Contrastive Analysis in China: Today and Yesterday

Abstract

It is widely believed among linguists in China and even in the world at large that contrastive analysis (also contrastive linguistics) was borrowed from the Western linguistics by the hand of Ma Jianzhong, a Chinese linguist in the late Qing Dynasty and author of China’s first grammar book Ma’s Grammar Book of the Chinese Language (1898), and that the starting point of contrastive analysis in Chinese philology is 1898, the year when Ma’s Grammar book of the Chinese Language was officially published. However, this remark is inconsistent with the historical fact and aichives on the development of contrastive analysis in China. Through the literatures available on Buddhist translation studies, traditional Chinese rhetoric and Chinese grammar by Western missionaries, we find that the development of contrastive analysis in China has three clues: Buddhist translation practice, the earliest source which can trace back to the period of Three Kingdoms (220 A.D-280 A.D.), Western Missionary Chinese grammar books of which Wonder of Western Writing (1605) is one of the earliest grammar books involving remarks on contrastive analysis between Chinese and western tongues, and traditional Chinese rhetoric literatures in which contrastive analysis was found to come into being during the Latter Jin Dynasty.