characters, rhetorical devices, language play, and language and media, with an abundance of articles exploring these areas.

2.2

More Research on Chinese Language and Culture

Linguists around the world have also contributed greatly to the research on Chinese language and culture, taking the advantages of easy access to the frontier of comparative linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, evolutionary linguistics, and language policy research. William Shiyuan Wang (1998) considers linguistics, archaeology, and genetics as three windows for examining history. Victor Mair (1994) finds that Buddhism played a significant role in the making of the national languages in East Asian countries. In terms of language cognition, James Tai (1985) summarizes that the word order of two sentences connected by event words in Chinese is consistent with the chronological order of the events described in the sentences. Fuhrman et al. (2011) examine the spatiotemporal metaphors of Mandarin speakers and found that they also conceptualize time vertically and use vertical terms to talk about time more frequently than English speakers. Metaphors were extensively employed by philosophers during the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period in China to persuade others and strengthen their viewpoints. Slingerland (2011) utilizes conceptual blending theory, somatic marker theory, and sensorimotor schemas to analyze Mencius and Gaozi’s arguments on human nature and morality through metaphors. This analysis supports the significance of metaphors as the fundamental bearer of philosophical meaning in early China. Yu (2009) conducted a series of studies on conceptual metaphor theory starting from the Chinese character “xin” (heart) and has been active in the Cultural Linguistics International Conference (CLIC) initiated in 2016. On the foundation of the promotion of sinology by European and Japanese sinologists from as early as the nineteenth century, of Christianity by missionaries worldwide to China, of Chinese philosophy by translators, of Chinese studies by figures such as John Fairbank, and of Chinese literature by authors such as Pearl S. Buck (赛珍珠), Lin Yutang (林语堂), Amy Tan (谭恩美), Iris Chang (张纯如), and Ha Jin (哈金), among others, in the last 300 years or so, Chinese studies and Sinophone studies are gaining more and more attention in academia and society. (See Shih 2007; Zhou 1992, for example.)

6

Introduction

In the past decade, the establishment of large-scale corpora, advancements in search tools and capabilities, as well as the abundance of excavated artifacts and texts, have not only expanded the scope of research on language and culture but have also provided new insights into fundamental topics. For example, Huang (2013) explored the invention, debates, and early dissemination of the new word/character “她” (ta) used to refer to women. Cao (2018) used the Wordsmith Tools to investigate the concept of “国民” (guomin) in the late Qing dynasty. He argues that, contrary to the conventional understanding, the term guomin prioritizes obligations of the people to the state to transfer their loyalty from the family to the newly imagined nation-state. A much wider survey and quantitative study of modern Chinese political concepts were done by Jin and Liu (2008). Huo (2021) analyzed the inscription of the word “中國” on three TLV bronze mirrors (博局镜) from the Han dynasty to examine traces of the concept of “大一统” (great unity) in everyday items among the general public. In conclusion, the study of Chinese language and culture has seen significant advancements over the years, evolving from early research that explored the interplay between language and cultural phenomena to more comprehensive investigations encompassing historical, sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and evolutionary aspects. Language and culture has emerged as a prominent field, inspiring scholars to delve into the unique intricacies of the Chinese language and its profound connections to the rich tapestry of Chinese culture. The contributions of linguists from both China and around the world have widened the scope of research, with interdisciplinary approaches shedding new light on fundamental topics. As new technologies and methodologies continue to enrich the field, the understanding of Chinese language and culture will undoubtedly continue to expand, fostering a deeper appreciation of the complexities and significance of this ancient civilization.

3.

Organization of the Chapters

Seventeen chapters in this book are grouped into four parts based on thematic elements. The first four chapters aim to provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of the Chinese language, starting with its most tangible aspects—writing and sounds—while offering historical insights. Politics has played and continues to play a pivotal role in the lives of the Chinese people. Likewise, Chinese philosophy has significantly influenced early China. The four chapters in the second part delve into these aspects, with a focus on the twentieth century. This part is introduced with an exemplary analysis of some philosophical terms from the etymological perspective. The five chapters of Part III address semantics and the cultural application of some key components of the Chinese language, including words, phrases, and discourse. In the final part, the four chapters examine China, its peoples and languages, as well as various Chinese dialects, from a global, transcultural, and historical perspective.

References Bergeton, Uffe. 2013. From Pattern to “Culture”? Emergence and Transformations of Metacultural Wén, University of Michigan, PhD dissertation. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/97850/ bergeton_1.pdf Cao, Qing. 2018. “晚清‘国民’概念考” (A Corpus-Based Investigation of Guomin), 中国社会语言学 (Journal of Chinese Sociolinguistics), 31(2), pp. 13–28. Chao, Yuen Ren. 1976. Aspects of Chinese Socio-Linguistics, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Liwei Jiao Chen, Hsin-hsiung 陳新雄. 2009. “聲韻與文情之關係——以東坡詩為例” (The Relationship between Phonology and Mood in Literature: A Case Study of Su Shi’s Poems), 漢學研究集刊 (Yuntech Journal of Chinese Studies), 8, pp. 1–22. Chen, Yinke 陳寅恪. 1950. “崔浩與寇謙之” (Cui Hao and Kou Qianzhi), 嶺南學報 (Lingnan Journal of Chinese Studies), 11(1), pp. 111–134. Fuhrman, Orly et al. 2011. “How Linguistic and Cultural Forces Shape Conceptions of Time: English and Mandarin Time in 3D”, Cognitive Science, 35, pp. 1305–1328. Huang, Xingtao 黄兴涛. 2013. “‘她’字的故事——女性新代词符号的发明、论争与早期流播” (The Story of ta: The Invention, Debate and Early Dissemination of the New Symbol to Refer to Females), in 東アジアにおける学芸史の総合的研究の継続的発展のために (Higashi ajia ni okeru gakugeishi no sōgōteki kenkyu no keizokuteki hatten no tameni), ed. Suzuki Sadami 鈴木貞美 and Liu Jian Hui 劉建輝, Kyoto: 国際日本文化研究センター (International Research Center for Japanese Studies), pp. 125–160. Huo, Hongwei 霍宏伟. 2021. “镜上中国: 三面汉镜上的‘中国’ 铭文” (China on Mirrors: The Inscription Zhongguo on Three Han Dynasty Mirrors), 中国书法 (Chinese Calligraphy), 384, pp. 129–141. Jin, Guantao 金觀涛 and Liu, Qingfeng 劉青峰. 2008. Guannian shiyanjiu: Zhongguo xiandai zhongyao zhengzhi shuyu de xingcbeng (觀念史研究: 中國現代重要政治術語的形成). Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong. Li, Rulong 李如龙. 1998. 汉语地名学论稿 (Essays on Chinese Place Names), Shanghai: Shanghai Educational Publishing House. Luo, Changpei 罗常培. 1950. 语言与文化 (Language and Culture), Beijing: Peking University Press. Mair, Victor. 1994. “Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages”, Journal of Asian Studies, 53(3), pp. 707–751. Shao, Jinmin 邵敬敏, ed. 1995. 文化语言学中国潮 (The Chinese Tide in Cultural Linguistics), Beijing: 语文出版社 (Language and Culture Press). Sharifian, Farzad, ed. 2015. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Shi, Youwei 史有为. 1991. 异文化的使者——外来词 (Envoys of Other Cultures: Loanwords), Changchun: Jilin Education Press. Shih, Shu-mei. 2007. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Slingerland, Edward. 2011. “Metaphor and Meaning in Early China”, Dao, 10, pp. 1–30. Tai, James H.-Y. 1985. “Temporal Sequence and Word Order in Chinese”, in Iconicity in Syntax, ed. John Haiman, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 49–72. Wang, William Shiyuan 1998. “Three Windows on the Past”, in The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, ed. Victor H. Mair, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, pp. 508–534. Wang, Zhaopeng 王兆鹏 and Sun, Kaiyun 孙凯云. 2008. “Seeking For Classics: The Quantitative Analysis of One Hundred Famous Tang Poems” (寻找经典—唐诗百首名篇的定量分析), Literary Heritage《文学遗产》, 2, pp. 40–52. Wang, Zhaopeng 王兆鹏 et al. 2011. Tangshi Paihangbang 唐诗排行榜, Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company 中华书局. Yu, Ning. 2009. The Chinese HEART in a Cognitive Perspective: Culture, Body, and Language, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton. Zhang, Wenxuan 张文轩. 1991. “并列式成语的四声序列” (The Tone Sequences of Chinese Idioms with a Symmetrical Structure), Journal of Lanzhou University (Social Science), 19(1), pp. 151–158. Zhengzhang, Shangfang 郑张尚芳. 1993. “上古缅歌──《白狼歌》的全文解读” (Old Burmese: A Comprehensive Interpretation of ‘Pai-lang Songs’), Minority Languages of Chinese 民族语文, 1, pp. 10–21; 2, pp. 64–70, 47. Zhengzhang, Shangfang 郑张尚芳. 1996. “吴语在文学上的影响及方言文学” (Wu Dialect’s Influence on Literature and Literature Written in Dialects), Journal of Wenzhou Normal College (Philosophy and Social Science Edition), 5, pp. 20–32. Zhou, Min. 1992. Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Zhou, Zhenhe 周振鹤 and You, Rujie 游汝杰. 1986. 方言与中国文化 (Dialects and Chinese Culture), Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press.

8

PART I

Writing, Sounds, and Culture

1 CHINESE MANUSCRIPT CULTURE Imre Galambos University of Cambridge

Manuscripts are the physical form of texts written by hand, in contrast to other forms produced by other means, such as casting, etching, engraving, stamping, and especially printing. The study of premodern manuscripts largely hinges on what survived and what has been discovered, which entails a degree of arbitrariness. Although writing in China is attested very early, and there are even occasional specimens of brush-written characters on oracle bones going back to the end of the second millennium bce, the earliest examples of significant quantities of handwritten texts come from the Warring States period (475–221 bce). It is from this time that we can talk about manuscript culture, even if it seems likely that texts were commonly written by hand in earlier periods as well. Manuscripts of the Warring States period are chiefly written on slips of bamboo and wood and, less commonly, on silk. Paper gradually replaced these writing materials by the third century ce and became the dominant writing support in China. The wide-scale adoption of printing technology around the beginning of the second millennium led to the appearance of printed books, which, however, did not entirely replace manuscripts. Even though printed books became ubiquitous in society, manuscripts remained in use until modern times. Both print and digital technology inherited many of the visual aspects of manuscripts and thus in some sense can be seen as extensions of that tradition.

1.

Function

Although writing had a wide range of applications, most manuscripts that came down to our times had been produced in four main contexts, namely, religious, administrative, economic, or educational. Often the boundaries between these domains are not clear-cut, and there are a variety of scenarios where two or more of them are at play at the same time. It is obvious, for example, that students’ writing exercises are relevant to any type of textual production in that they are part of basic training on the path to literacy in general. For this reason, administrative and economic texts from the medieval period often survived as students’ copies, and it seems that such educational practices have played a central role in the preservation of many documents. The bulk of the material on wood and bamboo that comes from the first centuries of the imperial period comprise administrative texts. By contrast, the majority of extant paper manuscripts from about the fourth century are of religious content. The large body of Buddhist manuscripts DOI: 10.4324/9781315167800-3

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discovered at sites in northwestern China attests to the ritual significance of such texts in the daily life of local societies. Texts were routinely copied with the aim of accruing merit, gaining protection from harmful influences, and as part of rituals related to the commemoration of the dead. Some state-run sutra-copying projects were massive enterprises resulting in thousands of scrolls being distributed to all corners of the empire. In addition to their karmic efficacy, these scriptures had a standardizing effect in that they served as a model for copies made on a smaller scale or privately. For the most part, the copying of texts happened within the context of a specific social or religious activity, rather than for the sake of being transmitted to posterity. The reproduction of texts was almost never a goal in itself but the means to achieve an objective or effect particular to that context. The act of transcribing sutras, responsible for the production of countless medieval manuscripts, had distinctly nontextual objectives. It aimed to generate merits, atonement, and well-being in the “real” world, which for the communities involved also included potential future incarnations. Some of the manuscripts include colophons, which reveal the motivation for the copying of the text and the wishes of the persons involved. These wishes, often directed at recently deceased parents, children, spouses, or other relatives, commonly revolved around avoiding various realms of hells, being born into a better existence, or just gaining relief from sickness. For this reason, reconstructing the circumstances under which manuscripts were produced is of consequence for understanding their function. This, in turn, may have implications on how we interpret the texts themselves. The function of a text was not fixed but could change according to the concrete situation in which it was used. It goes without saying, for example, that a manuscript copied for the sake of being placed in a tomb or dedicated to the memory of one’s late husband should be approached with that knowledge in mind, rather than purely based on the literal meaning of the text it carried. A related phenomenon is that in many cases manuscripts remained in use beyond the context in which they had been produced, and sometimes even beyond the lifetime of the person responsible for their initial production. Over the subsequent decades and centuries, new users could assign different functions to them, altering them in a variety of ways. They could add notes or additional texts, cut them up into smaller parts, glue them onto other manuscripts as patches, use their blank verso to write unrelated content, or reuse their paper as padding for clothes or shoes. Even if the manuscript remained in its original form, its function could still undergo changes. Thus, a scroll of the sutra copied by a man in memory of his late wife had a different function once becoming part of a monastic library five centuries later, or in the hands of a collector another millennium later. The continuous (re)use of manuscripts over multiple generations and centuries was not an exceptional phenomenon but the usual state of affairs in manuscript culture. In fact, it remains to be the case in our modern society, which attaches a high value to relics of the past.

2. Terminology Today, the English term “manuscript” is used principally to differentiate texts that appear in handwritten form from those that are printed, engraved, or produced in other ways. Many modern libraries have a manuscripts department or section where handwritten materials are kept separately from printed books, typically being treated as more precious. Naturally, the reason for this lies in the uniqueness of manuscripts, as they are often singular exemplars, unlike mass-produced printed books that can, at least in principle, be replaced with identical copies. One of the reasons for this division is that many of the manuscripts that enter public collections are either quite old or related to historical figures, making them not only unique but also exceptionally valuable. Yet 12

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there are also many manuscripts with copies of well-known texts, sometimes relatively recent, and these copies are usually considered as being less valuable. Nonetheless, technically even these are manuscripts on account of having been written by hand. Before the spread of printing technology, manuscripts were simply books, as all of them by default were written by hand. The division into handwritten and printed materials is a later development aimed at differentiating between these two basic modes of production. Accordingly, in most Western languages the word for “manuscript” simply references their handwritten quality. In many European languages (e.g., French, Italian, or English), the word derives from Latin manuscriptus (from manu “by hand” and scriptus “written”), and the same structure resurfaces as a calque in other languages (e.g., German Handschrift, Russian рукопись, Hungarian kézirat, Estonian käsikiri). While in theory this term is relatively neutral and designates any type of document produced by hand, in practice its usage is more restricted. It typically includes texts on soft writing support, such as paper or parchment, excluding those written on wall, stone, bricks, metal, and other hard material. Graffiti and other types of writings on hard surfaces are typically not considered manuscripts, even if they are inscribed by hand.1 Interestingly, there is no exact equivalent for the Western concept of “manuscript” in China and East Asia. The term used for handwritten books typically depends on the context, and different designations were in use for specific kinds of materials at various stages in Chinese history. The bamboo and wood slips of early China are generally referred to as zhujian 竹簡 or mujian 木簡, whereas those on silk as boshu 帛書.2 The term jianbo 簡帛 includes both the slips and silk and thus could be understood as a general term for manuscripts but only for those from early China. Paper manuscripts, such as those found in Dunhuang, are commonly called juanzi 卷子 (scroll) or xiejuan 寫卷 (copied scroll). In the early decades of Dunhuang studies, they were often called Tangjuan 唐卷 (Tang scroll), but as it became clear that many of them did not actually date to the Tang period, other terms came into use. Another problem was that terms with the word juan 卷 in them referenced the scroll form and were not applicable for a large portion of manuscripts in other forms, such as booklets, concertinas, pothi leaves, loose sheets, and smaller fragments. From about the 1970s, but especially in the past decade, the term xieben 寫本 (lit. “copied book”) came into wider usage as a generic term for manuscripts. This was originally a Japanese word (i.e., shahon 写本) and had the advantage of being sufficiently generic with regard to the physical form of the book.3 The term, however, is only used for paper manuscripts and does not include those on silk and bamboo from early China. Manuscripts of the Ming-Qing period are, once again, usually designated with other terms. Among the common ones are chaoben 抄本 (copied book) and shouchaoben 手抄本 (handcopied book), which are nonspecific terms for manuscripts, sometimes also used in reference to earlier periods (e.g., manuscripts from Dunhuang and Turfan). Yet these terms have a connotation of informal copying and do not seem to be appropriate for books produced as part of elite literati culture or under imperial patronage. A modern term for a manuscript in the sense of a yet to be published piece of work, or a writer’s autograph text, even if it is typed, is yuangao 原稿 (J. genkō) or gaozi 稿子.4 The preceding are modern terms which may or may not coincide with how people referred to their manuscripts in their respective time periods. As books before the spread of printing were by default written by hand, there would not have necessarily been a specific word to distinguish them from other types of books. In general, early modern and modern Chinese bibliographical scholarship chiefly focused on printed books, within the framework of the highly sophisticated field of banbenxue 版本學 (lit. “study of editions”). As this discipline was devoted to printed editions, it could not be directly applied to the large body of ancient and medieval manuscripts discovered 13

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in the course of the twentieth century. Instead, scholars gradually began to combine traditional philological methods with newly developed analytical tools and those adopted from Japanese and, to a lesser degree, Western scholarship to study this new body of material. This is a process that is still ongoing.

3.

Geographical Scope

It is also useful to consider the geographical boundaries of Chinese manuscript culture as they do not match the area known to us as China today. From the second half of the first millennium ce, Chinese texts rapidly spread beyond the borders of the Chinese states to various regions of East and Central Asia.5 Along with the Chinese script, China’s neighbors imported, copied, wrote, and printed books written in literary Chinese. Besides Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, the three main regions commonly mentioned in connection with the adoption of the Sinitic writing system, the script was also used by the Uyghurs, Khotanese, Khitans, Tanguts, Jurchen, and the Bai people of the Nanzhao kingdom. In addition, newly created sinoform scripts (e.g., Khitan 契丹, Jurchen 女真, Tangut 西夏, Old Zhuang 古壮字, Vietnamese Chữ Nôm 𡨸喃, Japanese kana 仮名) either derived directly from Chinese characters or received inspiration from them. The spread of Chinese Buddhism played a vital role in this textual expansion, although religious texts were by no means the only ones adopted into a foreign environment. Confucian classics, historical works, primers, poetry, and a variety of technical manuals (e.g., medical, pharmacological, military, divinatory) all became part of a shared written world that stretched from the Japanese archipelago to the Central Asian oases cultures along the edges of the Taklamakan Desert.6 As a result, manuscripts written in these scripts and languages followed their Chinese prototypes in nearly all aspects. As the extant material in Japan, Korea, and sites along the historic Silk Roads demonstrates, the spread of manuscripts led to the development of native written traditions. Even though in some countries the manuscripts with Chinese texts to this day constitute a vital part of national identity, an argument could be made that are an extension of Chinese manuscript culture. Japanese Buddhist scrolls of the Nara period, for example, are in many respects very similar to those produced in the Tang Empire.7 Similarly, the production of Chinese manuscripts among the Tanguts, Khitans, Jurchens, and Uyghurs did not stop even after the development of native scripts but remained an integral part of local textual traditions. Unsurprisingly, terminology was often adopted together with the manuscripts and in some cases continues to be used to this day. Although the Central Asian branches of this shared world of Sinitic texts gradually diminished around the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), Chinese book culture remains part of the local traditions of East Asia. The foremost example in this context is Japan, where the Chinese script and Chinesestyle manuscripts remain an important part of the culture. Possibly, this is also the reason why Japan has preserved the largest number of medieval Chinese manuscripts outside of China.

4.

Manuscript Discoveries

Most manuscripts from before the Song period did not come down to us as part of monastic libraries or inherited collections. Instead, the bulk of this type of material comes from archaeological discoveries of the past century or so. By contrast, a substantial number of medieval Chinese manuscripts, and early copies of those, survive in Japanese collections and temple libraries. Among the largest and most important collections of early manuscripts are the recently discovered holdings of the Nanatsu-dera 七寺 temple in Nagoya and the Amanosan Kongōji 天野山金剛寺 temple near 14

Chinese Manuscript Culture

Osaka. Although these are for the most part manuscripts copied in Japan, they often preserve now lost versions of Chinese texts.8 There are several well-known manuscript finds from before the modern period. Among these is the second century bce discovery of a series of ancient texts inside the wall of the former residence of Confucius. The texts included the Shangshu 尚書, Lunyu 論語, Liji 禮記, and Xiaojing 孝經, all written in archaic characters (guzi 古字) or the so-called tadpole script (kedouwen 科斗文) from before the Qin period (221–206 bce).9 Another well-known discovery was done in 279 ce by tomb robbers, who dug up thousands of bamboo slips from the tomb of King Xiang of Wei 魏襄 王 (r. 318–296 bce).10 Modern discoveries of manuscripts began at the turn of the twentieth century in the northwestern part of China, a region that traditionally served as the frontier zone or, at other times, lay beyond the border of Chinese states. The rich finds in this liminal zone are in striking contrast with the dearth of manuscripts found in Central China. It is often pointed out that the reason why the ancient Silk Road sites yielded so many manuscripts is because the desert climate of the region was beneficial for their preservation. Yet the large body of medieval manuscripts preserved in Japan, a region with an extremely humid climate, suggests that there might be other reasons at play as well. It is probably not a coincidence that both Northwest China and Japan are located on the periphery of the Chinese cultural sphere and that peripheries tend to be more conservative in preserving cultural elements and artifacts than the center. European and Japanese expeditions to Xinjiang and Gansu played a key role in the acquisition of manuscripts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a race for manuscripts and antiquities that developed as an offshoot of the Great Game, the political rivalry between Russia and Britain in Central Asia. A rich body of materials was also excavated or purchased at sites along the northern edge of the Tarim Basin by a series of German and Japanese expeditions. The majority of the texts were in Chinese, Tibetan, and Old Uyghur, but there were at least two dozen other languages represented. Excavations in the region of Turfan and other parts of Xinjiang continue to yield manuscripts even today, gradually growing the corpus. One of the most influential finds was the discovery of tens of thousands of mainly Buddhist manuscripts in a walled-off chamber (known today as the “library cave”) at the Mogao Caves near the city of Dunhuang in Gansu province. The cave was found around 1900, but it was only after the visit of M. Aurel Stein (1862–1943) and Paul Pelliot (1878–1945) in 1907 and 1908, respectively, that the manuscripts became known to the outside world. In the following years, most of the manuscripts were acquired by foreign scholars and explorers, as a result of which, the contents of the library cave are now scattered around the world. The most important collections are in Britain, France, Russia, Japan, and China. The significance of this body of texts can hardly be overestimated, and it had a major impact on the development of a range of fields, including Chinese and Central Asian history, linguistics, classical philology, Buddhist studies, and art history.11 Another important episode in the race for manuscripts was the 1908–1909 excavation of thousands of Chinese and Tangut books at the desert ruins of Khara-khoto (Heishuicheng 黑水城) in Inner Mongolia by the Russian expedition of Pyotr K. Kozlov (1863–1935). In a large Buddhist stūpa outside the city walls, members of the expedition found thousands of printed and handwritten books in Chinese, Tangut, and Tibetan. They shipped the spoils to St. Petersburg, where they remain to this day. Subsequent excavations at the ruins, as well as other sites in Ningxia, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia, yielded additional texts. The study of the Tangut texts led to the decipherment of the Tangut script.12 During his expeditions, Stein also excavated Han dynasty administrative documents on wood slips at the ruins of ancient watchtowers near the city of Dunhuang, as well as in the 15

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Etsin-gol region of Inner Mongolia. The Sino-Swedish Expedition of 1927–1935 led by Sven Hedin (1865–1952) recovered over 10,000 additional slips. In the 1970s, Chinese archaeologists conducted further excavations in this region, more than doubling the number of unearthed documents. The documents, which were in the tens of thousands, are known today collectively as the Juyan 居延 manuscripts after the Chinese name of the region.13 The beginning of the 1970s marked a period of intense archaeological activity in China, yielding a series of important manuscript finds. In 1972, nearly 5,000 bamboo slips were found at Yinqueshan 銀雀山 (Shandong province) inside two tombs dated to the second half of the second century bce. The texts on the slips included military and divination texts (e.g., Sunzi bingfa 孫子兵 法, Sun Bin bingfa 孫臏兵法, Liutao 六韜), which provided insights into the transmission of these texts. The following year, in 1973, archaeologists came upon a spectacular collection of silk manuscripts inside a tomb at Mawangdui 馬王堆 near Changsha 長沙 (Hunan province). The tomb dated to 168 bce and contained several known texts (e.g., Laozi 老子, Yijing 易經, Zhanguoce 戰 國策) and some unknown but important ones (e.g., Wushi’er bingfang 五十二病方). While some of the manuscripts dated from the Western Han period (206 bce–9 ce), others were possibly as early as the Warring States period. Since then, the field of Chinese archaeology has made enormous advances, and it is impossible to list all of the manuscript discoveries here. Among the most spectacular finds from early China were the Qin-dynasty bamboo slips from Shuihudi 睡虎地 (Hubei province, 1975), the Warring States bamboo slips from Guodian 郭店 (Hubei province, 1993), and the Qin bamboo slips from Liye 里耶 (Hunan province, 2002). Apart from excavated documents, important collections of bamboo slip manuscripts were also acquired from the antique market by leading museums and universities. The newly emerging material has generated great interest among scholars, resulting in a wealth of research.14

5. 5.1.

Physical Form

Bamboo and Silk Manuscripts

The physical format of Chinese manuscripts and their writing support has changed considerably over the two and a half millennia of their attested history.15 During the Warring States and the QinHan periods, texts were generally written on slips of bamboo or wood, which were tied together into a continuous surface using a cord at two or three places along their length. It is believed that the character ce 册 (used for the word denoting a piece of writing) derives from the graphic image of such slips tied together. To keep the cord in place and to prevent the slips from sliding out of the book, often small notches were carved into one side of the slips. The notches also provided space for the cord looping around the slips and ensured that there were no gaps between them. The horizontal cords, perpendicular to the row of vertical slips, must have been an essential part of the book design. Apart from rare cases, the cords holding the slips together have either completely disintegrated or remain only as traces. As a result, archaeologists typically find the slips scattered, and it is always a challenge to piece these together in the correct order. A relatively recent realization is that the person preparing the slips cut or drew a slanted line across the back of the slips, providing a visual clue for the correct order of the slips. This may have been done on the outer surface of the bamboo culm before slicing it up vertically into individual strips and treating those to prepare the surface for writing. The slanted line then served as a guide for tying the slips together in the correct sequence, and they are just as invaluable today for the same purpose. A set of slips originating from 16

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the same culm may have functioned as a codicological subunit within a manuscript, as longer books would have consisted of several such sets.16 The complete bamboo book was then rolled up or folded. The other medium for writing in early China was silk. Findings of silk manuscripts are much rarer than those on bamboo and wood, and this is generally attributed to silk being much more expensive than writing support made from more commonly available material. While this assumption may hold true for most cases, we should also acknowledge that besides the generic availability of the material itself, there were other factors (e.g., craftsmanship and scribal competence) that must have played a role in determining the value of a manuscript. An exquisitely produced bamboo-slip manuscript may have been just as expensive as some silk manuscripts. It is undeniable, however, that only a few silk manuscripts survive from early China, in contrast with the multitude of wood and bamboo slips. Silk manuscripts form a continuous writing surface on a soft surface, which became the primary type of books with the spread of paper, lasting into the modern age. At the same time, we should remember that the move to a soft writing support was a later development, and at the time, silk was probably not the dominant medium for writing. It is true, however, that many of the codicological features of paper scrolls were inherited from silk manuscripts. Among the more conspicuous ones is the use of ruling for dividing the writing surface into vertical columns.

5.2.

Scrolls

With the spread of paper as the medium for writing in the first centuries of the Common Era, the scroll gradually became the dominant form of manuscripts. There were, of course, smaller sheets of paper which were folded or kept unfolded, but longer texts were invariably shaped as scrolls. The scroll consisted of rectangular sheets of paper glued together into a continuous writing surface. We may notice the analogy with the single-culm codicological subunits of bamboo-slip manuscripts, which could similarly be joined into a longer manuscript. The end of the scroll, that is, the left side of the last sheet, was typically beveled so that the edge of the paper was narrower as it connected to a wooden roller (zhou 軸), which was used as the core support onto which the scroll was rolled. At the beginning of the scroll was often a blank cover sheet, the left edge of which was bent back to form a little pocket that held a thin wooden slat. Attached to this slat was the cord that was tied around the scroll when it was rolled up (Figure 1.1). Although the title of the text appeared at the beginning and the end of the text, it was also written on the leftmost end of the verso, so that it was visible from the outside when the scroll was rolled up.17 Most of the extant manuscripts, however, were of a less formal nature, especially shorter ones, and did not include a roller, a cord, or an outer title. The person who read the scroll unrolled it gradually, at a pace matching the speed of reading, in the meantime loosely rolling up the right-hand part already read. In this manner, the reader would normally have a 40–50-cm stretch of flat surface to look at while moving leftward between the two rolled-up sides. Upon reaching the end, the entire scroll would essentially be rolled up on the right side, around the thin slat. To “close” the manuscript, the reader would have had to roll the scroll back onto the left side so that the roller was once again on the inside and the thin slat on the outside.

5.3.

Pothi Manuscripts

Pothi (fanjia zhuang 梵夾裝) manuscripts reproduce the form of Indian palm-leaf books, but their leaves are made of paper.18 Accordingly, this form is closely connected with the Buddhist tradition 17

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Figure 1.1 The two ends of an 8.7-m-long scroll. Left: the end of the scroll with the wooden roller and the beveled corners of the last sheet; right: the beginning of the scroll with the cover sheet and the wooden slat in the pocket with the binding cord. (Pelliot chinois 2235, Bibliothèque nationale de France)

and is less common for other types of texts. A large number of pothi fragments made of paper were discovered in Tocharian, Sanskrit, and other languages at sites in the Tarim Basin. The Chinese pothi are primarily known from Dunhuang, where they seem to betray a Tibetan influence. This is also seen from the fact that the vast majority of such manuscripts in Dunhuang are in Tibetan, and only a few of them contain Chinese texts. They are mostly undated, but their appearance in Dunhuang is usually associated with the Tibetan control of the region (786–848),19 although it is likely that most of them were produced during the second half of the ninth until the end of the tenth century. In terms of their physical form, Chinese pothi leaves are rectangular sheets of paper, turned with their long side vertically so that the Chinese lines can be read vertically, in contrast to the horizontal orientation of the Tibetan pothi. The leaves typically have one or two holes, which in palm-leaf manuscripts were used for stringing them together into a volume. In Dunhuang, however, the holes were rarely used and in some cases are only drawn, keeping the paper unperforated (Figure 1.2). The leaves often have rounded corners, even though this is not a universal rule. The pothi (together with the booklet) is among the earliest Chinese book forms with pages and is thus one of the earliest ones to occasionally feature folio numbers, which was a device not used in scrolls. It is apparent that some of the concertinas and booklets from Dunhuang have pothi-shaped leaves. In addition, there are also Tibetan manuscripts in the concertina form, which consist of pothi leaves sewn together along their edges. This shows that the pothi as a book form must have had a role in the development of the concertina form. Even though the pothi did not continue as 18

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Figure 1.2 Two adjacent leaves from a pothi manuscript, showing the string hole in the center with a circle drawn around it, as well as the folio number on the top. (Pelliot chinois 3914, Bibliothèque nationale de France)

a Chinese book form, the derivative concertina gradually became one of the most popular forms used for Buddhist texts in East Asia.

5.4.

Concertina

The earliest examples of concertina (jingzhe zhuang 經摺裝, zhezi zhuang 摺子裝; J. orihon 折本) manuscripts are also from Dunhuang, where they are used for both Chinese and Tibetan texts, roughly during the same time span as the pothi. In terms of its structure, the concertina is essentially a scroll folded in a zigzag fashion, in alternating directions. In shape and size, the leaves often resemble those of the pothi, sometimes even including the hole in the center and the rounded corners. Although in Dunhuang there are relatively few concertinas, this form becomes 19

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widespread during the following centuries not only in China but also in other regions of East Asia. It becomes one of the common forms for the so-called precious scrolls (baojuan 寳卷) used in various forms of local religions during the Ming and Qing periods. To this day, the concertina is the primary book form for Buddhist (and Daoist) scriptures, whether handwritten or printed, which remain in daily use in temples throughout East Asia.

5.5.

Booklets

The booklet (codex) is a book form that consists of folded bifolia arranged into a format similar to our modern books. The earliest examples of this form also come from Dunhuang, where around 400 exemplars are known. There are two main types, depending on how the bifolia are attached to each other. The first is the sewn type, in which several bifolia are stacked into gatherings (i.e., quires), which are in turn sewn together along the fold in the middle. The gatherings are also sewn to each other, forming a booklet. Typologically, this form matches the Christian codex and is likely a borrowing from Western book cultures, which probably reached China with Manichaean or Christian scriptures by the Tang period. Because of the close similarity of their structure to the Western books, some scholars have used the term codex for them. In the other main type of booklet in Dunhuang, the folded bifolia are glued together sequentially, each to its neighbor, along a narrow line near the outer side of the fold. Although technically this is a different structure from the sewn type, the two types look very similar and appear in the same period and context. In both types, the four corners of the bifolia are often rounded or beveled. Unlike Western codices, the booklets of East Asia did not have a hard cover and could be easily folded in half. In terms of their content, the booklets usually contained Buddhist texts or educational texts. The contemporary term for them was cezi 冊子 (also written 策子), which later became the generic designation for all books with pages, including the “thread-bound book” (see the next section).20 When neighboring cultures adopted the booklet, they also borrowed the Chinese term for it (e.g., Japanese sasshi, Korean chaekja, Old Uyghur čagsı).

5.6.

Thread-Bound Books

The thread-bound book (xianzhuang shu 綫裝書) is the traditional Chinese book form familiar to us from books before the twentieth century. Their pages are typically very thin, and the text is written on one side only. The bifolia are folded in two and stacked together to form the body of the book. Then they are stab-stitched using several holes along their open side so that the folded (i.e., closed) edges face the outside. In this way, the unwritten side of the sheets is hidden on the inside, essentially invisible to the observer. The front and back covers of the book are relatively soft, and thus, the entire book remains pliable (Figure 1.3). Printed exemplars typically have a cartouchelike slip with the title glued on the left side of the front cover, although in manuscripts the title slip is either absent or is simply written by hand inside a frame. The most common way of stitching the folded sheets together was through four or six holes, which was also the format employed for printed books. The manuscripts, however, could also be stitched in a number of other ways, sometimes through pairs of holes (Figure 1.4). The binding thread itself could also vary, and manuscripts often use paper flattened into a ribbon-like shape or spun into a thread. Especially in Japan, the variations of this type of binding, depending on their size, shape, and function, are categorized as different types of binding. Ultimately, however, they all have double-layered folded leaves turned with their blank sides to the inside, which distinguishes them from other book forms. 20

Chinese Manuscript Culture

Figure 1.3

A Republican-period manuscript in a typical thread-bound form. (Private collection)

Figure 1.4 Nineteenth-century manuscripts in a thread-bound form, with flattened paper acting as the thread. (Gützlaff collection, Leiden University Library)

21

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Historically, this form is known to us from printed books of the Song and especially later periods. Certain features of this form, such as the thin folia inscribed on only one side, appear in a few Dunhuang booklets, suggesting that the earlier codex may have played a role in the development of the thread-bound book. With time, the thread-bound book also spread to other regions in East Asia, where it became one of the most popular book forms. Today, this form is considered the traditional Chinese bookbinding method and is often contrasted with the modern Western-type book. Publishers, therefore, may choose to print classical texts in this form as a “retro” edition, creating a visual link with the much-admired printed book culture of the Song period. The popularity of such editions is a testimony to the extent of cultural symbolism this book form still embodies.

6.

Layout and Punctuation21 6.1.

Layout

Layout refers to the arrangement of the text and images. It is not part of the text itself but is one of the visual devices that aid the reader in navigating through the text and interpreting it. Naturally, layout is by default part of any written text in any time period or region. Among the basic elements of layout is the direction of writing. This is essentially a matter of convention, and theories that explain this in terms of convenience are probably anachronistic.22 As it was already the case with most bronze inscriptions, the text on manuscripts almost always read in vertical columns running from right to left. This direction of writing persisted until the twentieth century when China adopted the Western format of writing horizontal lines from left to right. In manuscripts, there are a few notable exceptions to the traditional pattern, and these could reflect the influence of a nonChinese manuscript tradition.23 A technical device that aided the writing of vertical lines of text in manuscripts is ruling. Ruled lines are already present in the Mawangdui silk manuscripts from the second century bce, and later paper manuscripts featured a very similar system. In manuscripts made of bamboo and wooden slips, the physical shape of the slip had a similar function of guiding the hand of the writer and ensuring that the handwritten lines were straight. In fact, it is possible that the ruled lines on silk and paper manuscripts ultimately derive from a desire to replicate the visual structure of bamboo and wood slips. In bamboo and wood slip manuscripts, the basic layout is formed by the combination of the adjacent vertical slips and the horizontal lines of the thread tying those together. Some manuscripts have a margin, which is achieved by leaving empty space at the top and bottom of the slips. Sometimes the slips have beveled corners, and the narrowed top and bottom ends—together with the zigzagging edge of the tied book—may also function as a margin. In paper manuscripts, the ruling delineates the writing surface into tightly arranged vertical columns for the text and the top and bottom margins. In book forms with pages (i.e., pothis, concertinas, booklets, and thread-bound books), we see the appearance of side margins not only toward the outer edge of the pages but also along the inner one. Indentation and blank space in general are devices that belong to the domain of neither layout nor punctuation but, at the same time, are related to both. Indentation is common in official documents where it helps establish a hierarchy between various divisions of the text.24 The consistent application of indentations articulates the text’s internal structure and helps the reader in finding their way in it. The system may be different from manuscript to manuscript, but even without being entirely consistent it greatly increases the legibility of the text. Indentation is also a common way to separate auxiliary information (e.g., title, name of author or translator, preface or postface, 22

Chinese Manuscript Culture

Figure 1.5

Section of a Sui dynasty scroll (dated 617), showing the condensed way of writing the chapter title and the gāthā lines, in contrast to the continuous text on the left. (Pelliot chinois 2334, Bibliothèque nationale de France)

colophon) that is not part of the core text. Similarly, negative indentation may be used in itemized lists, enhancing transparency, and ultimately enabling the reader to navigate through the entries. Titles at the beginning and the end, chapter titles, and sometimes parts of the colophon are also commonly set apart from the rest of the text by being written in a condensed manner, with characters closely squeezed together. In Buddhist scriptures, condensed text may also be used to display gāthā lines, separated by spaces, setting them apart visually from running text (Figure 1.5).

6.2.

Punctuation

Punctuation was another nontextual device supporting the reader in parsing and interpreting the text. Some punctuation marks were already used in bamboo and wood slips of the Warring States period and have remained a consistent feature of manuscript culture until the modern period, without becoming fully standardized. Their use often seems to be haphazard, and it is clear that in most cases they were optional. One of their main applications was disambiguating potentially confusing sentences or expressions by signaling divisions or connections in the text.25 Quite often, such marks were added long after the production of the manuscript by a person who used it for studying the text. Some of the marks, however, formed part of the text and were not optional. The most important of these was the duplication mark (chongwen 重文) that indicated the repetition of one or more characters without writing them out the second time. It often stood in place of the second syllable of reduplicative words, such as zhongzhong 種種 (various kinds of ), renren 人人 (people; everyone), riri 日日 (every day). Yet the same device could also be used when the second 23

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syllable or word was not syntactically connected to the first one or even when it was part of the next clause or sentence, showing that the mark was a purely graphical device. A special subset of marks used in manuscripts are the set of symbols used for correcting mistakes. These were sometimes added by the writer or copyist during the process of writing or subsequently by a proofreader or a reader. Often these were in a different color, most commonly in red. Among the frequently used marks were those indicating the reversal of accidentally inverted characters and the deletion of redundant ones. When readers read the manuscript, they decoded the marks along with the text, and if they made a new copy, they automatically copied the text in its corrected form without the correction marks.

7.

Into the Age of Print and Beyond

Printing technology made its debut during the first half of the Tang dynasty but became widespread only during the Song period. Therefore, it was certainly not an invention that instantly swept across the realm, culminating in an overnight revolution of book culture. Instead, printed texts continued to be used alongside manuscripts without fully replacing those. The thousands of manuscripts and printed books discovered together at Khara-khoto provide ample evidence to this state of affairs from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Ming and Qing dynasty religious literature (e.g., “precious scrolls”) also include both printed and handwritten books, attesting to the continuity of manuscript production alongside printing. Massive court-sponsored encyclopedias such as the Yongle dadian 永樂大典 (1403–1408) and the Siku quanshu 四庫全書 (1773–1782) were also purposefully completed in handwritten form in an age when printing had already been firmly established as the dominant method of book production. The production of texts by hand also survived in a series of specialized contexts for which printing was impractical or unsuitable. For example, the votive copying of Buddhist or Daoist scriptures, which had played a major role in the production of the vast quantities of medieval manuscripts, persisted as a vital part of religious practices throughout the second millennium ce. In addition, many of the liturgical texts were hand-copied as late as the twentieth century. For obvious reasons, handwriting also remained essential in educational settings, as each student had to write out in their own hand a series of texts on the road to literacy. Other domains in which printing failed to achieve ascendency include letter writing, family collections of cooking recipes and medicinal remedies, genealogies of smaller clans, and personal collections of songs and poetry. The coexistence of print and manuscript before the modern period is also manifested in the practice of mixing printed and handwritten text. Examples of such practice include adding handwritten votive inscriptions onto printed prayer leaves or scriptures, supplementing printed texts with handwritten material, replenishing text missing from damaged printed books (often in a style that emulates that of the original), or even the commonplace habit of punctuating and annotating by hand-printed books. In fact, in many cases the layout of the printed page anticipates such later contributions by leaving wide margins and empty spaces for readers’ input. Therefore, adding handwritten notes to printed books was usually not an ad hoc intervention that damaged the book but an engagement with the book’s content encouraged by the design of the printed page. As it is the case elsewhere in the world, printed books in most cases preserved the layout of manuscripts, trying to produce scrolls and pages that were very similar to how manuscripts looked. As a result, the physical format and the visual layout of manuscripts persisted into the modern age and remain at the core of our modern conception of the book, especially its visual characteristics. In other words, medieval manuscripts laid the foundation for how we see books today. This is just as much true for digital technology, which often imitates the format of physical books. 24

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Notes 1 Interestingly, we call South Asian palm-leaf books manuscripts even though they are technically not written with a pen and ink but etched into the surface of the leaves and the ink is rubbed into the resulting scratch marks. 2 Note that even though the bamboo or wood slips are written on a relatively hard surface, they are typically considered manuscripts, perhaps because the writing surface itself (i.e., a series of individual slips tied together) is pliable. 3 The word shahon in Japan was not an all-inclusive term either, as it excluded administrative and economic documents, as well as personal correspondence, all of which were known as monjo 文書 or, in the case of older material, as komonjo 古文書. 4 This meaning is similarly conveyed in the English usage of the word manuscript, which can indicate a pre-publication version of a piece of writing, even if it is typed or in electronic form. 5 The complex dynamics of the use of the Chinese script and texts throughout East Asia are expertly described in Kornicki (2018). 6 On the shared written world in East Asia, see Kornicki (2018). 7 On the world of Buddhist manuscripts in Nara, Japan, see Lowe (2017). 8 See, for example, Ochiai et al. (1991). 9 Hanshu 30, p. 1706. 10 For early discoveries of manuscripts and inscriptions, see Shaughnessy (1997). 11 Research on the Dunhuang manuscripts is immense. For a convenient introduction to the field, see Rong (2013). 12 For the history of the discovery and the development of Tangut studies, see Galambos (2015: 17–95). 13 See Loewe (1997). 14 For an inventory of early Chinese manuscripts, see Giele (1998–1999); on more recent discoveries, see Venture (2021: 525–543). 15 For an overview of the physical form of silk and bamboo manuscripts of early China, see Venture (2014a, 2014b, 2014c). 16 Staack (2015). 17 On the medieval scroll form, see Drège (2014a). 18 For an overview of the pothi, concertina, and booklet (i.e., codex) forms in Dunhuang, see Galambos (2020: 24–36). See also Drège (2014a, 2014b, 2014c). 19 Fujieda (1966: 26–27); Drège (2014b). 20 The term butterfly binding 蝴蝶裝 is sometimes also used in secondary scholarship, but since this is a Ming-dynasty neologism, I prefer not using it. 21 On layout and punctuation, see also Galambos (2021). 22 Tsuen-hsuin Tsien (2004: 204), for example, attributes the right-to-left direction of the Chinese script to physical and psychological factors, arguing that it is easier to write in this way with a brush. 23 For an example of such a phenomenon, see the group of manuscripts and portable paintings from Dunhuang discussed in Galambos (2020: 139–194). 24 Venture and Drège (2014: 333–334). 25 Richter (2015).

References A. Primary Sources Ban, Gu 班固. 1962. Hanshu 漢書. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.

B. Secondary Sources Drège, Jean-Pierre. 2014a. “Les rouleaux de papier”, in La fabrique du lisible: La mise en texte des manuscrits de la Chine ancienne et médiévale, ed. Jean-Pierre Drège and Costantino Moretti, Paris: Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises, pp. 355–360. Drège, Jean-Pierre. 2014b. “Les ôles chinoises”, in La fabrique du lisible: La mise en texte des manuscrits de la Chine ancienne et médiévale, ed. Jean-Pierre Drège and Costantino Moretti, Paris: Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises, pp. 361–364.

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Imre Galambos Drège, Jean-Pierre. 2014c. “Les reliures en sūtra”, in La fabrique du lisible: La mise en texte des manuscrits de la Chine ancienne et médiévale, ed. Jean-Pierre Drège and Costantino Moretti, Paris: Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises, pp. 365–367. Fujieda, Akira. 1966. “The Dunhuang Manuscripts: A General Description. Part I”, Zinbun, 10, pp. 1–32. Galambos, Imre. 2015. Translating Chinese Tradition and Teaching Tangut Culture: Manuscripts and Printed Books from Khara-khoto, Berlin: de Gruyter. Galambos, Imre. 2020. Dunhuang Manuscript Culture: End of the First Millennium, Berlin: de Gruyter. Galambos, Imre. 2021. “Premodern Punctuation and Layout”, in Literary Information in China: A History, ed. Jack W. Chen, Anatoly Detwyler, Xiao Liu, Christopher M. B. Nugent, and Bruce Rusk, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 125–134. Giele, Enno. 1998–1999. “Early Chinese Manuscripts: Including Addenda and Corrigenda to New Sources of Early Chinese History: An Introduction to the Reading of Inscriptions and Manuscripts”, Early China, 23–24, pp. 247–337. Kornicki, Peter Francis. 2018. Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lowe, Bryan. 2017. Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Loewe, Michael. 1997. “Wood and Bamboo Administrative Documents of the Han Period”, in New Sources of Early Chinese History: An Introduction to the Reading of Inscriptions and Manuscripts, ed. Edward L. Shaughnessy, Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, pp. 161–192. Ochiai, Toshinori, Forte, Antonino, Makita, Tairyô, and Vita, Silvio. 1991. The Manuscripts of Nanatsu-dera: A Recently Discovered Treasure-House in Downtown Nagoya, Kyoto: Istituto italiano di cultura, Scuola di studi sull’Asia orientale. Richter, Matthias L. 2015. “Punctuation, Premodern”, in Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, ed. Rint Sybesma et al., Leiden: Brill. Rong, Xinjiang. 2013. Eighteen Lectures on Dunhuang, trans. Imre Galambos, Leiden: Brill. Shaughnessy, Edward L. 1997. “Introduction”, in New Sources of Early Chinese History: An Introduction to the Reading of Inscriptions and Manuscripts, ed. Edward L. Shaughnessy, Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, pp. 1–14. Staack, Thies. 2015. “Identifying Codicological Sub-Units in Bamboo Manuscripts: Verso Lines Revisited”, Manuscript Cultures, 8, pp. 157–186. Tsien, Tsuen-hsuin. 2004. Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginnings of Chinese Books and Inscriptions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Venture, Olivier. 2014a. “Les pièces de soie”, in La fabrique du lisible: La mise en texte des manuscrits de la Chine ancienne et médiévale, ed. Jean-Pierre Drège and Costantino Moretti, Paris: Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises, pp. 347–350. Venture, Olivier. 2014b. “Les tablettes”, in La fabrique du lisible: La mise en texte des manuscrits de la Chine ancienne et médiévale, ed. Jean-Pierre Drège and Costantino Moretti, Paris: Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises, pp. 351–352. Venture, Olivier. 2014c. “Les rouleaux de lattes de bois et de bambou”, in La fabrique du lisible: La mise en texte des manuscrits de la Chine ancienne et médiévale, ed. Jean-Pierre Drège and Costantino Moretti, Paris: Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises, pp. 353–354. Venture, Olivier. 2021. “Recently Excavated Inscriptions and Manuscripts (2008–2018)”, Early China, 44, pp. 493–546. Venture, Olivier and Drège, Jean-Pierre. 2014. “Ponctuation, balises et autres signes de lecture”, in La fabrique du lisible: La mise en texte des manuscrits de la Chine ancienne et médiévale, ed. Jean-Pierre Drège and Costantino Moretti, Paris: Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises, pp. 331–343.

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2 A CENTURY OF CHINESE WRITING REFORM Victor H. Mair and Jing Hu University of Pennsylvania

Introduction Languages, scripts, and literatures change all the time. This normally happens slowly, but it could take place dramatically when there are great social changes and dynasty replacements. For example, the Meiji Restoration in Japan led to a radical transformation of the Japanese writing system, eventually leading to the current combination of limited use of Chinese characters (汉字, called kanji in Japanese) along with the hiragana and katakana phonetic scripts (syllabaries) and even the romaji alphabet.1 Chinese characters have a long history of more than 3,000 years, counting from the earliest surviving oracle bone inscriptions (甲骨文).2 A handful of characters in these earliest inscriptions are still recognizable today,3 but the structure of most characters has changed over time. For example, the modern, simplified character for horse, 马, is almost unrecognizable in its original form in the oracle bone script: . Characters were standardized under the Qin dynasty (221–207 bce). However, even after the Qin standardization, the style in which characters are written has varied substantially. For example, the character that is now normally written as 回 can also technically be written as 囘, 茴, or 囬, although the latter forms are very rare.4 In addition, just as European languages can be written in a variety of styles (including block letters, cursive, Carolingian, Gothic, etc.), so can Chinese characters be written in regular script (楷书), semi-cursive (行书), cursive (草书), and the older seal script (篆书) and clerical script (隶書). The Han dynasty lexicographer Xu Shen 许慎 (ca. 58–ca. 147) argued that, regardless of their form or style, all characters can be classified into one of five types: pictograms 象形字 (which were originally drawings of something), simple ideograms 指事字 (whose structure suggests their meaning), compound ideograms 会意字 (in which two characters are combined to suggest a new meaning), semantic-phonetic compounds 形声字 (in which part of the character suggests the meaning and part suggests the pronunciation), and phonetic loans 假借字 (in which a preexisting character is used to represent a homonym or near homonym).5 One of the most influential ancient Chinese literary classics is the Analects 论语, the sayings attributed to Confucius and his immediate disciples. The most common expression in this work is “The Master said”, followed in each case by what purports to be a direct quotation. In addition, Analects 15.6 records that Confucius’s disciple Zizhang 子张 was so impressed with a saying by the DOI: 10.4324/9781315167800-4

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Master that he immediately copied it on the sash of his cloak (子张书诸绅). These facts suggest (although they do not prove definitively) that there was a reasonably close relationship between the vocabulary and grammar of the written text of the Analects and the spoken language at the time the text was finalized. However, there are at least 2,000 years from the Analects to the present time.6 The relationship between Classical Chinese, the language of the Analects, and contemporary topolects of Chinese is like the relationship between Latin and contemporary Romance languages like Italian, French, and Spanish. Just as Latin was originally a spoken language but became the language for reading and writing by literary elites in medieval Europe (regardless of what vernacular language they learned on their mother’s knee), so did Classical Chinese become the language of literary elites in later periods in China (and throughout East Asia and Vietnam), even while the vernacular Chinese dialects increasingly diverged from it in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. This made the written language increasingly inaccessible to common people. In addition, the large number of Chinese characters (the Unabridged Chinese Character Dictionary 汉语大字典 lists more than 60,000 characters) makes learning them difficult.7 Consequently, from the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) through the early years of the Republic of China in the 1920s–1930s, many scholars proposed reforms, including replacing Classical Chinese with vernacular Chinese (白话) and even replacing Chinese characters with some phonetic system. So what was the fate of Classical Chinese and Chinese characters?

Vernacular Movements in Imperial China In imperial China, vernacular Chinese was considered unrefined and not suitable for written literature, while Classical Chinese was held to be the standard writing style. However, as early as the Tang and Song dynasties, there were people who opposed writing Chinese in a highly artificial style disconnected from the spoken language. Han Yu 韩愈 (768–824) promoted writing prose (sanwen 散文) that was closer to the spoken language at that time and was against writing in the ornate parallel prose (pianwen 骈文) style. Buddhist monks and nuns (as well as laypersons) in the Tang dynasty told stories or sang songs to attract people, and the lyrics constituted early vernacular literature (one of the most important genres was called bianwen 变文 [transformation texts]). The genre of “recorded dialogues (yulu 语录)” of Chan (Jp. Zen) 禅 Buddhist masters and Song dynasty scholars like Zhu Xi was another form of early semi-vernacular literature. The renowned and erudite polymath Zheng Qiao 郑樵 (1104–1162) noted the deficiencies of the Chinese script. “Texts of narratives 话本” in Song and Yuan dynasties were storytellers’ libretti, which consisted of fictional and historical narratives that were close to ordinary speech. The most famous Chinese drama of the Yuan dynasty was The Western Chamber 西厢记, and the well-known novels in the Ming and Qing dynasties such as Dream of the Red Chamber 红楼梦 and Water Margin 水浒传 were written in vernacular Chinese (at that time). Their popularity helped expose a wide audience to well-written but vernacular Chinese. Jin Shengtan 金圣叹 (1608–1661), a famous writer and commentator at the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Qing dynasty, gained recognition as the earliest and most influential advocate of Chinese vernacular literature. His meticulous and in-depth comments demonstrated that vernacular literature can be compared with classic masterpieces. Since then, vernacular literature has become more popular among scholars. Toward the end of the Qing dynasty, China’s defeats in the Opium Wars (1839–1842, 1856–1860) showed the technological backwardness of China in comparison with the West. Perhaps as a result, there were more scholars who promoted vernacular Chinese. Huang Zunxian 黄遵宪 (1848–1905) wrote in one of his poems in 1868, “I use my hand to write what I say with my mouth. How could 28

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the ancient style confine me? 我手写我口, 古岂能拘牵？” Qiu tingliang 裘廷梁 (1867–1943) wrote in his “On Vernacular as the foundation of reform 论白话为维新之本”, “Value the vernacular and dispense with the Classical”. he also explained that vernacular writing has eight merits. Wang Zhao 王照 (1859–1933) designed the Chinese mandarin alphabet and used it to spell the common speech of the northern people, not Classical Chinese. Chen ronggun 陈荣衮 (1862–1922) was the first person to promote the use of vernacular in publishing newspapers. Many small vernacular newspapers were published starting from that time (Zhou, Z., 46–47). Perhaps the earliest was Meng Xue Newspaper 蒙学报, which began publication in shanghai in 1897. this was part newspaper and part a reading primer for children written in the vernacular language.

The Vernacular Movement After the Qing T

Promoting vernacular language and literature was one of the most important parts of both movements. It was a literary revolution of the era, a movement that aimed to replace scholarly Classical Chinese writing with the vernacular spoken language and cultivate and stimulate new forms of literature. The leading figures of these movements included Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 (1879–1942; who, along with Li Dazhao 李大钊 [1889–1927], later founded the Chinese Communist Party), Hu Shi 胡适 (1891–1962), Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881–1936), Qian Xuantong 钱玄同, (1887–1939) Li Jinxi 黎锦熙 (1890–1978), and female scholars such as Chen hengzhe 陈衡哲 (1890–1976), su Xuelin 苏雪林 (1897–1999), Bing Xin 冰心 (1900–1999), and yuan Changying 袁昌英 (1894–1973). Most of these figures are introduced next. H

In the test of time, however, hu shi’s most lasting and transformative gift to China may well be his elaboration of a theoretical and practical basis for the establishment of the vernacular as the national language for all the people, in contrast to Classical Chinese, which belonged to the small percentage of literati who had mastered it during the previous two millennia and more before his time. naturally, there were other reformers as mentioned previously who were promoting language reform around the same time as hu shi, but his statements concerning the essential 29

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problems that had to be faced and the requisite solutions for overcoming them were the clearest and most systematic program for creating China’s new national language. In 1910, at the age of 19, Hu Shi was selected as a “national scholar” and was sent to Cornell University to study agriculture with funds from the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. In 1912 he switched majors to philosophy and literature. After graduating from Cornell, he went to Columbia to study philosophy under John Dewey, which accounts for his lifelong attachment to the concept of pragmatic evolutionary change. In 1916, while still a student, Hu published the first of three seminal articles on language reform, “The Teaching of Chinese as It Is”:10 I am of the opinion that most of the faults which have been attributed to our language are due to the fact that it has never been properly and scientifically taught. Its critics have been too hasty in their condemnations, and have failed to realize that languages are more conservative than religions and cannot be made and remade by sensational agitations and destructive criticisms. I readily admit that an alphabetical language may have greater advantages than our own language and that the alphabetization of Chinese is a problem worthy of scientific study. But it is highly improbable that we and even our second and third generations will live to see the adoption of an alphabetized Chinese, although we may work for it. In the meanwhile, the teaching of Chinese as it is constitutes a far more urgent problem, because it is the language which records our past and present civilization, which is the only means of inter-provincial communication, and which is the only available instrument of national education. There are a few generalizations which I consider to be of great importance in discussing the problem of teaching Chinese as it is. The first of these is that what we call our literary language is an almost entirely dead language. Dead it is, because it is no longer spoken by the people. It is like Latin in Mediaeval Europe; in fact, it is more dead (if mortality admits of a comparative degree) than Latin, because Latin is still capable of being spoken and understood, while literary Chinese is no longer auditorily intelligible, even among the scholarly class except when the phrases are familiar, or when the listener has already some idea as to what the speaker is going to say. The second generalization is that we must free ourselves from the traditional view that the spoken words and the spoken syntax are “vulgar”. The Chinese word vulgar [here Hu prints sú 俗]) means simply “customary” and implies no intrinsic vulgarity. As a matter of fact, many of the words and phrases of our daily use are extremely expressive and therefore beautiful. The criterion for judging words and expressions should be their vitality and adequacy of expression, not their conformity to orthodox standards. The spoken language of our people is a living language: it represents the daily needs of the people, is intrinsically beautiful, and possesses every possibility of producing a great and living literature as is shown in our great novels written in the vulgate. Hu’s second major statement on language reform, “A Preliminary Discussion of Literature Reform 文学改良刍议”, was published in New Youth in January 1917. In this essay, Hu Shi laid out eight guidelines for effective writing. Following are his guidelines with our explanations: 1. Write with substance (xū yán zhī yǒu wù 须言之有物). By this, Hu meant that literature should contain real feeling and human thought. This was intended to be a contrast to the recent poetry with rhymes and phrases that Hu saw as being empty. 30

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2. Do not imitate the ancients (bù mófǎng gǔrén 不摹仿古人). Hu meant that literature should not be written in the Classical Chinese of long ago but rather in the modern vernacular style of the present era. 3. Respect grammar (xū jiǎngqiú wénfǎ 须讲求文法). Hu did not elaborate at length on this point, merely stating that some recent forms of poetry had neglected proper grammar. 4. Reject melancholy (bùzuò wú bìng zhī shēnyín 不作无病之呻吟). Recent young authors often chose disconsolate pen names and wrote on such topics as death. Hu rejected this way of thinking as being unproductive in solving modern problems. 5. Eliminate old clichés (wù qù làndiào tàoyǔ 务去滥调套语). The Chinese language has always had numerous four-character sayings and phrases (chéngyǔ 成语 or “set phrases”). Hu implored writers to use their own words in descriptions and deplored those who did not. 6. Do not use allusions (bùyòng diǎn 不用典). By this, Hu was referring to the practice of comparing present events with historical events even when there is no meaningful analogy. 7. Do not use couplets or parallelism (bù jiǎng duìzhàng 不讲对仗). Though these forms had been pursued by earlier writers, Hu believed that modern writers first needed to learn the basics of substance and quality before returning to these matters of subtlety and delicacy. 8. Do not avoid popular expressions or popular forms of characters (bù bì súzì súyǔ 不避俗字 俗語). This rule, perhaps the most well known, ties in directly with Hu’s belief that modern literature should be written in the vernacular rather than in Classical Chinese. He believed that this practice had historical precedents and led to greater understanding of important texts. Hu also talked about vernacular literature in this article. He says, Nowadays, there are still people who despise vernacular novels as literary trifles (文学小道). They do not know that the novels of Shi Naian 施耐庵 [the author of Water Margin 水浒传], Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 [author of Dream of the Red Chamber 红楼梦], and Wu Jianren 吴趼人 [author of Bizarre Happenings Eyewitnessed over Two Decades 二十年 目睹之怪现状] are all authentic literature, while parallel prose (pianwen 骈文) and regulated verse are the actual trifles (今人犹有鄙夷白话小说为文学小道者，不知施耐庵、曹雪 芹、吴趼人皆文学正宗，而骈文律诗乃真小道耳). The claim that vernacular fiction is serious literature was uncontroversial in the West, where works like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Melville’s Moby Dick had long been canonized, but such a statement was very revolutionary in China at that time. As critic C. T. Hsia explained, Hu Shi’s article revalued the heritage of the entirety of Chinese literature. Few scholars dared to praise the value of novels as openly as he did before, claiming that Water Margin and West Chamber can be compared with [the poetry of] Li Sao 离骚, [the philosophical writings of] Zhuangzi 庄子, and the Historical Records 史记 [of Sima Qian 司马迁]. (把整个中国文学的遗产重 新估价了，他以前没有几个学者敢像他那样公然表扬小说的价值，声称水浒传、西 厢记足可与离骚、庄子、史记相提并论).11 In April 1918, Hu published a second article in New Youth, this one titled “Constructive Literary Revolution (建设的文学革命论)”. In it, he proposed the slogan “Literature of the national 31

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language and national language of literature 国语的文学, 文学的国语” and simplified the original eight points into just four: 1. Speak only when you have something to say (yào yǒu huà shuō, fāngcái shuōhuà 要有话说, 方才 说话). This is analogous to the first point previously. 2. Speak what you want to say and say it in the way you want to say it (yǒu shéme huà, shuō shénme huà; huà zěnme shuō, jiù zěnme shuō 有什么话, 说什么话; 话怎么说, 就怎么说). this combines points two through six cited previously. 3. Speak what is your own and not that of someone else (yào shuō wǒ zìjǐ de huà, bié shuō biérén de huà 要说我自己的话, 别说别人的话). this is a rewording of point seven. 4. Speak in the language of the time in which you live (shì shénme shídài de rén, shuō shénme shídài de huà 是什么时代的人, 说什么时代的话). this refers again to the replacement of Classical Chinese with the vernacular language. In the same year, in response to hu’s call, Chen Duxiu began publishing New Youth in vernacular Chinese rather than Classical. Chen later stated that “the literary reform atmosphere had been brewing for a long time, but the radical vanguard who first erected this righteous banner (of literary reform) is my friend hu shi” (Zhou 2002: 50). Hu Shi exemplified the principles he laid out for readily comprehensible writing in Chinese by penning his own pellucid prose. Hu Shi wrote his first poem—Butterfly 蝴蝶—in vernacular in 1916, expressing his loneliness and hoping to have more supporters in the early stage of the vernacular movement. In 1920, he published the first vernacular poetry collection in the history of new literature in China, Book of Experimental Poetry 尝试集. It caused heated discussion on the new style of poems. People who were strongly against it include the ancient prose stylist Lin Shu 林纾 (1852–1924), noted scholar Zhang shizhao 章士钊 (1881–1973), and hu Xiansu 胡先骕, a professor at southeast university and the representative of the Xueheng school 学衡派, which defended traditional Chinese culture and Classical Chinese. the Xueheng school was named after a journal, Measurement of Studies (Xueheng school 学衡), which rejected the vernacular language movement. In particular, hu Xiansu described this vernacular poetry collection as “dead literature 死文学12”. In addition, in response to Hu Shi’s “A Preliminary Discussion of Literary Reform”, hu Xiansu published “China Literature Improvement theory 中国文学改良论” in Nan Gao Daily Journal 南高日刊. thus, the dispute between vernacular Chinese and Classical Chinese literature became increasingly fierce. Zhang Shizhao was one of the most influential political commentators in the early Republic of China. he served as the editor of the Establishing the People News 民立报 and The Tiger 甲寅 and published a large number of political articles. The Tiger, a more conservative political journal, was against the vernacular movement, and the majority of the articles in this journal were written in Classical Chinese, which limited its exposure to the Chinese public to a large extent. In response, Li Jinxi and Qian Xuantong founded National Language Weekly 国语周刊, which “welcomes contributions, but doesn’t take classical Chinese”, and publicly declared war on The Tiger. In 1915 Li Jinxi was appointed as a special editor of textbooks of the ministry of education. he advocated changing the “national Literacy Bureau 国文科” into the “national Language Bureau 国语科” to emphasize the importance of written and spoken vernacular Chinese. In 1924, he published New Chinese Grammar 新著国语文法, the first monograph on Chinese vernacular grammar.

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Hu Shi is arguably the greatest prose essayist of the early twentieth century, but Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881–1936) is generally regarded as the greatest Chinese fiction writer of the early twentieth century.13 He never produced a full-length novel, but he wrote numerous memorable short stories and countless essays and letters that had an enormous impact on modern China. Among his most celebrated works are the novella “The True Story of Ah-Q” (A-Q zhengzhuan) and the short stories “Kong Yiji”, “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji), and “My Old Hometown” (Guxiang). Lu Xun was also a deeply learned chronicler and critic of Chinese literature; his Brief History of Chinese Fiction (Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe 中国小说史略) remains authoritative to this day. But Lu Xun was much more than an outstanding littérateur. He was also a trenchant social commentator whose impassioned pleas for reform were instrumental in guiding China’s path toward progress—even for many decades after his death. He made bitterly honest comments on virtually all aspects of Chinese institutions, culture, and customs. Among the subjects that attracted Lu Xun’s attention was the Chinese script. So deep were his feelings about the Chinese writing system that he was reported to have proclaimed shortly before his death, “If Chinese characters do not fade away, China will perish!” (Hanzi bu mie, Zhongguo bi wang 汉字不灭，中国必亡). While this is admittedly a radical formulation of the problem, Lu Xun was by no means the first Chinese scholar to blame the writing system for his nation’s backwardness. Indeed, Lu Xun had been preceded by dozens of individuals from the late Qing period onward who had devised simple and more efficient writing systems, including alphabets, for the various Chinese languages. Lu Xun returned to the subject of the Chinese writing system on numerous occasions throughout his career, but his most sustained and probing examination of the characters is to be found in the remarkable text “An Outsider’s Chats about Written Language” (Menwai wentan 门外文谈). It is both enormously informative and richly entertaining. It should be noted that the first word of the title, Menwai, is multivalent. Among its applicable meanings here are “outdoors” and— with han (man, fellow) understood at the end—“novice, layman, greenhorn”. Since Lu Xun was deeply familiar with Chinese script, its nature, and its history, he was obviously being polite in styling himself a menwai(han). “Menwai wentan” first appeared in the pages of the “Free Discussions” (Ziyou tan 自由谈) supplement of the influential Shanghai newspaper Shen bao 申报, from August 24 through September 1934, under the pseudonym Hua Yu 华狱. This name may literally be rendered as “China’s Prison”, but it is also a perfect homophone for “China’s Language 华语”, a pun that was almost surely in the back of Lu Xun’s mind when he chose it for this particular work. In the article, Lu Xun writes, My surmise is that Chinese language and script all along have not at all coincided. The main reason for this is that the characters are difficult to write, so that the only recourse is to abbreviate somewhat. . . . Writing had its inception among the people, but later it became the exclusive possession of the privileged. . . . In addition to the limitations of social status and economic means, our Chinese characters present another high threshold to the masses: their difficulty. If you don’t spend ten or so years on them, it’s not easy to cross this threshold alone. Those who cross over it are the scholar-officials, and these same scholar-officials do their utmost to make writing as difficult as possible because it makes them especially dignified, surpassing all other ordinary scholar-officials. . . . Chinese characters and the Chinese literary language are already difficult enough by their own nature. On top of that, the scholar-officials have purposely devised all of these additional difficulties that get added on. Such being the case, how could anyone hope that the masses would have any affinity for

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the Chinese writing system? But the scholar-officials precisely want it to be this way. If the characters were easy to recognize and everybody could master them, then they would not be dignified, and the scholar-officials would lose their dignity along with them. Those who say that the written vernacular is not as good as Classical Chinese take this as their starting point. In the conclusion of this article, Lu Xun writes, I’ve already said quite a lot. In short, words alone will not suffice; what’s important is action. We need lots of people to act: the masses and the vanguard. All sorts of people are needed to act: educators, men of letters, linguists. . . . This is an urgent necessity right now, even if it is like sailing against the current, when all you can do is tow the boat from the bank. To be sure, sailing with the current is pleasant, but even then, it is necessary to have a steersman. Although we can discuss the best methods for towing and steering, in general the greatest benefit derives from practice. No matter how we look at the wind or the water, our goal is always the same: Forward! Lu Xun actually once said characters have “three beauties”: “their meaning has beauty to affect the heart, their sound has beauty to affect the ears, and their form has beauty to affect the eyes” 意美 以感心, 音美以感耳, 形美以感目. He had a profound knowledge of China’s traditional culture and Classical Chinese, as proven by his book A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. He also admitted that he benefited from tradition. However, he believed that Chinese characters had become a tool to distinguish classes. In Lu Xun’s view, Classical Chinese is hard to understand and is only used to repeat ancient meanings and sentiments. Its only voice is that of the past. The first chapter, “From Characters to Essays 自文字至文章”, in his Outline of Chinese Literature History 汉文学 史纲要 was written by Lu Xun in 1926. It gives an incisive exposition of the language and script’s problems, which were also reflected in “Menwai wentan”. Lu Xun defended the position of vernacular Chinese as the language of modern Chinese literature and refuted remarks against the vernacular. He put forward constructive ideas on language reform. He also made great efforts to solve the problems existing in vernacular Chinese itself and to establish and standardize the language of modern Chinese literature. He made great contributions to the consolidation and development of the modern Chinese literary language. Although not in league with Hu Shi and Lu Xun, Zhu Ziqing (朱自清 1898–1948) was a noted educator, poet, and essayist of the New Culture and May Fourth Movements and one of the pioneers of modernist literature in China. Though he died young from stomach ulcers, his work received praise from leading figures in his era and has continued to be taught to students up to the present day. Zhu graduated from Peking University in 1920 and started to teach in the Department of Chinese Literature at Tsinghua University in 1925, based in part on recommendations from Hu Shi and Yu Pingbo 俞平伯 (1900–1990), Hu’s student, who became a well-known essayist, poet, and literary critic. At the time, the curriculum at Tsinghua was focused on “National Learning” (guóxué 国学), which emphasized traditional approaches to the Confucian classics, not the more modern “literary studies” (wénxué 文学). In 1928 Yang Zhensheng 杨振声 (1890–1956) was appointed head of the Department of Chinese Literature at Tsinghua and invited Zhu to help him design a new curriculum emphasizing “literary studies” (Chan 2016: 237). Zhu introduced modern (Western) methods of criticism and used them to analyze traditional and modern Chinese literature. Literary criticism has since become an essential part of modern Chinese literary study (Chan 2016: 249; Sun 2009: 24). In 34

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addition to his academic work, Zhu is best known for his Chinese poetry and essays, particularly his poem “Destruction” (Huǐmiè, 毁灭) and his essays “Haste” (Cōngcōng 匆匆) and “Retreating Figure” (Bèiyǐng 背影). Zhu Ziqing started to write poems in 1919 while he was still a student at Peking University and became a forerunner of the New Poetry. The New Poetry was written in the vernacular (as opposed to Classical Chinese) with a free style (not limited by traditional rules of versification). As Wang Yao has explained, “Zhu’s poems, with the natural rhythms of the spoken language, took the lead to break away from the bondage of old poetry” (1981: 24–25). In 1923 Zhu wrote a long poem, “Destruction” (Huǐmiè 毀灭), in which he reexamines the romanticized and unrealistic ideals of the May Fourth Movement. “Destruction” was well received and was compared to “Encountering Sorrow” (Lí Sāo 离骚), a seminal elegy in Classical Chinese (Chan 2016: 235). In the same year, Zhu began to write vernacular essays. His debut essay, “Splashing Oars and Lantern Light on the Qinhuai River” (Jiǎngshēng dēngyǐng lǐ de qínhuái hé 桨声灯影里的秦淮河), was published and well received. Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967; Lu Xun’s younger brother, also one of the leading figures in the New Culture Movement), whose relationship with Lu Xun had turned sour, praised it as “a model of vernacular art 白话美术文的模范”. However, Zhu’s work has also been criticized for its language, imagery, and overall quality. Ye Shengtao (1948) believes that some of Zhu’s essays, like “Moonlit in Lotus Pond” and “Haste”, are “artificial” and lack “soul” or “vitality”. C. T. Hsia goes as far as to say that he finds Zhu’s prose (other than “Retreating Figure”) “really loathsome” (2010). Mao Zedong 毛泽东 extols Zhu in his essay “Farewell, Leighton Stuart”, claiming that “though seriously ill, [Zhu Ziqing] starved to death rather than accept U.S. relief food”. Mao continued: “We should write eulogies of Wen Yiduo and Zhu Ziqing who demonstrated the heroic spirit of our nation”. Mao’s words sanctified Zhu, and with him his writings, for the country.

Women’s Voices of Reform Chen Hengzhe 陈衡哲 (1890–1976) was a pioneering writer in modern vernacular Chinese literature, one of the main leaders in the vernacular movement, and one of the main contributors to New Youth. She was also the first female professor at a Chinese university, the first professor of Western history in China, one of the first female students to go to the United States to study, and the first Chinese student at Vassar College (attending on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, graduating in 1919). Although Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman 狂人日记” (Kuangren riji) is widely cited as the first modern Chinese vernacular story, Chen’s vernacular short story “One Day”, based on her life as a college student at Vassar, was published two years earlier in Chinese Students’ Quarterly. Chen was a good friend and a strong supporter of Hu Shi’s attempts at poetry and literature in the vernacular. Hu Shi wrote in the foreword to her 1928 short story collection “Raindrops 小雨点”: She was my earliest comrade. When we were discussing the new literature, Sophia [Chen’s English name] was already writing in vernacular Chinese. “One Day” was the earliest work during those preliminary discussions about the literature revolution. “Raindrops” was also the earliest creative work during the “New Youth” period. After 1917, Sophia authored many vernacular poems. We should think about the conditions of that time regarding the new literature, think about when Lu Xun published his “Diary of a Madman”, think about how few writers were using vernacular. We then can understand the proper place in the history of our new literature movement for these short stories by Sophia.14 35

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Hu Shi referred to Chen Hengzhe, her husband Ren Hongjun 任鸿隽 (1886–1961), a Chinese politician and a professor of chemistry, and himself as “we three friends” 我们三个朋友 in his Book of Experimental Poetry 尝试集 of 1920. The term “three friends” has led to controversy as to whether there was ever a romantic relationship between Chen and Hu. An article written under a pseudonym and published in a popular journal, Decameron 十日谈 (in 1934), talked about this friendship, which then became the topic of public speculation (Gimpel 2015: 22). Hu was certainly not above extramarital affairs, as documented in Egan and Chou’s study of his romantic relationship with Edith Clifford Williams, an early pioneer in the American abstract art movement. However, even though this work documents Hu’s various affairs, it does not even hint at the possibility of a romantic relationship with Chen Hengzhe (see Egan and Chou 2009; Gimpel 2015: 53n40). Incidentally, some have suggested that Hu’s promotion of vernacular for literary creation might have been partially inspired by his encounter with American avant garde art as a result of his friendship with Williams. Another female writer, scholar, and supporter of the vernacular movement is Su Xuelin 苏雪林 (1897–1999). She was a protégée of Hu Shi who was highly critical of Lu Xun, writing many articles attacking Lu Xun after his untimely death in 1936. We cannot be sure why she was so critical of Lu Xun, but one possibility is that she was influenced by the attitudes of her two mentors, Hu Shi and Zhou Zuoren. At the beginning of the vernacular movement, Hu Shi and Lu Xun respected each other, and they praised each other’s works since they both shared similar opinions on vernacular reform. However, there were still many differences in their viewpoint, including their political views. Lu Xun frequently satirized Hu Shi. However, Hu Shi never criticized Lu Xun15—at least not directly. Su Xuelin wrote prose, novels, and poetry in the vernacular. Her collection of essays, Green Skies 绿天, and her long autobiographical novel, Thorny Heart 棘心, were so popular that they were republished within a few months. Critics have largely agreed with the popular assessment: Green Skies is regarded as an early vernacular prose masterpiece. Su Xuelin and two other female writers, Yuan Changying 袁昌英 and Ling Shuhua 凌叔华, were praised as “The Three Musketeers of Luojia 珞珈三杰” when they were living at Wuhan University between the 1930s and 1940s.16 Along with Bing Xin 冰心, Ling Shuhua, Feng Yuanjun, and Ding Ling, she was also listed as one of the five great female writers in the post–May Fourth literary world. Bing Xin is the pen name of Xie Wanying 谢婉莹 (1900–1999), who is one of the most influential Chinese female writers of the twentieth century. Although she published many essays, short stories, poems, translations (including works by Kahlil Gibran and Rabindranath Tagore) and novels (her first, Two Families 两个家庭, was published in 1919), she is best known for her contributions to children’s literature. Her To Young Readers 寄小读者 (1926), written in the form of letters describing her experiences traveling abroad, became the foundation of Chinese vernacular children’s literature. In addition to studying in the United States, Bing Xin also taught Chinese literature in Japan.

The Fight Is Won All the prolific and influential writers mentioned previously published essays, reviews, and new poetry that were well received by the public. In addition, they had a significant influence on education at all levels. Consequently, within just a few years, vernacular literature replaced Classical Chinese as the standard. Since the late 1920s, almost all Chinese newspapers, journals, and books have been written in vernacular Chinese.

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M

In 1919 the national education Association held in shanxi province decided to promote the national language and advocate the congruity of writing and speaking 言文一致. On January 24, 1920, the ministry of education of the Beijing government announced the amendment of Articles 13 and 15 of the national school Decree, which changed all instances of the “national Literacy Writing (Classical Chinese)” into “national Language (Vernacular)”, and clearly stipulated that all the first, second, third, and fourth grades of national schools should learn the “style of spoken language”. This was the first decree signaling that Chinese schools had abandoned Classical Chinese and adopted the national language (vernacular). Also in 1920, the ministry of education of the republic of China announced that the Classical Chinese textbooks of national schools be abolished by stages, and the final deadline was the winter of 1922. textbooks after the winter of 1922 were all written in vernacular Chinese. E

However, the government’s official documents still included Classical Chinese until the early 1950s. In the 1950s, the reform of official documents began, and the official written style has subsequently been switched from Classical Chinese to vernacular. newspapers and magazines also further underwent colloquialization. nowadays vernacular is widely used in China and overseas.

Chinese Character Simplification While intellectuals called for vernacular language reform, many scholars also advocated simplifying characters or even abolishing them. In 1922, Li Jinxi 黎锦熙 proposed to abolish characters and adopt a new spelling script, and Qian Xuantong brought up a “Bill to simplify and Reduce the Strokes of the Currently Used Characters” at the Preparatory Committee for Unifying the national Language 国语统一筹备委员会. Qian commented “Characters with many strokes are hard to write and are a waste of time, and thus are naturally unsuitable for use. Characters with fewer strokes are easier to write and save time, and thus are naturally suitable for use” (Zhou 2002: 61). With the support of these scholars, the movement to simplify characters accelerated in the 1930s. more than 20 magazines and newspapers published many articles that advocated simplified characters, such as Chen Guangyao’s 陈光尧 (1906–1972) Collected Essays on Simplified Characters 简字论集 in 1931. the national Conference on script reform was held in 1955, and

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after that, the “List of the First Set of Variant Characters that Have Been Put in Order 第一批异体 字整理表” was released. The “Scheme for Simplifying Characters 汉字简化方案” was promulgated in 1956. Nowadays the simplified characters are used for all of the general publications and textbooks in mainland China. Although the extent of these changes was controversial, the principle of character simplification has been in use for thousands of years. Actually, many simplified characters existed in ancient times. Consider the character for qì in the sense of “gas” or “vital energy”. The traditional or “long form” of the character is 氣, and the modern, “simplified form” is 气. However, the simplified form is actually very similar to the earliest forms of the character, like the “small seal” form, which is . Furthermore, among the 2,235 simplified characters in the General List of Simplified Characters 简化字总表, there are 521 basic simplified characters that have been accumulated from pre-Qin to 1956 when the Scheme for Simplifying Characters 汉字简化 方案 was promulgated. Many of the other simplified characters are derived from them by analogy. Simplified characters account for one-third of 7,000 generally used characters. Nonetheless, the simplified characters did not have any negative effects on the art of calligraphy. For instance, there were 102 simplified characters among 324 characters of Wang Xizhi’s 王羲之 (303–361; the most renowned calligrapher in history) calligraphy masterpiece “Preface to the Orchid Pavilion 兰亭序” (Zhou 2002: 66–67, 71).

Chinese Character Romanization As early as the Six Dynasties era (220–581), China developed fanqie 反切 (countertomy), a method of phonetic notation for Chinese characters. It adopted phonological principles that had come to China from India (along with Buddhism). This method relied on characters, so a new alphabet was not designed. It was very difficult to use for children and people who do not know enough characters. In 1869, the Wade-Giles system was first introduced. It is a romanization system for annotating the sounds of the Beijing dialect by Thomas F. Wade (1818–1895), a British diplomat living in China. This system used only 20 out of the 26 Roman letters. The Wade-Giles system was, for many years, the standard for romanizing Chinese texts. However, Wade-Giles has certain limitations. For one, very different sounds are written in ways that are confusingly similar to many nonspecialists. Consider these four characters and their corresponding Pinyin romanizations: 居 jū, 区 qū, 珠 zhū, 出 chū. These would be romanized in Wade-Giles as chü, ch’ü, chu, and ch’u, respectively. In addition, there is not an ideal way to represent the four tones of spoken Mandarin in Wade-Giles. Its use of umlauts and apostrophes (technically, “breathing marks”) makes accent marks visually overwhelming, so when tones were needed, Wade-Giles used superscripts, like ch’ü1. These superscripts are easy to confuse with note numbers and require readers to read to the end of the word in order to know what tone to use. Pinyin also has its critics, of course. Readers of European languages find it puzzling to see words beginning with “zh-” or learn an unintuitive pronunciation for “c-”. The first alternative phonetic system to get widespread support was promulgated by the government in 1918: the Mandarin Phonetic Alphabet 注音字母 (also called Mandarin Phonetic Symbols 注音符号). Based on a phonetic shorthand developed by Zhang Binglin 章炳麟 (1869–1936), the Mandarin Phonetic Alphabet was finalized by a government commission. Like Japanese hiragana or katakana, the Mandarin Phonetic Alphabet is not really an alphabet per se (in which there are separate symbols for consonants and vowels) but a kind of syllabic script, with symbols derived but distinct from characters. This system is still used in Taiwan to the present day. 38

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Another important figure in the development of Chinese romanization systems was Yuen Ren Chao 赵元任 (1892–1982). Chao was a great linguist, educator, and scholar. Like Hu Shi, Chao also went to Cornell University in the same year (1910) with the same scholarship (Boxer Indemnity Scholarship). Chao and Hu Shi were classmates at Cornell and lifelong friends, and he was a strong supporter of Hu Shi’s vernacular movement. Chao’s marriage ceremony was attended only by Hu Shi and one other friend. Interestingly, they both died on February 24 (but in different years). Chao was considered one of the “Four Great Teaching Masters” of China while he was at Tsinghua University in the 1920s, alongside Wang Guowei 王国维 (1877–1927), Liang Qichao 梁启超 (1873–1929), and Chen Yinke 陈寅恪 (1890–1969). He made great contributions to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar. The grammatical structure of spoken (as distinct from written) Chinese was systematically introduced to Westerners using modern linguistics by Chao’s Mandarin Primer (published in 1948). In 1968, he published Readings in Sayable Chinese. The word Sayable that he invented implies a new direction for teaching Chinese as a foreign language: from written to spoken. He implied that teaching Chinese must change from a “dead language” to a “living language” for foreign students and scholars. Chao even worried that the vernacular movement had not gone far enough. Chao once teased his friend Hu Shi, “Your vernacular language is not vernacular enough. 你的白话文不够白”. Chao led a group of Chinese linguists to design National Language Romanization 国语罗马字. This system is distinctive because it uses alternative spellings of the vowels in words to represent the tones rather than the accent marks used in Pinyin or the superscript numbers used in WadeGiles. (This method was proposed to Chao by Lin Yutang 林语堂 [1895–1976], an author with an international reputation.) In 1928, the government adopted the National Language Romanization as its official system. Although it is no longer in common use, vestiges of the system can be seen in the contemporary spelling of “Shaanxi” for 陕西 (to distinguish it from 山西, both of which would be romanized as “Shanxi” in Pinyin) and the convention that the ancient states of 衞 and 魏 are romanized as Wey and Wei, respectively. In 1929, Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白 (1899–1935) composed a draft of “Latinization of Chinese Writing 中文拉丁化” while in the Soviet Union. Later it was revised by some linguists in the Soviet Union, including A. Dragunov. It was introduced to Shanghai in 1933 and was called the “Latinized New Script of the Northern Chinese Language 北方话拉丁化新文字”. It was strongly supported by leading scholars including Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868–1940), Lu Xun, Mao Dun 茅盾 (1896–1981), and others. In 1955, a National Writing Reform Conference took place in Beijing. Zhou Youguang 周有光 (1906–2017) headed a committee to take on the task of developing a romanization for Chinese characters. The Scheme for Romanized Spelling of the Han Language 汉语拼音方案 was promulgated in 1958. In 1982, the International Organization for Standardization decided to adopt Pinyin as the international standard for spelling Chinese. Zhou Youguang thus was called “the Father of Pinyin”. He was an outstanding economist, linguist, and sinologist who once said, “Without an alphabet, you had to learn mouth to mouth, ear to ear”, and argued that Pinyin is “a bridge to speech between Chinese people, a bridge between China and the rest of the world, a bridge between cultures”. Pinyin has had a transformative effect on Chinese language teaching and learning and on Chinese society overall. It greatly helps people around the world to learn Mandarin much more easily and quickly than before. It has also enabled China to transition to the digital age: people use Pinyin to easily type Chinese characters on smartphones and computers, which makes communication between people convenient and fast.17 (If Zizhang were alive today, he could have tweeted Confucius’s saying rather than writing it on his sash.) 39

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Even students in Beginning Chinese can easily type Chinese characters by using Pinyin after a week of learning. However, language educators now debate whether we should encourage students to learn only how to type Chinese characters without handwriting (so that they can learn more characters faster within a certain amount of time), or should we still require students to learn to write characters by hand (both to encourage greater familiarity with the structure of characters and to continue the three-millennia tradition of writing Chinese)? In fact, many native speakers of Chinese who are college-educated are forgetting how to write Chinese characters, since input with a keyboard is so easy and efficient. This prevalent phenomenon is called “character amnesia” (提笔忘字). Three permanent innovations resulted from the work of Chinese-language reformers during the past century: most Chinese writing is in the vernacular, Pinyin is used to phonetically represent Chinese, and many common characters have been simplified to make functional literacy a more attainable goal. It seems that, after less than 150 years, we have realized the dream of Huang Zunxian: “My hand writes what my mouth says 我手写我口”.

Notes 1 For more on the development of contemporary written Japanese, see Mareshi Saito, Kanbunmyaku: The Literary Sinitic Context and the Birth of Modern Japanese Language and Literature, trans. Ross King and Christina Laffin (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2020). 2 See David N. Keightley, Sources of Shang History: The Oracle Bone Inscriptions of Bronze-Age China (Oakland: University of California Press, 1978). 3 For example, the oracle bone character for the number three, , would be immediately recognizable even to a literate child today as being the same as the modern form: 三. 4 Cf. Lu Xun, “Kong Yiji”. 5 Xu Shen actually suggested that there were six types, but the meaning and importance of the sixth type is widely debated, and we follow many others in only focusing on the five most clear and helpful categories. Cf. the discussion in Bryan W. Van Norden, Classical Chinese for Everyone (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2019), pp. xiv–xxii. 6 There is considerable dispute about the date of composition of the Analects. At the one extreme, Michael Hunter has argued that the text was almost wholly fabricated during the Han dynasty. However, others have argued that the language and subject matter of the text suggest that most of it was composed soon after the death of Kongzi in 479 bce. See, for example, Edward Slingerland, “Textual Issues Concerning the Analects”, in Effortless Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 277–278; Yuri Pines, “Lexical Changes in Zhanguo Texts”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 122(4) (2002), pp. 691–705; Michael Hunter and Martin Kern, eds., Confucius and the Analects Revisited (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishing, 2018). 7 Of course, no one knows all these characters, any more than anyone knows all 250,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is estimated that 3,000 characters constitute 99% of all characters found in contemporary writing intended for general readers, and a Chinese junior high school graduate is expected to know 3,500 characters. 8 Yuan Shikai abdicated and then died in 1916. Thus, his brief effort to restore a monarchy illustrates the precarious hold on power of the early Republic of China. 9 One poignant recollection is Mark Swofford’s “Remembering Hu Shih: 1891–1962”, which focuses on aspects of Hu’s monumental advancement of literary and linguistic transformation in China. Mark Swofford, “Remembering Hu Shih: 1891–1962”, Pinyin News (blog), February 24, 2012, http://pinyin.info/ news/2012/remembering-hu-shih/. 10 The Chinese Students’ Monthly, 11(8) (June 1916), pp. 567–572. The journal was published by the Chinese Students’ Alliance in the United States of America and was distributed from Ithaca, New York. 11 夏志清《中国现代小说史》cited in 维基百科, 自由的百科全书, s.v. “胡適” (by Wikipedia contributors), https://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E8%83%A1%E9%81%A9&oldid=74663693 (accessed November 18, 2022).

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A Century of Chinese Writing Reform 12 Quoted in “Comment on Book of Experimental Poetry 评〈尝试集〉 ”, Journal of Measurement of Studies 学衡杂志, 1(2) (1922). 13 “Lu Xun” is the pen name of Zhou Shuren 周树人. He wrote under many other (more than a hundred) pseudonyms during his life as well. 14 李瑾 Li Jin “我们三个朋友”：胡适、任鸿隽和陈衡哲 (Women sange pengyou: Hu Shi, Ren Hongjun. Chen Hengzhe), Southern.com, July 15, 2005, cited in Wikipedia Contributors, “Chen Hengzhe”, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, June 18, 2022. Web. November 16, 2022. 15 Quoted in Zhou (2002: 13). 16 “Luojia” is the name of a famous mountain on the campus of Wuhan University; it is sometimes used as a nickname for Wuhan University or things associated with it. Note the familiarity with European literature that allowed readers to recognize the reference to Alexandre Dumas’s novel. 17 There was a brief period in the twentieth century in which Chinese typewriters (in essence, small typesetting fonts) were used by trained typists to produce printed documents for official purposes. For a history of this fascinating topic, see Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). Cf. also Language Log, “Chinese Typewriter” (June 30, 2009) and “Chinese Typewriter, Part 2” (April 17, 2019).

References Chan, Leonard Kwok Kou. 2016. “From Modernity to Tradition: Zhu Ziqing’s Chinese Literary Criticism”, Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, 3(2), pp. 233–257. Egan, Susan Chan and Chou, Chih-p’ing. 2009. A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit: The Half Century Romance of Hu Shi and Edith Clifford Williams, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Gimpel, Denise. 2015. Chen Hengzhe: A Life Between Orthodoxies, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Hsia, C. T. (Chih-tsing) 夏志清. 2005. Zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo shi 中国现代小说史, Shanghai: Fudan University Press. Hsia, C. T. (Chih-tsing). 2010. “Qijun de sanwen (shujian jielu)” 琦君的散文 (《书简》节录), in Ren de wenxue 人的文学 (People’s Literature), Fuzhou: Fujian Jiaoyu Chubanshe, cited in Wikipedia 2021. Mair, Victor H. 2017. “Hu Shih and Chinese Language Reform”, Language Log, https://languagelog.ldc. upenn.edu/nll/?p=30801 Mair, Victor H., Steinhardt, Nancy S., and Goldin, Paul R., eds. 2005. Hawaii Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 617–641. Shi, Shiping. 2021. “Lu Xun de Han Yuyan Wenzi Gong Zui Guan 鲁迅的汉语言文字功罪观”, Journal of Dongnan Xueshu 东南学术, 2, http://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2021/0324/c404064-32058923.html Sun, Y. 2009. “The Theoretical Resources of Zhu Ziqing’s System of Hermeneutics of Modern Poetry”, Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 3(1), pp. 24–63. Wang, Yao 王瑶. 1981. “Nian Zhu Ziqing xiansheng” 念朱自清先生 (In Memory of Mr. Zhu Ziqing), in Zhu Ziqing yanjiu ziliao 朱自清研究资料, ed. Zhu Jinshun 朱金顺, Beijing: Beijing Normal University Press, pp. 20–52. Ye, Shengtao 叶圣陶. 1948. “Zhu Pixuan Xiansheng” 朱佩弦先生, Zhongxue Sheng 中学生, 203. Zhang, Liqing, trans. and Zhou, Youguang. 2003. The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts (Zhongguo yu wen di shi dai yan jiu), Columbus, OH: National East Asian Languages Resource Center, Ohio State University. Zhou, Youguang. 2017. “Whose Pinyin Writing System Helped Modernize China, Dies at 111”, Washington Post, January 16, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/zhou-youguang-whose-pinyinwriting-system-helped-modernize-china-dies-at-111/2017/01/16/68e96964-dbfd-11e6-acdf14da832ae861_story.html Zhou, Zhiping. 2002. Hu Shi and China’s Modern Thought 胡适与中国现代思潮, Nanjing: Nanjing University Press.

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3 CHINESE PHONOLOGY AND CROSS-CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN HISTORY Chu Chia Ning University of Wales

1.  The Influence of Ancient Sino-Indian Cultural Exchange on the Historical  Chinese Phonology (1)  The Translation of Buddhist Scriptures and the Birth of the Rhyme Table Throughout its long history, Chinese phonology has been influenced twice by the introduction of foreign ideas, resulting in significant changes. The first time was the introduction of Buddhism from India in the Eastern Han dynasty. The cultural contact with India had a tremendous influence on Chinese literature and philosophy. It also infiltrated the religious beliefs of Chinese society, thereby affecting the way people lived in China. Buddhism, an Indian cultural system of beliefs, was brought to China by Central Asian traders and Buddhist monks as early as the first century ce. During the Eastern Han dynasty (148 ce), the Parthian prince An Shigao (安世高) was one of the first to translate Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. Buddhists borrowed ideas from original Chinese philosophy Daoism (Chinese philosophy to signify the fundamental or true nature of the world) via the Chinese language to help the Chinese comprehend this foreign concept. As a result, Buddhist scriptures spread widely in major cities in China and were accepted by most of the Chinese scholars, the common people, and even the emperor. The translation of Buddhist scriptures enriched Chinese culture and contributed significantly to the development of Chinese vocabulary, grammar, and phonetic techniques, as well as improving Chinese phonology in multiple ways. During this time and over the course of the next period of the Three Kingdoms (三國時代), the popularity of Buddhist scriptures opened the window for other Indian literary studies in China. The study of ancient Indian rhymes such as “śabda-vidyā 聲明論” (the science of phonology of ancient Indian) and “siddham 悉曇章” (phonemic analysis of ancient Indian) are the knowledge in this respect. Sanskrit, an Indo-European Indic language used as the religious and classical literary language of India since circa 1200 bce, is also a phonetic text that features precise sound analysis. With the spread of the Buddhist texts, Chinese intellectuals from the upper class had the opportunity to study Sanskrit and understand the phonology of Indian language. This stimulated the rapid

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DOI: 10.4324/9781315167800-5

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growth of Chinese phonology, and the enthusiasm for Sanskrit continued until the end of the Tang dynasty. The idea of the “rhyme table” (等韻圖) also originated from Indian Buddhism and represents the highest achievement of linguistics during that time. The second cultural and phonological influence on Chinese came from modern Western linguistics over the past centuries. We discuss this in a later chapter. (2)  Organization of the Rhyme Table A “rhyme table” is a Chinese phonological model that consists of a series of charts arranging Chinese characters in large tables based on their tones and syllable structures to indicate their proper pronunciations. The basic structure of the rhyme table involves “horizontal arrangement by TSIMU (字母), vertically divided into four tones (四聲), four grades (四等)”, and then one by one, fill each character in the appropriate grid according to its pronunciation. To create such a chart may seem to be a simple task in modern times, but in an era lacking phonetic analysis capabilities, it was considered a remarkable breakthrough. As we all know, Chinese characters do not inherently represent sounds like English alphabetic words do. In Chinese, each character represents a complete “syllable”, and the phonetic components are not explicitly visible. However, through the study of Sanskrit texts, Chinese scholars discovered the precision of phonetic analysis found in Sanskrit spelling. This led them to focus on designing a Chinese phonetic chart, known as a rhyme table (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 A sample page of a rhyme table.

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Figure 3.2 A sample page of Siddham of ancient India.

To improve their knowledge of Chinese phonetic analysis, scholars first divided the pronunciation of Chinese characters into two halves. The first half is called “SHENGMU 聲母” (initial consonants) and the second half “YUNMU 韻母” (finals). This recognition led to a great revolution in the handling of phonetic analysis. In the Eastern Han dynasty, Chinese scholars invented the FANQIE (反切) phonetic method to indicate the pronunciation of Chinese characters. However, it was not until the Six Dynasties period1 that the FANQIE method gained popularity and became widely used for the pronunciation of Chinese characters. During that time, the use of the repetition of a beginning consonant sound SHUANGSHENG talk (雙聲語) was common in daily conversations, and it became a trend and a prominent feature of social interaction. This method or knowledge of the SHUANGSHENG pronunciation originated and was introduced through Buddhist texts. For example, an ancient book called Luoyangqielanji (洛陽伽藍記 532–534) recorded the following: Li Yuanqian (李元謙) was skilled at SHUANGSHENG talk. Once, he passed by Guo Wenyuan’s (郭文遠) home and asked, “Whose home is this?” A servant named Chunfeng (春風) replied, “This is the home of ‘Guo Guan Gun Ga’ (郭冠軍家)”. Li Yuanqian was very surprised and said, “Bi Bi Shuang Sheng” (彼婢雙聲, How can this servant speak SHUANGSHENG talk?). Chunfeng replied, “Ning Nu Man Ma” (檸奴慢罵, You must be joking. How can I be so skilled?). From the Eastern Han dynasty to the Tang dynasty, people perceived that the pronunciation of Chinese characters could be divided into two parts: an initial consonant and a final. But it was not yet possible for a more subtle speech analysis at that time. In the early years of the Tang dynasty, with the emergence of the concept of “ZIMU 字母”2 and “FOUR GRADES 四等”,3 the technique of phonemic analysis was finally further developed. This led to the creation of the “RHYME TABLE 等韻圖”, a type of phonetic chart.

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(3)  The Creation of “ZIMU (字母)” The concept of ZIMU refers to a series of “initial sounds”, and its development was completely influenced by Buddhism. The earliest “ZIMU” that appeared in Buddhist scriptures was introduced by the Buddhist master ZHUFAHU (竺法護) during the years 265–289 ce. He used Chinese characters to represent the pronunciation of certain Sanskrit consonants. Therefore, people began to think, “Why not use Chinese characters to mark every initial sound of Chinese characters?” The earliest set of ZIMU is the “Thirty Letters of Initials (三十字母)”, which emerged at the end of the Tang dynasty. The original document of “Thirty Letters of Initials (三十字母)” was discovered in the Dunhuang Stone Cave (敦煌石室) at the end of the Guangxu (光緒) period in the Qing dynasty. The documents found in this cave are a handwritten version dating back to the Tang dynasty. Here are the “Thirty Letters of Initials (三十字母)” unearthed from the Dunhuang Stone Cave: 脣音(bilabial) 舌音(dental) (alveolo-palatal) 牙音(velar) 齒音(sibilant) (palatal alveolar) 喉音(glottal)

不芳並明 端透定泥 知徹澄日 見溪群來疑 精清從 審穿禪照 心邪曉 匣喻影

(p-, ph-, b-, m-) (t-, th-, d-, n-) (tj-, thj-, dj-, nj-) (k-, kh-, g-, l-, ng-) (ts-, tsh-, dz-) (ʃ-, ʧh-, ʤ-, ʧ-) (s-, z-, x-) (ɣ- velar fricative, Ø - zero initial, ʔ- glottal stop)

Before the discovery of the “Thirty Letters of Initials (三十字母)” from Dunhuang during the Qing dynasty, scholars and students only knew the 36-initials system (三十六字母). Traditional rhyme tables were all based on the 36-letter system. The prototype of “Thirty Letters of Initials” has long been forgotten. However, the 36-letter system was retained through traditional school teaching and was passed down from the Song dynasty to the nineteenth century. (4)  The Relationship Between “FOUR TONES (四聲)”4 and Indian Buddhism The discovery of the four tones of “PING, SHANG, QU, RU (平上去入)” is also closely related to Buddhism, and the distinction of the “FOUR TONES” is a fundamental component of the structure of the RHYME TABLE. Tone is a fundamental element of the Chinese language. In ancient times, it was a traditional practice for people to use four tones in spoken language. During the Eastern Han dynasty, with the introduction of Buddhism, people gradually became familiar with Sanskrit. Upon comparing the two languages, monks and scholars found a unique phonological aspect in Chinese known as “different pitches”, which plays a role in distinguishing meanings and was absent in Sanskrit. These different pitch patterns were analyzed and classified into four categories (called “FOUR TONES 四聲”), and each tone has its own distinctive pitch contour. (5)  The Relationship Between “FOUR GRADES (四等)” and Buddhism The rhyme table classifies all Chinese characters into four “grades” based on the degree of mouth opening of the syllable final. The characters with the widest mouth opening in pronunciation are

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Figure 3.3 A sample page of “Four Grades (四等)” of a rhyme table. (For example, in ancient Chinese the characters “千, 姦, 甄, 堅” in the chart are pronounced in first-grade, second-grade, third-grade, and fourth-grade words, respectively).

referred to as “first-grade words 一等字”, which are positioned at the upper line in the rhyme table. Conversely, the characters with the smallest mouth opening are referred to as “fourth-grade words 四等字”. The earliest document which recorded the design of “four grades” was dated back to the Tang dynasty. It was a brilliant design by Buddhist monks who were proficient in the phonology of Indian Sanskrit. This document was unearthed at Dunhuang Cavern in the nineteenth century. (6)  The Phonological Terms “ZHUAN 轉”, “SHE 攝”, and “MENFA 門法” In the rhyme table, each chart is called a “～zhuan 轉” or a “～she 攝”. For example, the early rhyme tables “Qiyinlue 七音略” and “Yunjing 韻鏡” have 43 charts, which are called 43 “zhuans”. Rhyme tables such as “Sishengdenzi 四聲等子” and “Qieyunzhinan 切韻指南”, created in the Song and Yuan dynasties, have “16 she” (meaning “16 rhyme groups”). The term “zhuan 轉” originated from the concept of reincarnation in Buddhism, signifying “a turn of rotation”. Each rhyme table contains 12 vowels and matching consonants, akin to a rotating consonant wheel that matches each of the 12 vowels. The term “～she 攝” also came from Buddhism, meaning “to take and hold”. In Buddhist texts, the word she is an important term that was frequently used. The term “Menfa 門法” in the rhyme table refers to the arrangement rules of the rhyme table. It is derived from the “Famen 法門” in the Buddhist texts.

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Figure 3.4 A sample of a “～she 攝” rhyme table (marked at right).

Figure 3.5 A sample of a “ZHUAN 轉” rhyme table (marked at right).

(7)  The Relationship Between Early Rhyme Tables and Buddhism The two oldest existing examples of Chinese rhyme tables are “Qiyinlue 七音略” and “Yunjing 韻鏡”. Although the latest versions were published in the Song dynasty, their prototypes can be traced back to the late Tang dynasty (618–907) and the Five Dynasties (五代 907–960). The preface of “Yunjing 韻鏡” records that the book was originally written by Indian monks, and the latter edition was completed by Chinese monks who imitated the writing style of the Indian monks. This preface reveals the close relationship between ancient Chinese rhyme tables and Indian Buddhist monks.

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Figure 3.6 A sample of a “Menfa 門法” rhyme table.

Figure 3.7 A sample page of an early rhyme table: Qiyinlue 七音略.

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Figure 3.8 The first page of an early rhyme table: Yunjing 韻鏡.

(8)  The Relationship Between the “Song Yuan Rhyme Table” (宋元韻圖) and Buddhism The so-called Song Yuan rhyme table includes three books: “Sishengdengzi 四聲等子”, “Qieyunzhizhangtu 切韻指掌圖”, and “Qieyunzhinan 切韻指南”. “Sishengdengzi 四聲等子” was established by the monk Zhiguang (智光大師) and was compiled at the end of the Buddhist Scriptures (or “Buddhist Canon” 大藏經). The first page of the book “Qieyunzhizhangtu 切韻指掌圖” features a palm pattern with marked graphics of five fingers. This icon is similar to that found in the Buddhist scriptures. The handprint (手印) is a distinct Buddhist symbol. 49

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Figure 3.9 A palm, five fingers, and “Qieyunzhizhangtu 切韻指掌圖”.

Figure 3.10 A sample page of the Song Yuan rhyme table “Sishengdengzi 四聲等子”.

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Figure 3.11 A sample page of the Song Yuan rhyme table “Qieyunzhizhangtu 切韻指掌圖”.

Versions of “Qieyunzhinan 切韻指南” are mostly associated with monks and temples. They record the name of the monks and temples of the Ming dynasty, such as “Monk Jueheng 覺恒法 師”, “Monk Benzan 本讚法師”, “Dalongfu Temple 大隆福寺”, “Zhishankaiyun Temple 芝山開 元寺”, and “Yanfa Temple 衍法寺”. This reflects that Indian Buddhism has great influence on these works. 51

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Figure 3.12 A sample page of the Song Yuan rhyme table “Qieyunzhinan 切韻指南”.

2.  The Differences Between and the Characteristics of Modern Western  Linguistics and the Scholars of the Qing Dynasty in the Study of Phonology (1)   The Different Characteristics in the Study of Phonology Between Qing Dynasty Scholars  and Western Linguists Scholars in the Qing dynasty had their own unique research style in Chinese phonology, which differed from Western linguistics in terms of study methods and concepts. Although Chinese scholars were dedicated to the study of phonology, the cultural exchange with modern Western linguistics inevitably brought new ways of reconstructing the sound system of Old Chinese. These influences enriched Chinese phonology in many ways during the late Qing dynasty. Let us first review the study of Chinese phonology over hundreds of years. Academic research in the Qing dynasty was extremely prosperous in Chinese history. There are five significant breakthroughs in the field of phonology: The first notable achievement in Chinese phonology was made by Gu Yanwu (顧炎武5). gu divided the words of Old Chinese into ten rhyme groups. He annexed the RUSHENG tone (入聲 調6) with the YINSHENG character (陰聲字7). In traditional rhyme books, YINSHENG characters were always matched with YANGSHENG characters (陽聲字8). For example, in the rhyme category “東-ng 董-ng 送-ng 屋-k”9 in a rhyme book, the YANGSHENG characters (東董送) -ng matched the RUSHENG tone (屋) -k. However, Gu Yanwu discovered objective evidence from SHIJING (詩經10 ) that the [-k] ending should always match with the YINSHENG character on its rhyming way. This is an important discovery in Old Chinese phonology. A similar pattern can be observed in the XINGSHENG structure (形聲字11) of Chinese characters. There was always a consistent pronunciation when a YINSHENG character (陰聲字) was followed by a sound component (聲符 phonetic radical): YINSHENG character 陰聲字of XINGSHING 形聲 structure

入聲字 RUSHENG character as a sound component

代-g (人+弋) 否-d (不+口)、杯-d (不+木) 秘-d (禾+必)

弋 -k 不 -t 必 -t

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The table on the previous page demonstrates that the rhyming harmony sound of “代否杯秘” is always accompanied by the RUSHENG character (弋不必) of the same ending; that is to say, the sound relationship between the YINSHENG character and the RUSHENG character has consistent pronunciation, and this happened in the period of Old Chinese—also called Archaic Chinese by some scholars, which was used from 1300 bce to the second century ce. All archaic YINSHENG characters ended with a consonant, such as -b, -d, -g, -r, and they would match with RUSHENG characters that have a plosive ending such as -p, -t, and -k. As for the YANGSHENG characters, they have nasal endings -m, -n -ŋ, which are not suitable for matching with stop endings -p, -t, and -k. Examples of the syllable endings of RUSHENG and YINSHENG characters:

RUSHENG character 入聲字

YINSHENG character 陰聲字

-p -t -k

-b -d, -r -ɡ

Gu Yanwu (顧炎武) made the second significant breakthrough in Chinese phonology by denying a rhyme of “Guang Yun 廣韻”12 as an inseparable rhyme unit. While analyzing the archaic rhymes, Gu Yanwu found that a rhyme in “Guang Yun 廣韻” of Middle Chinese13 may come from different rhyme categories of Old Chinese. For example, some words in the “Zhi Yun 支韻14” in the rhyme book “Guang Yun 廣韻” were believed to come from the “GE 歌部15” section of the archaic period, while other words came from the “Yu 魚部” section of the archaic times. This research deepened our understanding of the nature of “Guang Yun 廣韻” and the evolution of Chinese speech. The third significant breakthrough in Chinese phonology was by made by Duan Yucai (段玉 裁16) in his research on the rhyming rules (韻例) of archaic ballads. Duan discovered that each chapter of the SHIJING (詩經 Book of Songs) was a distinct and independent rhyme unit, not associated with any other subsequent chapter in the book. This discovery led to the establishment of a new phonological rule in archaic ballads known as “theory of ZHIZHIZHI separation” (支脂之 分部說).17 As a result, the rhyme system was separated into three different parts, each with a different pronunciation in Old Chinese. The fourth significant breakthrough in Chinese phonology was the identification of rhyme group boundaries based on the relationship between different rhyme categories in OLD Chinese. Duan Yucai proposed the theory of “ZHEN and WEN rhyme Divisions 真文分部說”,18 stating that the rhyme ZHEN Division (真部, such as the characters “秦人身旬辛天田千令因 . . .”) always rhymed together with the rhyme GENG Division (耕部), and the rhyme WEN Division (文 部, such as the characters “昏先春屯門分孫君雲存 . . .”) always rhymed together with the rhyme

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YAN Division (元部). By analyzing their pronunciation relationship, the difference in pronunciation between the ZHEN Division and WEN Division could be determined, revealing the boundaries between the two rhyme categories. Another example is Kong Guangsen’s (孔廣森 1752–1786)19 theory of “DONGDONG Division 東冬分部說”. He found that the rhyme DONG (東部, such as the characters “東公同叢从 封容凶充 . . .”) always rhymed with the rhyme YANG (陽部) in OLD Chinese, and the rhyme DONG (冬部, such as the characters “中蟲冬宗農眾宋 . . .”) always rhymed with the rhyme ZHENG (蒸部, such as the characters “弓夢升朋興增承雄勝 . . .”) and QIN (侵部, such as the characters “林心三今風音南琴錦甚 . . .”). This allowed the boundaries between the DONG 1 Division (東部) of rhyme and DONG 2 Division (冬部) of rhyme in Old Chinese to be determined.

The fifth significant breakthrough in Chinese phonology was the recognition that the tone of RUSHENG (入聲) can also be an independent rhyme category in Old Chinese. RUSHENG words often form a separate and independent rhyming unit. This discovery challenged the traditional notion that every rhyme category in Middle Chinese must have all four tones (PING, SHANG, QU, RU 平上去入). Scholars in the Qing dynasty established some independent rhyme Divisions of RUSHENG (入聲), breaking the traditional concept that the four tones must be paired together as a group. These research results surpassed the Western linguistics of that era. For example, Qing dynasty scholars in the eighteenth century discovered the law that [p] evolved into [f] earlier than Western linguists (Grimm’s Law in the nineteenth century). However, by the nineteenth century, Chinese phonology had fallen slightly behind, and scholars began to incorporate a lot of Western progressive phonetic analysis skills and introduced new linguistic concepts to China. The methods employed in the study of Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those used in Indo-European linguistics due to the logographic nature of the Chinese writing system. Unlike Indo-European languages, Chinese did not have a phonetic spelling system, making the reconstruction of specific pronunciation more challenging. Originally, Western societies were similar to China in terms of language research, with scholars primarily focused on interpreting ancient classics and literature. However, with the rise of historical comparative linguistics in the nineteenth century, Western scholars developed a clearer and more precise understanding of language. In the twentieth century, structural linguistics emerged, further advancing Western scholars’ understanding of language. In the past 100 years, a significant milestone in Chinese phonology was achieved by the Swedish sinologist Karlgren (1889–1978). His work Études sur la phonologie chinoise (1915) marked a giant leap in the reconstruction of ancient Chinese, leading to updated research ideas and techniques among Chinese phoneticians. Phonology study became more objective, scientific, and systematic during this period, influenced by Karlgren’s contributions. One of the significant achievements influenced by Western linguistics was that Chinese phonologists found and studied consonant clusters in Old Chinese, and this research lasted for 100 years from the nineteenth century. Let’s delve into the research development over the past 100 years and how Chinese scholars were influenced by the West in terms of theory and methodology. 54

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As early as 1874, the British sinologist Joseph Edkins20 presented a paper at the Second Far East Conference proposing the existence of complex initials in Old Chinese based on harmonic words reflected in Chinese characters and recorded in classical documents. However, his viewpoint did not garner much attention from Chinese scholars at that time. In the early twentieth century, Swedish sinologist Karlgren (高本漢 1889–1978)21 constructed a set of initial consonant clusters in Old Chinese. This work laid the foundation for further research in the field (See Chao et al. 1940). Following Karlgren, renowned Chinese scholar Lin Yutang (林語堂 1895–1976)22 published “The Theory of Consonant Clusters in Old Chinese” in 1924. During the 1960s and 1970s, the study of the consonant clusters in Old Chinese reached its peak. The focus during this period was on the structure of the Cl/r type (e.g., gl-, pl-, bl-), the SC type (e.g., sb-, sg-, sk-, sl-), and the NC type (e.g., mb-, nt-, ngl-). The research findings were compiled in a proceeding titled Collection of Theses of Consonant Clusters in Old Chinese, edited by Zhao Bingxuan (趙秉璇)23 and Chu Chia Ning (Zhu Jianing 竺家寧)24 (Beijing Language and Culture University Press, 1998). This collection included 22 selected papers, with the majority being published after the 1960s. Based on the research results, scholars confirmed the existence of the consonant clusters in Old Chinese through various aspects.

(a)

Commonality of Language Evolution

Phonetic evolution often involves the loss of phonemes, and this is evident in both ancient and modern Chinese. For example, in the transition from Old Chinese to Middle Chinese, the initial dental flap [r-] was lost at the beginning of words. Similarly, in the shift from Middle Chinese to modern Mandarin, initial consonants such as [g- 羽雨雲王永有], [ng- 魚牛語宜危玉五], [m- 巫 無亡武文望], and [n- 而兒耳爾二] were lost and eventually became zero initials. After the Song dynasty, the glottal stops were subsequently lost and became zero initials (於央 伊衣憂一握). Therefore, the number of the zero initials gradually expanded. The same is true for Tibetan, which belongs to the same language family as Chinese. The simple consonants of Tibetan always came from consonant clusters. For example: Ancient Tibetan [dkaɦ] > modern Tibetan [ka] Chinese cognate 苦 [ku] hard Ancient Tibetan [mdaɦ] > modern Tibetan [ta] 箭 [jian] arrow Ancient Tibetan [gnis] > modern Tibetan [ni] Chinese cognate 二 [ni>er] two Judged from their same origin, the Chinese and Tibetan’s ancestral form, that is, Proto-SinoTibetan (PST), must have a cluster initial in its sound system. Indeed, the disappearance of phonemes in syllables is a common phenomenon in language change. In English, speak was from ancient sprecan, feeble from flebilis, and laugh from hliehhan. And the initial letters of k in the word knee, p in psychology, and g in gnaw are not pronounced. They were all derived from the loss of phonemes. In the Webster’s Dictionary, Old English initial clusters [hr, hl, hn, kn, gn, wr] have lost their initial consonants, such as hring > ring hleapan > leap cneow > knee hnecca > neck 55

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The initial [k-] is still preserved in some Germanic languages: Danish [knɛːʔ] and Swedish [kne]. Based on the trend of this language change, we have no doubt about the possibility that consonant clusters once existed in ancient Chinese. We can list a phonological rule that all languages have experienced: consonant cluster > > > single consonant > > > zero initials (e.g., Evenness 勻 O.C. gr- > > > r- > > > Mandarin Ø - )25 It would be very unreasonable and contrary to common sense if we assumed that Chinese is the only language in the world that never had initial consonant clusters and maintained a singleconsonant initial for thousands of years. It is difficult for us to come up with convincing explanations why the evolution of Chinese consonants has been stopped and why there has never been a sound lost in Chinese for thousands of years. These achievements in the study of Chinese phonological history have benefited from the cultural exchange between China and the West from the nineteenth century on.

(b)

Traces of Consonant Clusters Within Chinese Records

Many remnants of the consonant clusters can often be found in texts and ancient documents. The most obvious and abundant materials are the XINGSHENG characters (形聲字 phonetic compounds, or translated as phono-semantic compounds, ideophone words, picto-phonetic character, ideogram plus phonetic). In each XINGSHENG character, a half of the character indicates pronunciation, and the other half indicates meaning. When the XINGSHENG characters were first formed, the pronunciation should have been very close between the character itself and its phonetic radicals (聲符). As XINGSHENG characters were used for more than 3,000 years, the pronunciation of the character or its phonetic radicals may have changed. However, by examining the structure of XINGSHENG characters, we can reveal the phonetic sound of that time. We have observed that the same Chinese character had different pronunciations during different time periods, and these changes are also reflected in XINGSHENG compounds. For example, the character 果 (fruit) was pronounced [kl-] in Old Chinese, but people later changed its pronunciation to [k-] in Middle Chinese. The pronunciation [ 果kl-] became the phonetic radicals of other characters in the age of character creation (the period of Old Chinese), such as 裸 ([gl-] naked), because they had a similar pronunciation. Here are a few examples to illustrate the KL-type consonant clusters reflected in the XINGSHENG system: (O.C.= Old Chinese, M.C.= Middle Chinese) fruit 果 O.C. [kl-] > M.C. [k-]: naked 裸 O.C. [gl-]> M.C. [l-] each 各 O.C. [kl-] > M.C. [k-]: road 路 O.C. [gl-]> M.C. [l-] both 兼 O.C. [kl-] > M.C. [k-]: honest 廉 O.C. [gl-]> M.C. [l-] supervisor 監 O.C. [kl-] > M.C. [k-]: blue 藍 O.C. [gl-]> M.C. [l-] drop 降 O.C. [kl-] > M.C. [k-]: thriving 隆 O.C. [gl-]> M.C. [l-] capital city 京 O.C. [kl-] > M.C. [k-]: cool 涼 O.C. [gl-]> M.C. [l-] In these examples, the phonetic radicals always have a similar pronunciation to the XINGSHENG character. Their relationship was established during the OLD Chinese period. 56

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Another example is Shengxun (聲訓). Shengxun is an ancient practice of explaining a character by using a homophone or near homophone. The selected homophone is a character that is pronounced the same (to varying extents) as another character. Here are a few examples: neck 領 O.C.[gl-] > M.C. [l-]: 頸也 O.C.[ kl-] > M.C.[ k-] old 老 O.C.[gl-] > M.C. [l-]: 考也 O.C.[ kl-] > M.C.[ k-] In the previous case, “老[gl-] old” and “考[ kl-] old” have similar pronunciation and the same meaning in OLD Chinese, so they could interpret each other. This phenomenon is called Shengxun (聲訓). Multi-pronunciation words also reflected the pronunciations of Old Chinese. Unlike some languages, where each word may have a unique pronunciation, certain Chinese characters may have more than one pronunciation. For example, tripod 鬲, pronounced 隔 O.C.[ kl-] > M.C.[ k-], also pronounced 歷 O.C.[gl-] > M.C. [l-] volume 卷, O.C.[ kl-] > M.C.[ k-] (居晚切), also pronounced O.C.[gl-] > M.C. [l-] (又力轉切) The phenomenon of multi-pronunciation in Chinese originates from words with the same pronunciation, which later developed into two different pronunciations. For instance, volume 卷 gl- > kl- > k- (has become [juan] today), l- (recorded in ancient document, and the sound is not used today). Phonetic transcription in ancient documents also serves as traces of the ancient language. Scholars have discovered evidence of consonant cluster initials in ancient texts such as “SHUIJINGZHU” (《水經注》26—a work on the ancient geography of China that mapped the Chinese waterways and ancient canals) compiled by Li Daoyuan during the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534 ce), and “SHIJIZHUAN” (《詩集傳》—an annotation of SHIJING 詩經) compiled by Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200). For example, the character “角” was pronounced as [lak] in Zhu Xi’s book. It reflected the sound in Old Chinese: “角” Old Chinese [klak]> Middle Chinese [kak], [lak] in Zhu Xi’s language. Let’s examine another trace: loanwords of ancient times (通假字). Loanword refers to a character that acquires a new meaning because it is pronounced the same as another word, allowing it to be used as a substitute. Wu Qichang (吴其昌 1904–1944), a scholar from the early twentieth century, proposed the [ml-] consonant cluster from loanwords of ancient-time materials. In recent years, scholars have also discovered traces of the consonant cluster initials in loanword readings from unearthed documents.27 For example, “惠[hui] benefit” and “慧[hui] wisdom” are often used as loanwords and can replace each other due to their same (or similar) pronunciations. In addition, LIANMIAN words (連綿詞, or LIANMIAN doublets) in ancient Chinese are another important proof for reconstructing consonant cluster initials. For example, 孔 (kong, meaning “holes”) [klong] (holes 窟窿 [kulong] is a derived form from O.C. 孔 [klong]), and 角 (jiao, meaning “corners”) [klak] (corners 角落 [kaklak] is a derived form from O.C. 角 [klak]), etc. 窟窿 [kulong] and 角落 [kaklak] are LIANMIAN doublets that originate from the consonant cluster [kl-]. Clues from ancient and modern dialects in Chinese also provide evidence for reconstructing consonant clusters. Prof. Paul Fu-mien Yang (楊福綿) of Georgetown University, in the United States proposed a paper titled “Reconstruction of the Archaic Chinese sk-, skl- Consonants” 57

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where he found traces of the cluster initials in the MIN (闽方言) dialect. Mei Tsu-lin (梅祖麟), an American scholar from Cornell University, published the paper “Study on the [s-] Clusters in the Proto Northern MIN Dialects”, and Zhao Bingzhen (趙秉璇), a linguist of Shanxi, China, conducted a study on the JIN dialect (晉方言), all revealing remnants of consonant clusters in Old Chinese.

(c)

Clues From Cognate Words in the Sino-Tibetan Language Family

The Chinese language is a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family, which shares an etymological origin. Although modern Chinese dialects do not have any consonant cluster initials at all, other languages in this family, such as Tibetan, Burmese, and Miao-Yao, have preserved consonant clusters to varying degrees. This is the most powerful evidence for the existence of consonant clusters in Old Chinese. For example: Consonant cluster in QIANG language (羌語): 心 heart, Mandarin [xin], Mawo Dialect 麻窩話、Luhua Dialect 蘆花話 [sti:mi] 二 two, Mandarin [er], Mawo Dialect、Luhua Dialect [ɣnə] Consonant cluster in Atu Dialect of Yi language (彝語阿都話): 九 nine, Mandarin [jiu], Atu Dialect [gbu] Consonant cluster in Geshizha Dialect of Ganzi county, Sichuan province (四川甘孜州格什 扎話): 角 corner, Mandarin [jiao], Geshizha Dialect [grə] If we could find that consonant clusters existed in the same language family, only two assumptions could be inferred: 1. There was no consonant cluster originally and some languages in the family developed consonant clusters at a later period. 2. All languages in this family had consonant clusters originally, but only the Chinese language lost them over time. So which one is more realistic? If we consider factors such as the universal rules of phonological evolution, the geographical environment in which the language is located (secluded region or urban area), the frequency of language contact (a language is in contact with many peoples or always isolated?), I believe that the answer would become more obvious. Early scholars could only provide some clues for the existence of the consonant cluster or make assumptions about the possibility of their presence. However, in the twentieth century, studies began to focus on the structural types and forms in which consonant clusters existed. In 1981, a comprehensive and systematic study was conducted, incorporating all Chinese characters into a consonant cluster system. This study was made possible by scholars such as Yan Xuequn (嚴學 宭), a professor at Wuhan University, China, who published a paper on “The Traces of the Consonant Clusters in Proto Chinese”, and Chu Chia Ning (竺家寧), a professor at National Cheng Chi University, Taipei, who published a paper on “Research on the Consonant Clusters in Old Chinese”. 58

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So far, several types of consonant cluster reconstruction have been proposed by scholars, but two types have been confirmed by most researchers:

(a)

Consonant Clusters with Dental Lateral [-l-] (or Dental Flap [-r-])

We can examine the phonetic structure of the following characters: 剝 嵐 龐 獺 豊 龍 莒 泣

Old Ch. [pl-]＞Middle Ch. [p-]: Old Ch. [bl-]＞Middle Ch. [l-]: Old Ch. [br-]＞Middle Ch. [b-]: Old Ch. [thl-]＞Middle Ch. [th-]: Old Ch. [dl]＞Middle Ch. [l-]: Old Ch. [l]＞Middle Ch. [l-]: Old Ch. [kl-]＞Middle Ch. [k-]: Old Ch. [khl-]＞Middle Ch. [kh-]:

彔 風 龍 賴 體 童 呂 立

Old Ch. [bl-]＞Middle Ch. [l-] Old Ch. [pl-]＞Middle Ch. [p-] Old Ch. [bl-]＞Middle Ch. [l-] Old Ch. [dl]＞Middle Ch. [l-] Old Ch. [thl-]＞Middle Ch. [th-] Old Ch. [dhl-]＞ Middle Ch. [dh-] Old Ch. [gl-]＞Middle Ch. [l-] [l-]: Old Ch. [gl-]＞Middle Ch. [l-]

Another example of consonant clusters is the word “行李 baggage”. Its early meaning was “messenger with luggage”. The original writing form of this word was “行使 messenger”, but over time, the character “使” was replaced by “李” due to their similar pronunciation. This phenomenon is called “JIAJIE 假借” (loanword) by traditional scholars. As for the meaning of the word “行李”, it has changed from “messenger” to “baggage” in recent centuries. But a question arises: How was the pronunciation of the character “使” ([shi] in Mandarin) similar to that of the character “李” ([li] in Mandarin)? The reasons are as follows: first, the phonetic symbol of “李[li]” was “子[tsi]”, and the pronunciations of the two characters in Old Chinese were “李”[dzli>li] and “子”[tsi]; both sounds were very close. Second, the phonetic symbol of “使” [shi] was “吏” [li], and the pronunciations of the two character in Old Chinese were “使[sli>si]” and “吏[li]”; both sounds were very close. These similar pronunciations in the two sets of words caused the substitution over time, with “行使 [O.C. sli]” being replaced by “行李 [O.C. dzli]” in its written form. Another example is the word “角 corner”, which was pronounced [klak] in Old Chinese and later changed to [kak] in Middle Chinese. The LIANMIAN word (連綿詞) “角落 [kak lak] corner” used today is a variant form of “角 corner”. It preserves a residual trace of the original pronunciation of “角[klak]”. Another residual trace can be found in the character “龣” (the variant writing form of “角”), where its phonetic symbol (phonetic radical) is “彔[l-]” (at the right side of this character), which is derived from [kl- > l-]. The scholar Zhu Xi (朱熹 1130–1200) labeled the pronunciation of the word “角” as [l-], in his famous work “SHIJIZHUAN” (詩集傳), providing evidence of the Old Chinese pronunciation of “角[klak>lak]”.

(b)

Consonant Clusters with [s-]

In addition to the [-l-] cluster, another cluster accepted by most scholars is [s-]. We can observe the relationship of the character 支 [O.C. sk-/M.C. tɕ-] and 妓 [O.C. k-/ M.C. k-], which reflects the cluster type of [sk-]. The character 支 [sk-/tɕ-] is the phonetic symbol (or phonetic radical) of 妓 [k-/k-], and they share a similar pronunciation in Old Chinese. Furthermore, let’s consider the change of consonant cluster sb-(>sβ->s-): 必 must, O.C. [p-]/ M.C. [p-]: “瑟 Musical instrument” O.C. [sb-]> [sβ-] > M.C. [s-] “必[p-]” is the phonetic symbol of “瑟[sb-]” (put beneath it), and they have similar pronunciations in Old Chinese. 59

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The exchanges between Chinese and Western cultures has greatly contributed to the study of various aspects of Old Chinese, including its phonetics. These achievements have made it possible to understand ancient phonology and have improved the research methods of Chinese phonology since the Qing dynasty.

3.  The Application of Phonological Knowledge in Teaching Chinese  as a Foreign Language Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world. Not only does the largest population in China speak Chinese Mandarin, but the language is also spoken in most Southeast Asian countries. Roughly 14% of the global population communicates in Chinese on a daily basis. Learning Chinese is fun and interesting, and it offers many benefits for personal and professional growth. In recent years, teaching Chinese has become a popular career. Starting at the elementary level, foreign students have to learn Chinese Mandarin pinyin (a method of Chinese pronunciation) and Radicals of Chinese Characters. At the next level, students are introduced to the basics of linguistic and philology for more comprehensive studies in later courses. The goal of teaching phonology is for students to understand the language changes and developments from ancient to modern Chinese. Foreign students not only learn the modern customary usage but also need to know why it is used in this way and how it formed in language history. For this reason, Chinese phonology has become a crucial curriculum in Chinese teaching. Here are some examples of how phonology can be applied to Chinese teaching. (1)  Chinese Appellation—the Formation of “爸爸 baba (Dad)” Nowadays, Chinese children call their father “爸 [ba]” or “爹 [da] daddy”. However, these two characters cannot be found in the book “SHUOWEN JIEZI” (說文解字, a classic dictionary by the HAN scholar XUSHEN 許慎). It was not until after the third century that the two Chinese characters “爸” and “爹” appeared in Chinese. So what did Chinese children call their father in the time of Confucius (Old Chinese dated 600 bce to 200 bce)? Why is there no such word as “爸” or “爹” in the Confucius era? Let’s examine some evolution rules of phonology. In ancient Chinese, the word “父 [fu]” was used for “father”. Why was a father called “父 [fu]” not “爸 or 爹”? Why were Chinese fathers not called “papa” in ancient times, just like in other civilizations today? The answer can be revealed in the history of phonology. Chinese scholar QIAN DAXIN (錢大昕 1728–1804) of the Qing dynasty made a great discovery in the evolution of pronunciation over a long period of time. He believed that the current [f] sound was originally the [p] sound in ancient times. When his theory is applied to this case, the initial consonant of “父[f-]” originated from the Old Chinese [p-]. Another rule in the evolution of Chinese phonology is that today’s [u] vowel was originally pronounced as [a] sound. Therefore, “父 [fu]” in Old Chinese should be pronounced as [pa]. When these two rules are applied in the pronounce of the character “父”, we can tell students that in ancient China, children also called their father [papa], just like in many other languages in the world. Another German philologist, Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (1785–1863), also put forward the same theory that English [f] came from [p]. The word father came from the Old English pater. The evolution of [p>f] is a universal principle of languages. The character “父” was used in the era of Confucius. As mentioned previously, it was pronounced as [pa] before the third century. After the third century, a new character “爸 [pa]” was

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created by adding the sound symbol “巴” below the “父”. Since the pronunciation of character “父” changed to [fu], it was no longer suitable for recording the appellation of father [pa]. There are many ways of saying father in Chinese dialects, and some of them are not [pa] or [papa] but [ta] or [tata]. They added the symbol “多” ([ta] in Old Chinese, which later changed to [tuo] in Mandarin) below the original character “父”, resulting in the creation of a new character “爹”. Here is the evolution of the Chinese word father: “父” Old Chinese [pa]＞Mandarin[fu] “father” “爸” 父+巴 pa＝爸, Mandarin “pa, papa” (refer to English “papa”) “爹” 父+多 ta＝爹, ancient Chinese “ta, tata” (>southern dialect [tia] >Mandarin [tie]) (refer to English “daddy”, “dada, dad” as variants) There are many variants of [pa] (father or elder) in Chinese dialects: 爸 pa, 爸爸 papa, 老爸 lao pa, 阿爸 a pa (lao-, a- are prefixes) 爹 ta>tie, 老爹 lao tie, 阿爹 a tie, 阿大 a ta, 達達 tata, 大大 tata There are cognates of 父、爸[pa] and 爹[ta>tia>tie]. Teaching Chinese becomes easy and effective when we reference the traits in the evolution of Chinese phonology into modern Chinese speaking and writing. Once the distinctive characteristic or property of Chinese words and their pronunciation are identified through Chinese phonology, the same rules can be applied to other similar Chinese words. This knowledge makes Chinese teaching much more efficient. (2)  Phonology and Chinese “Tea Culture” For centuries, tea has been the most common drink for every Chinese household. People believe tea is a major source of health and consider it a necessity in their daily lives. Due to its popularity, Western students often have a strong interest in tea and any information related to tea, including the Chinese character “茶 tea”. There are two cognate words for tea in Chinese: “茶[cha]” and “荼[tu]”. Over a thousand years ago, Chinese ancestors discovered a bitter and cool herbal plant, which they called “荼 [tu]”. They later fermented the leaves of “荼[tu]” and turned it into a mellow and relaxing drink. They further refined their fermentation techniques and produced a new type of fine drink, which they called “茶 [cha]”. Eventually, many varieties of fine tea were produced. The word for tea was written as “茶 [cha]”, slightly differentiating it from “荼[tu]”. This is the story of the birth of the word “茶 tea”. Furthermore, the tea ceremony (茶道) and tea culture developed during the Tang dynasty. This tea culture gradually spread from China to the rest of the world. Up to the present time, the words used to refer to tea in all languages originated from Chinese. In Korean, the “tea” in “tea house 茶房다방” is pronounced [da]; in the Min dialect of China (spoken in Fujian and Taiwan), and in French, “tea” is pronounced as [de] and [thé], respectively; in English, “tea” is pronounced as [ti:], which evolved from the ancient Chinese cognate words “茶[cha]” and “荼[tu]”. From this example, we can observe the gradual shift of the low vowel [a] to the high vowel [i] in languages.

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[a]>[e]>[i] This pronunciation shift in the Chinese language coincides with the change of vowels in the English language, known as the “Great Vowel Shift” in English history. This similar change is considered a language universal in the study of speech. How did the pronunciation change from [da] to [de] and eventually to [ti]? The Chinese “荼 Mandarin [tu], 茶 Mandarin [cha]” were originally from the same pronunciation of [da]. In modern Chinese, the word “茶” retains the original final [-a], while the word “荼” retains the original initial [t-]. They still reveal their homologous relationship. The evolution of the words for “tea” is as follows: “荼, 茶” Old Chinese[da]> Southern Min dialect[de], French [thé] >English tea[ti] >Mandarin [茶cha], [荼tu] By summarizing the examples we have described and introduced, we can see how Chinese phonology plays an important role in language teaching and cultural exchanges. Understanding the principles of Chinese phonology can greatly enhance the teaching and learning of the language and facilitate cross-cultural communication.

Notes 1 Six Dynasties is a collective term for the six Han-ruled dynasties in China during the periods of the Three Kingdoms, Jin dynasty, and Southern and Northern dynasties. Period 220–589 ce. 2 Using Chinese characters treated as phonetic symbols to express initial consonants, such as 幫p-, 滂ph-, 並b-, 明m-. 3 Dividing Chinese pronunciation into four categories according to finals, such as 蕭sieu, 宵sjɛu, 肴ɣau, 豪hɑu, [ɑ] is more open then [a]. 4 For example, “東董送屋” are pronounced with the tones PING, SHANG, QU, RU, respectively. 5 An outstanding Chinese philologist and geographer of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties 1613–1682. 6 The word pronounced with ending -p, -t, -k. 7 The word pronounced with ending -b, -d, -g in Old Chinese. 8 The word pronounced with ending -m, -n, -ng. 9 There are 206 rhyme categories in the rhyme book “GUANGYUN 廣韻”. 10 The Classic of Poetry, also Shijing or Shih-ching, translated variously as the Book of Songs, Book of Odes, or simply known as the Odes or Poetry (Chinese: 詩; pinyin: Shī) is the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry, comprising 305 works dating from the eleventh to seventh centuries bc (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Poetry). 11 Ideogram plus phonetic (one of the Six Methods 六書 of forming Chinese characters) also known as a phonogram, phonetic compound, or picto-phonetic character. A type of character that combines a semantic element (called a radical) with a phonetic element intended to remind the reader of the word’s pronunciation (Britannica.com). 12 Guangyun 廣韻 is a character dictionary from the Northern Song period 北宋 (960–1126). The characters are arranged according to pronunciation and in rhyme groups. It was compiled by Chen Pengnian 陳彭年 on the basis of earlier rhyme dictionaries, Qieyun 切韻 and Tangyun 唐韻 (“An Encyclopedia on Chinese History, Literature and Art”). 13 From about the sixth century ce through to twelfth century ce. 14 One of the 206 rhyme groups in GUANGYUN. 15 There are ten rhyme sections of Archaic Chinese (OLD Chinese) in GU’s system. For example, “GE section 歌部, Yu section 魚部”, and others. 16 1735–1815, a Chinese philologist of the Qing dynasty. He made great contributions to the study of historical Chinese phonology and is known for his annotated edition of Shouwen Jiezi《說文解字注》. 17 Compiled in Duan’s work: “LIU SHU YIN YUN BIAO”（六書音韻表）.

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Chinese Phonology and Cross-Cultural Exchange in History 18 Compiled in Duan’s work: “LIU SHU YIN YUN BIAO” (六書音韻表). 19 He was a famous scholar of the Qing dynasty and was the 68th-generation descendant of Confucius. 20 Joseph Edkins (艾約瑟 1823–1905) was a British Protestant missionary who spent 57 years in China, 30 of them in Beijing. As a sinologue, he specialized in Chinese religions. He was also a linguist, a translator, and a philologist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Edkins). 21 Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren (1889–1978) was a Swedish sinologist and linguist who pioneered the study of Chinese historical phonology using modern comparative methods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Bernhard_Karlgren). 22 Lin Yutang was a renowned Hokkien Chinese writer, translator, linguist, philosopher, and inventor (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Yutang). 23 A linguist of Shanxi, China. 24 Professor of Chinese linguistics, National Cheng-Chi University, Taipei. Previously, he was president of the Chinese Phonology Association (Taiwan). 25 The character 勻 gr- is the phonetic radical of 均 k-. 26 According to the research of Professor Chen Xin Xiong (陳新雄, professor of Taiwan Normal University), there are consonant clusters such as “慮 *gl > l, 子 *tsl > ts” reflected in “SHUIJINGZHU”. 27 For example, the Mawangdui (馬王堆) silk book, unearthed at Changsha, China, from a tomb of Han dynasty, in 1973.

References Chao, Yuen Ren 趙元任, Luo, Changpei 羅常培 and Li, Fang-Kuei 李方桂, trans. 1940. Études sur la phonologie chinoise《中國音韻學研究》by Bernhard Karlgren (高本漢), 1915–1926, Shanghai: The Commercial Press (2nd edition in 1948), Taipei: The Commercial Press. Chen, Pengnian 陳彭年. 1008. Guangyun 廣韻. Chu, Chia Ning 竺家寧. 1977. The Phonemic System of Si Sheng Den Zi (《四聲等子》之音位系統), 《木 鐸》第 5, 6 期合刊, Taipei 臺北, pp. 351–368. Chu, Chia Ning 竺家寧. 1983. The Clusters with Glottal Stop in Old Chinese (上古漢語帶喉塞音的複聲 母), 《檀國大學論文集》, Seoul, Korea 韓國漢城: Dangook University, pp. 57–79. Chu, Chia Ning 竺家寧. 1984. The Clusters with Dental Plosive in Old Chinese (上古漢語帶舌尖塞音的複 聲母), 《中國學術年刊》第6期, Taipei 臺北, pp. 59–80. Chu, Chia Ning 竺家寧. 1986. The Phonemic System of ‘Gu Jin Yun Hui Ju Yiao’ (《古今韻會舉要的語音 系統》), Taipei 學生書局, 臺北: Student Book Co., Ltd (1990, 07日本駒澤大學譯為日文本發行, 列入 《外國語部研究紀要第19號第二分冊》, 譯者: 木村晟, 松本丁俊). Chu, Chia Ning 竺家寧. 1990. “The Clusters with Dental Liquid in Old Chinese” (上古漢語帶舌尖流音的 複聲母), Journal of National Chung Cheng University《國立中正大學學報》第一卷第一期, 人文分 冊, pp. 27–53. Chu, Chia Ning 竺家寧. 1991. Chinese Phonology《聲韻學》, National Institute of Compilation and Translation 國立編譯館, Textbooks for Universities Designated by the Ministry of Education 部編大學用書, Taipei: Wu-Nan Book Inc. Chu, Chia Ning 竺家寧. 2006. “The Development of Chinese Initials from the 14th to the 17th Centuries” (十四至十七世紀漢語聲母的發展), in Proceedings of the 18th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics, Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington, June 23–25, pp. 23–25. Chu, Chia Ning 竺家寧. 2009. “Correspondence of the Entering Tone of Transliterated Words in ‘Da Tan Xi YU Ji’” (《大唐西域記》音譯詞入聲字的對應規律), presented at 國際中國語言學學會, Seventeenth Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics, IACL–17, CRLAO, EHESS, Paris, July 2–4. Chu, Chia Ning 竺家寧. 2009. “The Phonological Phenomenon Reflected in the ‘Da Tan Xi YU Ji’” (《大 唐西域記》反映的聲韻現象), presented at the 6th Conference of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL-6), The Institute of Linguistics at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, August 26–28. Chu, Chia Ning 竺家寧. 2013. “The Study of Initial Consonants in the Ming Dynasty” (明代的聲母研究), 歐洲漢語語言學會議 (EACL-8), 法國高等社會科學院 EHESS 主辦, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris 巴黎.

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Chu Chia Ning Chu, Chia Ning 竺家寧. 2014. “The Rhythm Structure of ‘SHIJING’ the Book of Songs” (由上古音看詩經 的韻律結構), 第47 屆國際漢藏語暨語言學會議 ICSTLL47 (國際漢藏語會議), 雲南師範大學漢藏 語研究院承辦, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, China 昆明. Chu, Chia Ning 竺家寧. 2015. The Voyage of Chinese Phonology《聲韻之旅》, Taipei: Wu-Nan Book Inc (2nd edition in 2016). Duan, Yucai 段玉裁. 1815. Liu Shu Yin Yun Biao 六書音韻表. Edkins, Joseph. 1876. Introduction to the Study of the Chinese Characters, Hertford: Trübner & Co. He, Changqun 賀昌群譯, trans. 1934.《中國語言學研究》Philology and Ancient China. Oslo u. a. 1926 by Bernhard Karlgren, Beijing: The Commercial Press. Karlgren, Bernhard. 1922. “The Reconstruction of Ancient Chinese”, T’oung Pao, 21(1), pp. 1–42. Karlgren, Bernhard. 1940. “Grammata Serica: Script and Phonetics in Chinese and Sino-Japanese”, The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 12, pp. 1–471. Karlgren, Bernhard. 1954. “Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese”, The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 26, pp. 211–367. Karlgren, Bernhard. 1957. “Grammata Serica Recensa”, The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 29, pp. 1–332. Li, Fang-Kuei 李方桂. 1943. “The Hypothesis of a Pre-glottalized Series of Consonants in Primitive Tai” (古台語帶前喉塞音聲母的假設), 《中央研究院歷史語言研究所集刊》(BIHP), 11, pp. 177–188. Li, Fang-Kuei 李方桂. 1945. “Some Old Chinese Loanwords in the Tai Languages” (台語中的古漢語借字), Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 8, pp. 333–342. Li, Fang-Kuei 李方桂. 1954. “Consonant Clusters in Tai” (台語中的複輔音), Language, 30, pp. 368–379. Li, Fang-Kuei 李方桂. 1970. “Notes on Archaic Chinese Initials” (中國上古音聲母問題), Journal of Chinese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong《香港中文大學中國文化研究所學報》, 3(2), 511–519. Li, Fang-Kuei 李方桂. 1971. “Studies on Archaic Chinese Phonology” (上古音研究), Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies《清華學報》新, 9卷(1–2), pp. 1–61. Mei, Tsu-lin 梅祖麟 and Norman, Jerry. 1971. “試論幾個閩北方言中的來母s-聲字”, Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies 《清華學報》新9卷(1–2), 96–105. Ramsey, S. Robert. 1987. The Languages of China, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zhang, Shilu 張世祿, trans. 1933. Sound and Symbol in China 《中國語與中國文》by Bernhard Karlgren, 1923, Oxford University Press. Shanghai: The Commercial Press. Zhao, Bingxuan 趙秉璇 and Chu, Chia Ning 竺家寧, eds. 1998. 《古漢語複聲母論文集》(Collection of Thesis of Consonant Clusters in Old Chinese), Beijing: Beijing Language and Culture University Press.

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4 MONOSYLLABICITY OF CHINESE IN A QUADRIPARTITE CLASSIFICATION OF WORLD LANGUAGES Exceptions Explained Chen Weiheng Jiangsu Normal University

1.

Introduction: The Monosyllabicity Debate

In linguistic literature, mention of the term “monosyllabic language(s)” is almost always in association with the Chinese language. As Kennedy (1951) suggests, the earliest English writing about the monosyllabic myth of the language could be the following remarks in the seventeenth century by John Webb, not without love and appreciation, in his An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language: Our Chinique is a Language that consists (and it is singular therein) all of Monosyllables, not one Disyllable, or Polysyllable being found in it. . . . It was Nature that from God taught them their Language. Later, however, Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806) wrote with pride and prejudice in his Mithridates oder Allgemeine Sprachkunde: It is easy to perceive, that languages so barren as these, which convey only the most necessary fundamental ideas, unconnected and unblended among themselves, must open a wide field, even in common life, for obscurity and ambiguity, while for scientific conceptions they are absolutely unfit; hence the people who speak them, remain always children in understanding, and advance little beyond the accomplishment of mechanical adroitness. Whatever efforts the Chinese may make, so long as he adheres to his language, it is entirely impossible for him to appropriate the arts and sciences of the Europeans.1 For a long time, scholars and missionaries who came after him held more or less the same impressions of the Chinese language. Among them were such German linguists as Johan Gottfried

DOI: 10.4324/9781315167800-6

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Eichhorn (1807), Franz Bopp (1833–1852), and Wilhelm Humboldt (1836). While mentioning the possible primitiveness of the language, they also mentioned its simplicity and efficiency. It was not until the 1950s that linguists began to debate the previous impression, in particular linguists with a better or even native mastery of the language.2 While Kennedy (1951)3 doubted and denied the “Monosyllabic Myth” (a term he coined), Chao (1968: 139) warned that “the socalled ‘monosyllabic myth’ is in fact one of the truest myths in Chinese mythology”. The Kennedy-versus-Chao debate has since featured prominently in Chinese linguistics, with each side having its own supporters. While most linguists go for Kennedy’s view and even deny monosyllabicity as a valid linguistic term or perspective, some choose to side with Chao and find “monosyllabicity” a term of more trustworthiness and significance in probing the true and deeper nature of Chinese and its related languages. Among them, Tongqiang Xu is noted for his series of theoretical works4 on the decisive role that the meaningful monosyllables have played in the synchronic and diachronic aspects of the language or even the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, which has “a tendency towards monosyllabism”.5 Pulleyblank (2000) also maintained that the “characterization of Chinese as monosyllabic is not far off the mark”. The Kennedy-versus-Chao debate can be characterized as a monosyllabicity-versuspolysyllabicity debate, centering on the question, Which syllabicity can be used to describe the Chinese language? In fact, both sides have said something right about the syllabicities of a language’s lexical items, namely, regularity in the choice of syllable numbers for one lexical item (a word or morpheme). Their main difference is that one stresses a simple one-to-one regularity and the other a complex x-to-one (x stands for an unknown or flexible number of syllables). This chapter intends to contribute a further analysis on the opposing views of the debate and an introduction of my studies during the last two decades6 on syllabicity of world languages, on monosyllabicity, and if logical, other N-syllabicities (e.g., di-, tri-, or x-syllabicity7) of world languages as a whole, which are formerly randomly included under the heading of “multi-” or “polysyllabicities”.8 This approach to human language classification was implied by W. Humboldt9 in the early nineteenth century but later denied or given up possibly due to difficulties mentioned in Arlotto (1968). As we have found, each language is regularly N-syllabic for the number of syllables its words or morphemes choose to use. The Chinese lexicon is regularly monosyllabic at underlying morphemic levels and polysyllabic (chiefly disyllabic and trisyllabic) at surface word levels. All the exceptions can be explained as not real or valid. Regular correspondences can also be found for lexicons of other languages and families of languages which are of the same or different syllabicity.

2. Analyzing the Debate: Is the Monosyllabicity of the Chinese Language Denied? In this section, we are to analyze the Kennedy-versus-Chao debate from four perspectives where the two sides of the debate contradict each other in placing their emphasis in defining the syllabicity of the Chinese language, namely, (1) morpheme versus word, as the discussed linguistic unit; (2) ancient versus modern, as the discussed time dimension of the language; (3) written versus spoken, as the discussed form or style of the language; (4) love versus hatred, as the attached feelings for the syllabicity of the language; and (5) logical versus illogical as a reasonability judgment for the syllabicity of the language.

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2.1

Morpheme Versus Word

Morphemes and words are units of different levels in language. The former is lower in hierarchy than the latter. Words can be further analyzed into morphemes, but not the other way around. People in support of the monosyllabicity of Chinese focus more on morphemes instead of words. As Chao (1968: 139) said: The nearest equivalent to tzyh as a linguistic unit is the morpheme, which is usually defined as the smallest unit in the language which has meaning. This is the sense in which Chinese has been called, and to a large extent is, a monosyllabic language—a language in which every syllable has a meaning. Bernard Karlgren (1962: 15) expressed the same idea in his Sound and Symbol in Chinese, though he did not use the modern linguistic term “morpheme” but “simple words”10 instead: From the absolute point of view, considered by itself, Chinese has this special character, that, when we analyze the sentences into the simple words of which they consist (either as independent words or as members of compounds), these words are found to be fixed monosyllables. Like a set of building-blocks of the same size and pattern, Chinese words are assembled into the structure called a sentence. Likewise, due to lack of or unfamiliarity with the linguistic term during their time, scholars such as Finck, Meillet and Cohen, and Li11 may have explained the same idea in slightly different terms. In contrast with those outlined in the previous section, scholars with the view that Chinese is polysyllabic focus more on words than on morphemes. Kennedy (1951) belongs to this group of people. His central idea is that, in everyday communication, modern Chinese words are almost as polysyllabic as English.

2.2 Ancient Versus Modern As Kennedy (1951) asked, It would seem that ordinary reasoning on the basis of the commonly-known facts should lead to the conclusion that a substantial proportion of the Chinese vocabulary is polysyllabic. Why then is the conclusion not drawn by those whose knowledge of the language is especially complete? As he implied, the more ancient Chinese is, the more monosyllabic its vocabulary. As its history of development indicates, there is a tendency for Chinese vocabulary to develop in a direction of increasing polysyllabicity. Eminent scholars like Bernard Karlgren did not delineate a clear division between ancient and modern or today’s Chinese. The language may appear more monosyllabic when the constitutive parts of words are traced back to their etymological origins, and each syllable of a polysyllabic word has its own meaning. However, this may not be true in the minds of contemporary language users.

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2.3 Written Versus Spoken C

Once we see that what ultimately makes a single idea into a single word is merely the way in which it is written, problems concerning the monosyllabic nature of the chinese language evaporate. for chinese writes a separate and distinct symbol for each syllable. When spoken, however, the syllables of a polysyllabic word will normally have to be grouped together as a unit.

2.4 Love Versus Hatred S

E T

2.5

Logical Versus Illogical

Logic, good or bad, can also influence one’s stance. As it happens, people sometimes choose to argue for monosyllabicity or polysyllabicity of the chinese language according to their understanding of logic. In trying to arrive at a general linguistic definition for monosyllabism,12 Arlotto (1968) finally questioned the appropriateness of calling chinese or any other language “monosyllabic”, by considering “the status of the single syllable” in the language and “its relationship to the general linguistic concepts of ‘word’ and ‘morpheme’”. as he wrote the following: N

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sense. However, it appears that other languages deal with units of a different nature such as words, which are not connected with a simple syllable count.13 (note: the words are bolded by the present writer for emphasis.) It is worthwhile to note the word “seems”, which implies not only modesty and caution but also that the idea is not well grounded. however reasonable, arlotto’s conclusions remain only random guesses, lacking supporting evidence from world languages. another thing to note is that arlotto did not mention “morphemes” but “words”. T (1) how does one explain those non-monosyllabic exceptions? (2) can other languages be judged in the same or similar ways? (3) Do we have disyllabic, trisyllabic, and other n-syllabic languages as well, if we have monosyllabic languages? (4) Does that mean that there is a regular match between the words or morphemes and syllables in human language? In the next section, we answer the questions and show that there is indeed “a simple syllable count” between units of different natures, sound units as syllable, and meaning units as morphemes. not only is chinese, without exception, monosyllabic, but other languages are also contrastively disyllabic, trisyllabic, or n-syllabic. a simple and regular correspondence between syllables and morphemes (or even words) does exist.

3.

Chinese as an Exactly Monosyllabic Language for Its Root Morphemes: Exceptions Explained

When the lexical units of chinese are reduced to the minimal meaning unit (morpheme), the one-to-one simple match between morpheme and syllable as the defining feature of a monosyllabic language is clear. Due to their unique paths of linguistic development, the following nonmonosyllabic exceptions are not real exceptions (chen 2011).

3.1

Loanwords or Morphemes

In the history of the development of chinese, in particular through contact with foreign languages, there are some polysyllabic loanwords or morphemes which allow no further morphemic analysis in chinese. examples are boli (玻璃 glass),14 fotuo (佛陀 buddha), qiaokeli (巧克力 chocolate), makesi (马克思 Marx), Jialifuniya (加利福尼亚 california). These loanwords might have been nativized in their sound form and meaning to different degrees and may look like a word or morpheme of native origin. still, they can never be regarded as native. as they are not native, they do not count as exceptions to the monosyllabic requirement of chinese for a morpheme.

3.2

Compound Words or Morpheme Compounds

P

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C

Due to contractions or connected speech, syllables of compounds may be combined into one. In particular, the unstressed or weak syllable can be combined into the neighboring stressed or strong syllables. for example, historically, shen (婶 the wife of one’s uncle on paternal side) comes from combinations of shu-mu (叔母 uncle on paternal side+mom), jin (妗 the wife of one’s uncle on maternal side) from jiu-mu (舅母 uncle on maternal side+mom). even in everyday Mandarin speech, dou-fu (豆腐 bean+curd) can be heard or pronounced like douf or in the ears of the english touf. T

3.3  Affixed Words Like compounds, the affixed words cannot count as exceptions. The root morpheme and affix morpheme are in essence monosyllabic. Like compounds, too, the unstressed or weak affix syllables can sometimes be combined with the root syllable. for example, ji-er (鸡儿, chick+diminutive suffix)> jier, the diminutives -er in Mandarin or many other dialects are found to be combined with the root into one syllable. The suffixal numerical classifier -个 can also be combined with the numeral word root: 俩