Research Area D Language Flows (D14)

Project Leaders: Rudolf G. Wagner, Nicolae Cristian Statu
Project Members: Ivana Gubic, Thomas Wang

While language normally serves as the basic medium of cultural transfer – it can facilitate it, hinder it, distort it – the present project shifted the focus on language as the very object of cultural transfer: it concentrated on the flow of linguistic knowledge between cultures, and specifically on the adoption of literary Chinese (wenyan, kanbun, hanmun) as a high prestige linguistic variety in pre-modern East Asia. All aspects of the complex flow of knowledge were considered (transfers of institutional framework, instruction practices, canonical texts, cultural “experts”), with a focus on the recreation and transformation of lexical fields.
Language belongs to the basic infrastructure of processes of cultural contact and transfer and thus plays a crucial role in all aspects of the shifting asymmetrical flows which form the object of the Cluster’s research – by supporting or hindering them, facilitating or distorting them. The main contribution of the present project to the Cluster’s research agenda consisted of shifting the focus on language itself as the very object of cultural transfer and concentrating on the flow of linguistic knowledge between cultures. Within the wide field thus defined, the project dealt with a phenomenon of paramount importance for pre-modern cultures, the institutionalization and evolution of academic, literary linguistic varieties (“classical” languages) – and focused specifically on the case of Literary Chinese and its career as a high prestige language in pre-modern East Asia.
Over the course of the Han dynasty (traditional dates 202 BC – AD 220) Literary Chinese emerged as a linguistic variety distinct from both Ancient Chinese (or Old Chinese) and spoken Chinese (vernacular). By the mid second century AD it was bound to a core corpus of canonical texts and it acquired a well defined grammatical and lexical basis and a standardized system of writing. A language of culture and administration in the Chinese empires through the centuries, Literary Chinese has spread very early to neighboring cultures (Japan, Korea, Vietnam), where it has been adopted and has served a similar purpose until modern times. Concretely, the project focused on various aspects of the resulting flows of a complex array of institutions, practices, and objects associated with the study of this linguistic variety in its original setting, such as textbooks, learning aids, lexica, canonical texts, curricula, academic institutions (the imperial academy and later on private academies) and the system of imperial examinations. It also tackled the dynamics of these flows, which have likewise been complex, involving waves on intensive direct contact associated with such diverse phenomena as the spread of Buddhism or the export of Neo-Confucian ethics, as well as long periods of independent evolution.