2 - East Asian Early Linguistic Traditions: China; Korea and Japan

Summary

Part 1 (by Peyraube and Chappell): In China reflections on language date back to the fifth century BCE. Interest in language was first metaphysical in nature, focusing on the correspondence between reality and names. Later there were studies about phonology, lexical dialectology, and the prosody of rhymes. Chinese scholars concentrated on the writing system, and the classification and semantic value of the Chinese characters (dictionaries of rhymes). From the twelfth to the thirteenth century CE, grammatical analyses developed, dealing with “empty particles.” Later, philological work compared vernacular registers and older forms of the language (Classical Chinese). Remarkably, there was no interest in China regarding works on the Chinese language composed by western missionaries and sinologists from the sixteenth century onward. These grammars, which describe various dialects and registers, first followed European models. Only in the nineteenth century did better reasoned descriptions of Chinese appear.(by Vovin): This is concerned with the adaptation of the Chinese script to Korean and then of the Korean script to Japanese; it also considers the development of an alphabetic writing system in Korea. The philological Japanese tradition (lexicography and commentaries on Old Japanese texts) is also discussed.