Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

Abstract

The linguistic turn was a significant development in the early twentieth century. The essential characteristic was an intellectual reorientation toward the relations among language, language users, and the world. Early pioneers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and Ferdinand de Saussure, remain influential in specific academic fields. During nearly a century of reflection and study on language, mind, and society, however, critics, thinkers, and historians rarely ventured outside the scope of the Indo-European languages. Of course, there had been a long tradition of studying classical Chinese and Sanskrit in Europe, but Sinology and Indology belonged to old-fashioned philology, not to the modern linguistic turn. More recently, the postcolonial critic Sheldon I. Pollock has conceptualized Sanskrit as a cosmopolitan language amid South Asia's wide diversity of spoken languages, and many scholars consider Pollock an exceptional critic of the Western canon.1 In any event, a genuinely global analysis of human experience should undoubtedly include East Asia, and the disjunction between the studies of Indo-European languages and the rest could not be more obvious. Peter Kornicki's Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia, a systematic treatise that tackles the main textual tradition outside the system of Indo-European languages, is a welcome addition to contemporary efforts to engage with such theoretical issues.What defines the geographical scope of Kornicki's book? The independent emergence of agriculture occurred in only nine locations in the prehistorical world. Of these nine, only four developed into large states in Eurasia. The earliest agriculture in Southwest Asia (the Fertile Crescent) arose around 8000 BCE. Within the east-west extension of Eurasia (as opposed to the vertical extension of the Americas), agriculture then spread through similar geographies and climates: to the Indian subcontinent by 6500 BCE, to Egypt soon after 6000 BCE, to Central Europe by 5400 BCE, to southern Spain by 5200 BCE, and to Britain around 3200 BCE. None of these developments could have occurred without the Fertile Crescent's Mediterranean climate. Three great ancient states appeared on these foundations: in Mesopotamia around 3500 BCE, in the Indus Valley during 3300–2800 BCE, and in the upper Nile valley during 3700–3400 BCE. All these ancient states fit the territorial expansion of primary state formation.Because of Central Asia's geographical and climate barriers, and also because of the obstacles posed by the Southeast Asian Massif, East Asia was not part of the agricultural dissemination that originated from the Fertile Crescent. Central Asia is a vast region of varied geography, including high passes and mountains, extensive deserts, and treeless, grassy steppes. Much of the land of Central Asia is too dry or too rugged for farming. In the prehistorical period, Central and West Asia probably had some technological exchange with Northeast Asia (Korea and Japan) through the steppe. However, the North China Plain was relatively isolated from the interactions across the steppe to Northeast Asia. On the other hand, the Southeast Asian Massif—a geographical region roughly the size of Western Europe—encompasses the high ranges extending east and south from the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. The Southeast Asian Massif effectively blocks all practical land routes from the Indian subcontinent to the Chinese subcontinent. The Southeast Asian Massif was also a significant barrier to the dissemination of agriculture, Buddhism, and Indo-European languages. For instance, in the thirteenth century Marco Polo chose to bypass the Southeast Asian Massif and reach China through the Mongolian grassland. These examples show that the Southeast Asian Massif has always been an enormous natural divider between South and East Asia.Consequently, ancient states in East Asia developed their spatial and environmental knowledge in relative isolation from the Indo-European linguistic landmass of Eurasia. Within this geographical range and chronological span, Kornicki highlights that “all of these societies in East Asia encountered Chinese writing, and all of them faced similar problems when they were confronted by the weight of the long-established Chinese textual tradition, for they were all latecomers vis-a-vis China” (2). Within the ambitious scope of his book, Kornicki focuses sharply on the vernacular handling of Sinitic. Kornicki's characterization of the overall linguistic pattern in East Asia reminds me of some linguists' use of the term Sinosphere, and of Shu-mei Shih's concept of “Sinophone.”2 Kornicki coins a new term, Sinitic, with theoretical attention to a variety of ways to depict the peculiar linguistic pattern in East Asia. Kornicki's primary field is early modern Japan. Perhaps, like the linguists' use of Sinosphere (or of the “Chinese Scriptworld” as Kornicki invokes in the book), Joshua A. Fogel's Articulating the Sinosphere could be a historian's appropriation of a linguistic concept for intellectual and cultural history.3 Their search for a description of the prevalent presence of the classical Chinese texts in East Asia is evidence for why their works are not primarily about China, historically or otherwise. Here is a critical clarification that may help us to move forward: let us say that the works by Kornicki, Fogel, the linguist James Matisoff, and Shu-mei Shih are not actually about historical China at all. They are interested in how non-Chinese elite speakers coped with the persistent and pervasive use of Sinitic in the diplomatic, bureaucratic, and literary spheres of their own cultures. By contrast, for instance, recent intellectual historians in China, such as Wang Hui and Ge Zhaoguang, organize their works around such questions as, What was China?, and, Was there a political or cultural entity existing continuously in the past that we can identify as China? At first glance, it may seem that they attempt to deconstruct China.4 Far from it, they intended to search for a historical China in a postnationalist manner, attempting to counter postcolonial critics like Prasenjit Duara who have launched an effective critique of East Asian nationalism.5 Unlike Wang and Ge, however, Kornicki is not interested in whether China continued to evolve in the past two thousand years. Instead, he focuses on the resilient Sinitic, which continued to evolve and stubbornly persisted for two thousand years in East Asia. Nearly all vernacular-speaking elites of different regions in East Asia (including parts of what we may call Southeast Asia) made use of Sinitic on different scales and in different manners.Sinitic refers to a classical Chinese writing system with a long textual tradition. Kornicki focuses on the non-Chinese vernacular speakers who adopted the Chinese writing system to work for them in East Asia. Since Sinitic had never “to any significant extent functioned as a medium of spoken communication between members of different speech communities” (72), the Chinese spoken by speakers of the various dialects of Chinese was neither an advantage nor a condition, he implies, for learning classical Chinese. For instance, in the eighteenth century a Korean Yangban speaker from Hanseong (today's Seoul) would not be at disadvantage linguistically compared with an educated Cantonese speaker from Canton. The most striking and frequently cited example is how Korean Yangban scholars could travel to Beijing, take the Chinese civil service examination, and occasionally pass the hurdle and receive a degree title. In this book, Kornicki examines how Japanese, Korean, Okinawan, and Vietnamese speakers used Chinese texts and read them in their vernacular spoken languages. Kornicki makes a critical political point here: Sinitic does not belong to China. Any Chinese nationalist claim of ownership for classical Chinese as a language is fundamentally an ideological proclamation and has no basis in historical reality. Sometimes, our East Asian colleagues who focus on the twentieth century may have vaguely associated Sinosphere with Sinocentrism, but this would be a fundamental misreading of Kornicki's book. It is worth reiterating that the pervasive use and dissemination of Sinitic in East Asia before 1900 was a historical reality. Against such a backdrop, Kornicki is interested in the non-Chinese speakers' vernacularization of Sinitic in different regions.Unlike piecemeal studies of narrow topics in East Asia, Kornicki's method is textual and synchronic. As a professional historian, Kornicki's prose is not how I would build my narratives or explanations, but I appreciate his clear and structural approach to fill in useful information and make sensible arguments about each region. More important, he provides a systematic analysis of the entire East Asian region and of the linguistic pattern he calls Sinitic. Kornicki's book includes three parts to cover East Asia over the past two thousand years. The first part structurally explains the Chinese writing system (Sinitic) from a comparative and global perspective, and the flexibility with which speakers of different East Asian languages used and modified its scripts and writings. The oral dimensions of the Korean and Japanese languages coevolved with their modifications of the Sinitic characters and scripts. Unlike Latin, Arabic, or Sanskrit, Sinitic was never a spoken language but a sophisticated writing system with a long textual tradition. In addition to Sinitic the language, Kornicki describes the materiality of Sinitic writing and printing (including manuscripts, xylography, and topography for woodblock technology) and how merchants disseminated and traded books in East Asia. The movement of Sinitic texts from China to its peripheries establishes both the premise and focus of Kornicki's book.The second part describes two main strategies for coping with Sinitic inside and outside China: vernacular reading in Korea, Japan, Ryukyu, and Vietnam, and translation of Sinitic into Central Asian languages like Mongolian, Manchu, and Tangut. The more dominating trend was to keep Sinitic intact and apply vernacular reading and glosses to Sinitic. It was, of course, the primary reading practice in Korean and Japanese. The less common coping method was to translate Sinitic into one's own vernacular language. A considerable number of Sinitic texts were translated into Tangut, Mongolian, and Manchu. Kornicki balances his analytical coverage of both strategies. In my view, he attempts to explain away why translation took place in exceptional circumstances and gently suggests that vernacular readings and glosses to Sinitic were the norms. What exactly were vernacular readings and glosses? How did they work? “Vernacular reading refers to a set of techniques for reading Sinitic texts by converting them into some form of the vernacular, usually relying on glosses which were either inscribed invisibly or written or printed alongside the text” (162). Japanese and Korean elite readers provide the best-documented examples of vernacular reading. Their coping with Sinitic demonstrated the ingenuity of a uniquely interpretative and creative practice in world history. Kornicki offers comprehensive coverage of their originality and explains how these techniques worked.The third part surveys three bodies of Sinitic, Buddhist scriptures, Confucian classics, and primers and technical texts, in roughly chronological order. Regarding the Buddhist scriptures, throughout the first millennium Sinitic was undoubtedly sacralized as the language of Buddhism, similar to Koranic Arabic as the language of Islam, Sanskrit and Pali as the languages of Buddhism, and the Latin of the Vulgate as the language of Western Christianity. Similarly, sacralization of Sinitic resulted from what Kornicki calls “theological dependence of the vernacular upon the sacralized language” (244). In Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, Kornicki argues, the unwritten vernaculars could not compete with the textual might of Chinese Buddhism in a world in which writing was becoming essential for diplomatic, official, and literary purposes. In this connection, it is worth recalling that Japan and Korea received their Buddhism from Sui and Tang China, when Buddhism in China was at its apogee. In other words, the heavy use of Sinitic as an East Asian diplomatic, official, and literary language had become a premise for Sinitic to be sacralized as the dominant language of Buddhism. It was particularly true in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, and their vernacular readings of Buddhist scriptures in Sinitic also created distinctive traditions of Buddhism in each region. In the second millennium, although the vernacularizing of the Buddhist scriptures continued to proliferate and differentiate in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, the Confucian classics gradually became a competing genre in the vernacular reading of the Sinitic.For Confucian classics, although some readers in early modern East Asia, such as the Jesuit missionaries and some neo-Confucians, may have attributed some religiosity to them, most literati, yangban, and samurai scholars studied Confucian classics predominantly as a new ideology to stabilize and support the political establishment of their times. Kornicki includes both the Four Books and the Five Classics as Confucian classics and stresses the arcane nature of the Confucian classics, almost like ancient codes requiring vernacular commentaries to decode and make sense of them. There was already wide use of vernacular discussion (in Song and Ming China) or sacred edicts (in Qing China) on Confucian classics. However, the Chinese vernacularization of the Confucian classics created a hurdle for vernacular readings in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, because vernacularization equaled provincialization of the universal Sinitic in East Asia. Moreover, Kornicki uses the examination system as an East Asian institution to discuss the dissemination of Sinitic and contrasts Japan, which had never established an examination system, with Korea and Vietnam. I find Kornicki's analysis in this chapter less coherent than in the previous chapter on Buddhist scriptures, and its analytical acuity less penetrating. As Alexander Woodside argues in Lost Modernities, the institution of examination systems granted East Asian bureaucracy certain features of meritocracy and mobility for the elite society, and the selection criteria were primarily based on the studies of the Confucian classics written in Sinitic. The ideological and bureaucratic dimensions of the Confucian classics should have some intersections with Kornicki's analysis of Confucian classics as a written system of Sinitic.Third, primers and technical texts include the following subcategories: Chinese historical texts, manuals for governance, Daoist writings, Tang poetry, medical books, conduct books for women, Chinese vernacular fictions, mathematical and astronomical works,6 and books on the threat posed by the West. The category may seem a hodgepodge, but Kornicki makes an insightful observation about Sinitic's function as a vehicle of “useful knowledge.” Take, for instance, the primers: Chinese and non-Chinese speakers alike would find their encounter with Sinitic a daunting experience,7 and a wide variety of primers in China proved to be a valuable guide for non-Chinese adult speakers to learn Sinitic. Kornicki also analyzes two intriguing types of books: Chinese vernacular fiction, and monographs on the threat posed by the West. For those trained to read Sinitic in Korea and Japan, for instance, Chinese vernacular fiction was likely to be translated. In other words, Chinese vernacular was not a universal language in East Asia, but Sinitic was. In the nineteenth century, Korean yangban readers first noted the Chinese scholar Wei Yuan's books, written in Sinitic, on the threat posed by the West. The Koreans then passed their reading of Wei Yuan's books to Japan. Their utility for non-Chinese elite readers could characterize all the above types of books. Hence, Kornicki argues that Sinitic was, in addition to the language of Buddhist scriptures and Confucian classics, the medium of useful knowledge for East Asia until the end of the nineteenth century.In part 3, Kornicki attempts to show the impact of vernacularization on a wide range of texts. In Japan in the Edo period, all genres became accessible through printed glosses, apart from Chinese vernacular fiction and a few other Chinese vernacular works, which were not amenable to glossing. Daoist, mathematical, and medical results were all published in Japan in glossed editions. It was therefore only in Japan that engagement with Sinitic texts was routinely mediated through the vernacular in the form of vernacular glosses and vernacular reading. By contrast, Korean and Vietnamese readers, and readers elsewhere, had no choice but to tackle Sinitic texts in the raw if they did not want to be limited by the range of works available in bilingual editions. In this manner, Kornicki argues that elite readers in early modern Japan inhabited a unique cultural ambiance that allowed them to read and decipher nearly all books written in Sinitic. This remarkable achievement made it possible for Japanese samurai elite readers to keep up with almost every form of knowledge available in Sinitic until 1800. In contrast, Korean and Vietnamese elite readers had no choice but to tackle the raw Sinitic texts, with a much higher hurdle to overcome.In conclusion, Kornicki reflects on Pollock's model of cosmopolitan versus vernacular languages. Kornicki concedes that Sinitic functioned as a cosmopolitan language in East Asia, like Sanskrit in Pollock's formulation. But the vernacularization of Sinitic in East Asia underwent a different process and generated a somewhat different outcome than in South Asia. East Asian language communities were sharply divided from one another, despite a cosmopolitan written language. They were net importers of Sinitic texts and made few attempts to disseminate their vernacular readings of Sinitic, which were often inscribed directly onto the Sinitic texts. Kornicki also stresses that Sinitic, as a writing system of characters, enabled vernacular readings and prevented the sort of vernacularization described in Pollock's Language of the Gods in the World of Men. Sinitic was also resilient. It coexisted and coevolved with vernacular societies in East Asia for two millennia. Unceremoniously, it exited East Asia at the dawn of the twentieth century, very much like the disappearance of the civil service examination system on the East Asian horizon.8