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This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and showcases the long history of Chinese theories of language. 'Ideography' as such assumes extra-linguistic, trans-historical, universal 'ideas' which are an outgrowth of Platonism and thus unique to European history. Classical Chinese discourse assumes that language (and writing) is an arbitrary artifact invented by sages for specific reasons at specific times in history. Language by this definition is an ever-changing technology amenable to historical manipulation; language is not the House of Being, but rather a historically embedded social construct that encodes quotidian human intentions and nothing more. These are incommensurate epistemes, each with its own cultural milieu and historical context. By comparing these two traditions, this study historicizes and decolonializes popular notions about Chinese characters, exposing the Eurocentrism inherent in all theories of ideography. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory will be of significant interest to historians, sinologists, theorists, and scholars in other branches of the humanities.
This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and showcases the long history of Chinese theories of language. 'Ideography' as such assumes extra-linguistic, trans-historical, universal 'ideas' which are an outgrowth of Platonism and thus unique to European history. Classical Chinese discourse assumes that language (and writing) is an arbitrary artifact invented by sages for specific reasons at specific times in history. Language by this definition is an ever-changing technology amenable to historical manipulation; language is not the House of Being, but rather a historically embedded social construct that encodes quotidian human intentions and nothing more. These are incommensurate epistemes, each with its own cultural milieu and historical context. By comparing these two traditions, this study historicizes and decolonializes popular notions about Chinese characters, exposing the Eurocentrism inherent in all theories of ideography. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory will be of significant interest to historians, sinologists, theorists, and scholars in other branches of the humanities.
In Living Chinese Philosophy, Roger T. Ames uses comparative cultural hermeneutics as a method for contrasting classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with classical Chinese "zoetology" ("the art of living"), which is made explicit in the Yijing 易經 or Book of Changes. Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle give us a substance ontology grounded in "being qua being" or "being per se" (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being (telos) and defines the "what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind" (eidos) of any particular thing, thus setting a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for a particular thing to be "this" and not "that." In the Book of Changes, we find a vocabulary that makes explicit cosmological assumptions that are a stark alternative to this substance ontology. It also provides the interpretive context for the canonical texts by locating them within a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of on or "being," we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or "life" and create the neologism "zoe-tology" as "the art of living" (shengshenglun 生生論). This cosmology begins from "living" (sheng 生) itself as the motive force behind change and gives us a world of boundless "becomings": not "things" that are but "events" that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of human "beings" and a process conception of what the author calls human "becomings."
The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Applied Linguistics is written for those wanting to acquire comprehensive knowledge of China, the diaspora and the Sino-sphere communities through Chinese language. It examines how Chinese language is used in different contexts, and how the use of Chinese language affects culture, society, expression of self and persuasion of others; as well as how neurophysiological aspects of language disorder affect how we function and how the advance of technology changes the way the Chinese language is used and perceived. The Handbook concentrates on the cultural, societal and communicative characteristics of the Chinese language environment. Focusing on language use in action, in context and in vivo, this book intends to lay empirical grounds for collaboration and synergy among different fields.
Aspirational and expanding, this book examines contemporary Chinese language and discourse across a spectrum of linguistic layers and genres in diverse social contexts. Addressing issues ranging from the usual focus on language per se, or language use in reaction to the immediate settings, to the connections between properties of texts and social practices (ideologies, stancetaking, power relations, etc.), the updated and exemplary research projects presented in the volume demonstrates a developing trajectory of research in Chinese language and discourse. With its empirical focus and stress on the role of language and discourse in social practice, this important new book discusses various language features as well as gender, stancetaking, and identity in Chinese discourse. This is a vital discussion for anyone interested in contemporary Chinese language and discourse studies. In examination of different layers of language (i.e. from lexical items and sentence structures to discourse features and discursive practices) across different genres of texts, the research projects have drawn on a variety of linguistic approaches and methodologies, including functional linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and various approaches to discourse analysis. Researchers and students of Chinese linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse studies, translation studies, and China studies in general will find this volume an indispensable reference and an enjoyable read.
Examines the Chinese language in its spoken and written forms, presenting the Chinese writing system, its relationship to speech, and the problems associated with literacy in China.
How the medieval study of ancient bronzes influenced the production of knowledge and the making of things in East Asia. This book opens in eleventh-century China, where scholars were the first in world history to systematically illustrate and document ancient artifacts. As Jeffrey Moser argues, the visual, technical, and conceptual mechanisms they developed to record these objects laid the foundations for methods of visualizing knowledge that scholars throughout early modern East Asia would use to make sense of the world around them. Of the artifacts these scholars studied, the most celebrated were bronze ritual vessels that had been cast nearly two thousand years earlier. While working to make sense of the relationship between the bronzes’ complex shapes and their inscribed glyphs, they came to realize that the objects were “nominal things”—objects inscribed with names that identified their own categories and uses. Eleventh-century scholars knew the meaning of these glyphs from hallowed Confucian writings that had been passed down through centuries, but they found shocking disconnects between the names and the bronzes on which they were inscribed. Nominal Things traces the process by which a distinctive system of empiricism was nurtured by discrepancies between the complex materiality of the bronzes and their inscriptions. By revealing the connections between the new empiricism and older ways of knowing, the book explains how scholars refashioned the words of the Confucian classics into material reality.
This work presents the unpublished and largely unknown writings of the missionary James Scarth Gale, one of the most important scholars and translators in modern Korean history.
Sheldon Pollock’s work on the history of literary cultures in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ broke new ground in the theorization of historical processes of vernacularization and served as a wake-up call for comparative approaches to such processes in other translocal cultural formations. But are his characterizations of vernacularization in the Sinographic Sphere accurate, and do his ideas and framework allow us to speak of a ‘Sinographic Cosmopolis’? How do the special typology of sinographic writing and associated technologies of vernacular reading complicate comparisons between the Sankrit and Latinate cosmopoleis? Such are the questions tackled in this volume. Contributors are Daehoe Ahn, Yufen Chang, Wiebke Denecke, Torquil Duthie, Marion Eggert, Greg Evon, Hoduk Hwang, John Jorgensen, Ross King, David Lurie, Alexey Lushchenko, Si Nae Park, John Phan, Mareshi Saito, and S. William Wells.