Abstract
The article is devoted to the first in Russia (and in Russian) textbook of Chinese – “Chinese grammar by Fr. Hyacinth”. The article describes the content of this grammar book according to modern grammar studies. It is shown the following issues: 1) there were no special books for the purpose of teaching Chinese in Russia, so it was necessary to make such a textbook; 2) for a long time this “Grammar…” was the only textbook to teach the Chinese language; 3) when N. Ya. Bichurin came to China, European missionaries had already created an impressive number of works describing the Chinese language, and he studied carefully these works; 4) European books about Chinese are described and critiqued in Hyacinth’s grammar; 5) N. Ya. Bichurin had a good command of Chinese, was well up in the differences between the written language and the spoken language; 6) knowing Chinese very well, he could study works of Chinese philologists and also described them in his “Grammar…”; 7) Hyacinth noticed that Chinese words can function as different parts of speech; 8) he talked about nine parts of speech including unique to the Chinese language “function words”; 9) the expression of grammatical meaning is linked with the syntactic position of content words and the presence of function words.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
