Download Free The Chinese Language In European Texts Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Chinese Language In European Texts and write the review.

This detailed, chronological study investigates the rise of the European fascination with the Chinese language up to 1615. By meticulously investigating a wide range of primary sources, Dinu Luca identifies a rhetorical continuum uniting the land of the Seres, Cathay, and China in a tropology of silence, vision, and writing. Tracing the contours of this tropology, The Chinese Language in European Texts: The Early Period offers close readings of language-related contexts in works by classical authors, medieval travelers, and Renaissance cosmographers, as well as various merchants, wanderers, and missionaries, both notable and lesser-known. What emerges is a clear and comprehensive understanding of early European ideas about the Chinese language and writing system.
"DeFrancis's book is first rate. It entertains. It teaches. It demystifies. It counteracts popular ignorance as well as sophisticated (cocktail party) ignorance. Who could ask for anything more? There is no other book like it. ... It is one of a kind, a first, and I would not only buy it but I would recommend it to friends and colleagues, many of whom are visiting China now and are adding 'two-week-expert' ignorance to the two kinds that existed before. This is a book for everyone." --Joshua A. Fishman, research professor of social sciences, Yeshiva University, New York "Professor De Francis has produced a work of great effectiveness that should appeal to a wide-ranging audience. It is at once instructive and entertaining. While being delighted by the flair of his novel approach, the reader will also be led to ponder on some of the most fundamental problems concerning the relations between written languages and spoken languages. Specifically, he will be served a variety of information on the languages of East Asia, not as dry pedantic facts, but as appealing tidbits that whet the intellectual appetite. The expert will find much to reflect on in this book, for Professor DeFrancis takes nothing for granted." --William S.Y. Wang, professor of linguistics, University of California at Berkeley
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.
Based on Comrie's much-praised The World's Major Languages , this is the first comprehensive guide in paperback to descibe in detail the language families of Eastern Europe, and includes an introduction which surveys the field.
How did word of the Buddha first reach Western ears? Over the centuries, until the first reliable introduction to Buddhism was published in France in 1844, rumors and reports of this oriental idol and his teachings reached the West in haphazard but fascinating ways. A Jesuit missionary traveling with a Thai delegation to the court of Louis XIV spent months at sea with a Buddhist monk and asked him many questions. A Russian ship captain was held captive for three years in Japan and learned about the Buddha from his jailors. A Catholic priest in China dressed like a Confucian gentleman and learned in this way to disparage the Buddha. British army officers on surveys of India struggled to decipher monuments, inscriptions, and statues. Western references to Buddhism extend back to the first years of the third century CE, and during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, European contact with, and writing about, Buddhism was extensive. Because much of this writing is considered wrong today, it is often forgotten or dismissed, but in this anthology Donald S. Lopez Jr. shows their great importance for understanding how our view of the Buddha evolved, from an idol worshipped by heathens to the revered founder of a religion. This fascinating compendium begins with Clement of Alexandria around 200 and ends with the great French scholar Eugene Burnouf in 1844. It can be read as a companion to Lopez s 2013 book From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha (forthcoming in paperback in the same season) or enjoyed on its own for its strange but instructive tales."
An important new book unlocking the words of the Buddha contained in the vast Tibetan canon, one of the main scriptural resources of Buddhism. In the forty-five years the Buddha spent traversing northern India, he shared his wisdom with everyone from beggar women to kings. Hundreds of his discourses, or sutras, were preserved by his followers, first orally and later in written form. Around thirteen hundred years after the Buddha’s enlightenment, the sutras were translated into the Tibetan language, where they have been preserved ever since. To date, only a fraction of these have been made available in English. Questioning the Buddha brings the reader directly into the literary treasure of the Tibetan canon with thoroughly annotated translations of twenty-five different sutras. Often these texts, many translated here in full for the first time, begin with an encounter in which someone poses a question to the Buddha. Peter Skilling, an authority on early Buddhist epigraphy, archaeology, and textual traditions, has been immersed in the Buddhist scriptures of diverse traditions for nearly half a century. In this volume, he draws on his deep and extensive research to render these ancient teachings in a fresh and precise language. His introduction is a fascinating history of the Buddhist sutras, including the transition from oral to written form, the rise of Mahayana literature, the transmission to Tibet, the development of canons, and a look at some of the pioneers of sutra study in the West. Sutras included in this volume are: Four Dharmas Not to Be Taken for Granted; The Benefits of Giving; The Exposition of Four Dharmas; The Merit of the Three Refuges; Four Dharmas Never to Be Abandoned; Advice for Bodhisatva Dharmaketu; Advice for Bodhisatva Jayamati; Sutra Comparing Bodhicitta to Gold; Bodhisatva Maitreya’s Question about the Gift of the Dharma; Four Summaries of the Dharma Spoken to the Naga King Sagara; The Stanza of Dependent Arising; The Heart Formula of Dependent Arising; Prediction of the Boy Brahmasri’s Future Buddhahood; Ksemavati’s Prediction to Future Buddhahood; The City Beggar Woman; An Old Woman’s Questions about Birth and Death; The Questions of Srimati the Brahman Woman; The Questions of the Laywoman Gangottara; Brahma Sahampati’s Question; Advice to King Prasenajit; Passage to the Next Life; Instructions for King Bimbisara; Instructions for King Udayana; Buddhas as Rare as a Grain of Golden Sand; and Predictions on the Eve of the Great Final Nirvana.
The Chinese are among Europe's oldest immigrant communities, and are now, in several countries, among the biggest and, economically, the most powerful, drawing increasing interest from other ethnic minorities, governments, and researchers. This volume opens up and delineates this new field of European overseas Chinese studies, reporting on pioneering research on the Chinese in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain, and exploring the networks, self-organizations, and migration patterns that are the fabric of the Chinese community in Europe, together with the issues of identity, language, integration, and community building that Chinese throughout the continent face.