“Chinese Writing and Lexicography in Medieval China” (Announcement of a Doctoral School at the Department of Languages and Cultures, Ghent University) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Medieval ways of character formation in Chinese manuscript culture
Scripta 6, 2014
Traditional Chinese scholarship understood the principles of character formation according to the six scripts (liu shu 六書) model initially set forth in Eastern Han sources towards the end of the first century CE. Although initially these categories were not intended as etymological principles, in later times they were also used to explain the origin and early development of the script. Even some modern models of the origin of Chinese writing, which generally stem from the critique of traditional views, rely on the concept of liu shu as they try to determine the actual number of principles at play during the formative stages of the script. All of these models, however, seem to carry the assumption that writing had been created in the distant past and then creation essentially stopped. This paper is an attempt to demonstrate that character creation, that is, the development of orthographic structure, was an ongoing process that involved a number of principles beyond the traditional liu shu categories. Along the same line of thought, I am trying to draw attention to the value of interpreting character forms in terms of their medieval structure, rather than disregarding what we see in an effort to find out what an archaic structure might have been at the time the character first came into being.
Non-Chinese influences in medieval Chinese manuscript culture
Zsombor Rajkai and Ildiko Beller-Hann, eds., Frontiers and Boundaries: Encounters on China's margins, Wiesbade: Harrassowitz, 2012
A look at foreign elements in Dunhuang manuscripts from the 9th-10th centuries, including bookbinding format, paper, orthography and other issues. Dunhuang was a cosmopolitcan city on the Silk Road and a closer analysis of the manuscripts reveals that many of even the Chinese manuscripts were likely to have been written by non-Chinese people. This attests to the multilingual nature of contemporary communities and, from our modern point of view, to the fluidity of concepts such as literacy, ethnicity, language.
The following bibliography is a byproduct of the named authors’ article on “Northwestern Medieval Chinese” published in The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics (ECLL). In its current form it primarily covers publications in Chinese, English, French, German and Japanese. It will be expanded and corrected in the future – any comments are welcome. Sven Osterkamp, Bochum [sven.osterkamp@rub.de] Christoph Anderl, Ghent [christoph.anderl@ugent.be] For producing this second expanded draft version, many thanks for corrections and suggestions for additions are due to: CHÉN Huáiyǔ 陈怀宇, D. Neil SCHMID, Kirill SOLONIN and WÁNG Dīng 王丁. Furthermore, special thanks for their generous support in procuring copies of several difficult-to-obtain publications go to TAKEUCHI Yasunori 武内康則 and YOSHIDA Yutaka 吉田豊.
DMCT NEWSLETTER ISSUE #01: DATABASE OF MEDIEVAL CHINESE TEXTS (Version 2022-08-04)
DMCT NEWSLETTER Issue #01, 2022
This is the first “Newsletter” of the project “Database of Medieval Chinese Texts” (DMCT), briefly and informally introducing aspects of the work that have been done during the last couple of years, as well as discussing recent technical innovations and our plans for the near future. The updated version has a ISSN number: 2952-8534
Even more than other recent archaeological fi nds from East Asia, ancient Chinese manuscripts have ignited strong academic excitement. While much attention is focused on the philosophical interpretation of these texts, we are only beginning to explore their social circumstances and modes of production, to relate them to other tomb artifacts alongside which they were buried, and to explain their very physical appearance. According to a not uncommon view, texts with a reception history-e.g., the classics, but also a broad range of recently discovered technical writings that were handed down across generations-represent lineages of writings, with each manuscript being a copy of an earlier one. Yet on closer examination, graphic idiosyncrasies suggest the mutual independence of various written versions of the same text and thus a local, individual mode of textual production where scribes enjoyed considerable freedom in choos ing particular characters to write the intended words. In their written form, texts with a transmission history-among them works of canonical status-do thus not seem fundamentally different from occasional writings without such a history. Compared to administrative writings, for which certain written blueprints existed, they were indeed less, not more, defi ned in their graphic form. This is not surprising if we consider that texts to be transmitted were also texts to be committed to memory; their modes of storage and com mu ni ca tion of knowledge did not entirely depend on the writing system. One necessary step towards the discussion of such manuscripts, and ultimately to their function and nature, is the systematic linguistic analysis of their textual variants. The present paper outlines the methodological preliminaries towards such an analysis and suggests which scenarios of early Chinese manuscript production are plausible according to our present evidence, and which others are not.
Tang Studies, 2018
The fourth workshop continued discussions begun during the 2017 Symposium in Beijing of textuality and materiality of manuscripts and inscriptions produced between the 5th through 10th centuries. It opened with Yang LU's presentation, titled "Textuality and Materiality in Medieval Chinese Studies: Reflections on its Conceptual Framework," which expanded upon the workshop's focus on the textual, material, and environmental contexts for production and consumption of these materials. Within the context of studying medieval inscriptions, Lu defined "textuality" as how texts are constructed to convey particular sets of meanings and "materiality" as the physical expression of the text. He asserted that textuality and materiality are interrelated: when interpreting the text and the object on which it was inscribed, aspects such as the positioning of the text within its physical environment and how the text exists as a material object (regardless of its original intent and Tang Studies, 36. 1, 150-154, 2018
New incarnations of old texts: Traces of a move to a new book form in medieval Chinese manuscripts
Tōhōgaku kenkyū ronshū kankōkai 東方學研究論集刊行會, ed., Takata Tokio kyōju taishoku kinen Tōhōgaku kenkyū ronshū 高田時雄教授退職記念東方學研究論集, Kyoto: Rinsen shoten: 369–389., 2014
This paper looks at medieval Chinese manuscripts from Dunhuang which contain traces of the physical form of earlier copies, thereby evidencing the shift to a new book form. The examples presented here generally corroborate our understanding of the history of the Chinese book, including a strong Central Asian influence during the ninth-tenth centuries. The argument is that appreciating the materiality of manuscripts helps us to understand their social function in medieval society.
The Development of Local Writing in Early Medieval China
A study of the development of biographical and geographical formats and themes in writing about local places starting in the late Han period, and their contribution to the eventual rise of universal gazetteers by the Sui period.