Monthly Archives: April 2016

20 April CHILL lecture by WU Juan

CHILL!

Chinese Linguistics in Leiden

 

All lectures Wednesdays 15:15-16:30, De Vrieshof 1/001

 

 

20 April 2016

WU Juan (Leiden)

“Contact-Induced Grammatical Creations: Through the Lens of Chinese Buddhist Translations”

 

The translation of Indian Buddhist texts into Chinese (between 2nd-11th Century CE) is one of the most spectacular cross-cultural enterprises in human civilization. It not only imported Buddhist ideologies into China, but also brought about the first large-scale language contact in Chinese history, which resulted in new lexical items, semantic elements and syntactic forms. These contact-induced innovations provide a window into how ancient translators mediated between different linguistic and cultural systems. This paper presents some representative examples of syntactic patterns found in Chinese Buddhist texts, discussing in particular those which left lasting marks on the development of the Chinese language as well as those which only survived briefly. Finally, through correlating these creations with similar linguistic phenomena found in other religious translations and in other language-contact settings, the paper will argue the importance of Chinese Buddhist translations within the broader context of language-contact studies in general.

 

Forthcoming:

4 May 2016: HU Han (Leiden)

“A Sociolinguistic Study on Rhoticity in Beijing Mandarin”

 

18 May 2016: WANG Man (Leiden)

“Experimental approach to language production of Mandarin”.

 

 

all welcome!