Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

by Peter Francis Kornicki

Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia is a wide-ranging study of vernacularization in East Asia - not only China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, but also societies that no longer exist, such as the Tangut and Khitan empires. Peter Kornicki takes the reader from the early centuries of the common era, when the Chinese script was the only form of writing and Chinese Buddhist, Confucian, and medical texts spread throughout East Asia, through
the centuries when vernacular scripts evolved, right up to the end of the nineteenth century when nationalism created new roles for vernacular languages and vernacular scripts. Through an examination of oral approaches to Chinese texts, it shows how highly-valued Chinese texts came to be read through the prism
of the vernaculars and ultimately to be translated.

423 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 18, 2018

About the author

Peter Francis Kornicki is the son of a Polish WWII Spitfire pilot and grew up in Malta, Aden, and Cyprus. He entered Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1968 to read Classics but transferred to studying Japanese after one year, taking a first class honours in Japanese with Korean in 1972. He received an MSc in Applied Social Studies, a DPhil in Japanese literature, and a DLitt, all from the University of Oxford, after which he taught at the University of Tasmania, Kyoto University, and the University of Cambridge. He was the President of the European Association of Japanese Studies from 1997 to 2000, a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000, and won the Yamagata Banto Prize in 2013.

Reviews

[G.G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure: the author supervised my graduate studies in the late 1980s, and for his support then, as well as his encouragement of my work ever since, I shall always be grateful. It is not for me to pass judgement on what the author has achieved here; let me say only that it is an awe-inspiring feat of scholarship.

For starters, the author is a gifted linguist and this book is based on extraordinarily wide reading in the languages of East Asia: Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese, as well as several European languages, from English through Italian to Russian. The inclusion of Vietnamese examples in the discussion I found especially interesting.

The book is about "the dissemination, interpretation, vernacularization, and ultimate replacement of Chinese texts in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and other societies on the periphery of China." (p. 21)

By "Chinese texts," the author means texts written in what used to be called Classical or Literary Chinese (wenyan) but is now often referred to as Sinitic. The book begins with an incisive account of just what this language is: "a form of writing that is economical in the sense that it is pared down to the essentials, and it was written to be read with the eyes" (p.18); there was "no oral dimension to wenyan that might have enabled speakers of different languages to communicate with each other orally even in a rough and ready way. But [wenyan] made written communication possible within and between societies for more than two millennia." (p.19)

Therefore, Sinitic produced a ‘script community’ rather than a ‘speech community’. (p.38) For most of the last two millennia…Japan, Korea, and Vietnam were essentially monoglot [not bilingual] societies. As the author argues: Sinitic made it possible for those educated in the language to correspond with one another, “but because there was no common spoken language…a ‘Republic of Letters’ did not develop in East Asia…. There was no equivalent of Cairo, where debate and conversation took place between people from many different parts of the Islamic world, or of the polyglot cities of Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Venice.” (p.299)

In the final section of the book, the author attempts to answer the question of why Sinitic ceased to be the medium for new knowledge, why it was abandoned, and why the vernaculars took over when they did. He concludes:

The death of Sinitic outside China was ultimately linked not so much to the rise of the vernaculars, for they had been rising for centuries, but to the emergence of rival sources of knowledge and of new forms of knowledge that were much in demand, including international law, engineering, medicine, Christianity, and political thought. Sinitic was in fact able to supply some of these new forms of knowledge in the 1850s and 1860s, in the form of Sinitic translations of the Bible and European and American texts on law and medicine published in China. But thereafter, Sinitic translations were replaced by vernacular translations, which were made directly from texts in English and other European languages. People continued to study the classics and to write Sinitic poetry…but the knowledge they sought, the scriptures they read, and the new literature they were stirred by was no longer in Sinitic and was no longer coming from China. (p. 310)

The author states in his introduction that the book is "written for readers with an interest in vernacularization as a global phenomenon and an interest in the forms it took in East Asia" and is not primarily written for specialists in China, Japan, Korea, or Vietnam. (p.2) The reach of the book is a good deal broader than that, and I learnt much from his wide-ranging exploration of "languages, scripts, and Chinese texts in East Asia."

Just to be clear: I read the the hardcover edition of this book (ISBN 978-0-19-879782-1), not the Kindle edition.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book helped me appreciate the role of Sinitc in not just the history of Korean, but the history of Korea itself (and also Japan(ese) and Vietnam(ese), but Korean is my primary area of specialization). For an academic book, it is very readable - I might even call it a page-turner, as I read it much more quickly than I expected to (about 1 month, with most reading done on my morning and evening commutes).

I also really liked the glossary, which includes every single name and title mentioned in the entire book, along with Chinese characters when applicable. I imagine this is a book I will return to often, either as a reference, or just to reread.