Reading Sinitic Texts in the Vernaculars

Abstract

Chinese texts first reached neighbouring societies in the form of raw texts, without any aids to understanding or even punctuation. Manuscripts recovered from Dunhuang, though, testify to the need for such aids either in the form of written punctuation for reading aloud or in the form of dry-point glosses made with a stylus or the wooden end of a brush: these dry-point glosses are invisible at first sight but the indentations in the paper serve as guidance to the interpretation of the text. By the sixth century some form of ‘vernacular reading’ was being practised in the Silk Road town of Gaochang: this means that students there were reading Chinese classical texts in their own language rather than in Chinese. Similar techniques developed in Korea and these were most likely then transmitted to Japan. Vernacular reading was a means of translating a text but keeping very close to the original.