Literary Chinese Research Articles

Comparison and analysis of two methods for improving the accuracy of OpenNMT in literary and vernacular Chinese translation

As machine translation advances, challenges persist in achieving high accuracy when translating between Literary and Vernacular Chinese. Literary Chinese is known for its concise writing style, often characterized by monosyllabic words. In contrast, Vernacular Chinese incorporates more polysyllabic words. This study utilizes the OpenNMT system to address these challenges and employs different Classical Chinese word segmentation tools to train 2-layer Long Short-Term Memory and Transformer models. These models are then compared and analyzed to measure the improvement in precision. The research findings reveal that adopting a character-level-based word segmentation method for Classical Chinese, coupled with training the Transformer model using OpenNMT, significantly enhances precision. This outcome validates the current observation that existing Classical Chinese word segmentation methods lack sufficient accuracy, consequently impacting the quality of translations between Literary and Vernacular Chinese. By exploring and investigating these approaches, this study contributes to advancing machine translation techniques for improving accuracy in rendering Literary and Vernacular Chinese translations.

East Asian languages in Lord’s Prayer collections, ca. 1600–1900

This paper provides a survey of versions of the Lord’s Prayer translated into several East Asian languages as they are attested in collections since the end of the 16th century. This is when the first relevant example appeared in print, namely a Literary Chinese version provided by a Jesuit missionary. The various versions are contextualized with a view on their creation and dissemination, often but not always involving Christian missionaries, and their textual interrelations are considered. The languages covered here are chiefly Literary Chinese (as well as other Sinitic languages later on), Japanese (and later Ryukyuan) and Korean.

Vernacular Language and the Wu Dialect in the Formation of a Chan Koine and the Rise of Chan/Zen Philology: The Seventh to Seventeenth Centuries

Chan monks had a language problem. They needed to deal with at least four registers; the language of the street in their district, the Chan koine with its colloquialisms and argot, the guanhua or official language, and the elite formal language in Literary Sinitic that was packed with allusions. Zen monks in Japan had to deal with registers of Japanese, plus the Chan koine and the formal Literary Chinese. One response was philological, glosses on vocabulary that were likely to be misunderstood, such as dialect words and words that had changed meaning over time. Notably, most of these responses originated in or were connected to the greater Hangzhou region and its Wu language. After discussing whether there was a “standard” or common language used by elites throughout China, this article contends that the awareness of language differences between the “standard” or Mandarin Chinese and the Wu language by native Wu speakers contributed to the rise of Chan philology and then Zen philology. A few key examples of specialized Chan philological texts will be examined, but it should be kept in mind that examples of Chan philology may be embedded in other Chan works.

“Were Buddhist Scriptures in China Translated for Chinese?”: A New Investigation into the Development of Early Buddhist Chinese from the Perspective of the Buddhist Speech Community

Modern scholarship focuses on the lexical or syntactical features of Buddhist Chinese used in Chinese translations of Buddhist scriptures; however, the origins of the language have attracted relatively little attention. Our article explores the issue from the perspective of the speech community, and we argue that the community’s ethnicity played an important role in the pre-fourth-century development of Buddhist Chinese. Buddhist scriptures were mainly introduced to inland China via the Western Regions and the Han people were not officially allowed to be monks. In addition to the translated scripture’s readership, considerable numbers of scripture transmitters and translators were not Han Chinese, and Han Chinese translation assistants were mainly grassroots literati. We combined an analysis of language learning with an examination of the universal features of translated languages and views on translation, and we argue that the early Buddhist community generally could not write and did not need to read refined literary Chinese. The lifting of a ban on Han peoples converting to Buddhism from the fourth century onwards accelerated the development of Han Buddhist communities, and dramatically promoted the localization of Buddhism and scriptures, which marked a new era of translation and translated language. Our investigation into the framework of the Buddhist Chinese speech community provides new perspectives compared with philological studies on the Buddhist language and explains the early historical development of Buddhist Chinese.

Структурная классификация топиковых предложений на китайском языке различных периодов

The study aims to develop a comparative classification of topic sentences in early classical Archaic Chinese (the V-III centuries BC), late Literary Chinese (the late XVII - the early XVIII century) and modern Chinese. Scientific novelty of the study is accounted for by the fact that the classification of topic sentences is created based on the material of not one, but three different periods in the development of the Chinese language. As a result of the study, the researcher has proved that topicalisation mechanisms are common to sentences in Chinese belonging to different periods and also has shown that it is impossible to analyse Chinese sentences by topic components. The terms “topic - commentary” should be used in the process of analysing the presence (absence) of a direct semantic link between the subject group and the predicate core. These terms are absolutely not applicable for syntactic analysis.

From the Perspectives of “Others” - A Pedagogical Exploration of Teaching Literary Chinese in the US and Europe -

From the Perspectives of “Others” - A Pedagogical Exploration of Teaching Literary Chinese in the US and Europe -

The Chinese Exclusion Act and The Late Qing Chinese Cosmopolitanism

Abstract This article examines a specific set of literary texts, both in English and Chinese, produced by a few Chinatown leaders and some Chinese writers as they protested against the anti-Chinese sentiments and the Chinese Exclusion Act in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. Those Chinese-authored texts resisted the homogenizing view of the Chinese people by the Westerners, advocating a cosmopolitan class above race, and used commercial amity to assert the Chinese people's cosmopolitan right. The moral compass of the Chinese merchants in those literary stories also puts forward an alternative model of global capitalism that evolved from the traditional Chinese idea of tianxia. Reading these texts can help us build a more historicized view of Chineseness and the Chinese worldview prior to the rise of state-centered nationalisms in modern China, on the one hand, and understand the epistemological framework and limit of modern nationalisms, on the other.

Transforming Gender and Emotion: The Butterfly Lovers Story in China and Korea

Transforming Gender and Emotion: The Butterfly Lovers Story in China and Korea

Alphabets in the History of the Chinese Language

Various phonographic variants of script, both for Chinese and for the neighboring languages using Chinese characters, had been created long before contacts with the West and the appearance of any Romanization systems in the region. Two official alphabets, the ʼPhags-pa and the Yìsītìfēi (Istīfā) scripts, and likely the nonofficial Arabographic Xi ˇа ojī ng writing system were introduced for the Chinese language already in the period of the Mongol Yuan dynasty. A syllabic character-based ‘women’s script’ Nǚshū was invented for the Southern Hunan Tǔhuà dialects at the turn of the Ming period or evidently much earlier. Modern information technologies and the possibilities of computer typesetting, in particular, have inevitably changed even the official character texts written in Standard Chinese. To a greater extent, these changes are known to have affected the language of the computer-mediated communication with its often unusual forms of Latin spelling for Chinese words. In many cases, however, Chinese Internet users and primarily speakers of various dialects prefer to use even for the all-China lexicon not only Latin variants, but also phonetically borrowed characters. Thus, they follow the centuries-old traditions of nonofficial texts including those in the medieval Báihuà vernacular language with its numerous phonetically or semantically borrowed characters from official Literary Chinese.

Creating, Linking, and Analyzing Chinese and Korean Datasets: Digital Text Annotation in MARKUS and COMPARATIVUS

MARKUS, a multilingual digital text annotation and analysis platform, allows historians and other researchers to construct datasets from primary sources available to them in full-text digital format. Originally designed for those working with pre-twentieth-century Chinese texts, MARKUS has developed into a multifunctional annotation platform that is particularly suited for the automated annotation, referencing, and visualization of named entities in modern and literary Chinese and premodern Korean texts, but many of its additional annotation features can be used to analyze and read texts in any language, as long as the electronic documents are encoded in the most common standard for language encoding, Unicode. Below I discuss the main goals and methodological features of MARKUS and the allied text comparison utility COMPARATIVUS. I will illustrate these with some examples of how MARKUS has been used in Chinese and Korean historical research.

Story of the Eastern Chamber: Dilemmas of Vernacular Language and Political Authority in Eighteenth-Century Chosŏn

Abstract The earliest extant playscript in Korea stands as an enigma. It is an anonymous work written to celebrate a wedding arranged by King Chŏngjo. Called Story of the Eastern Chamber, the play evokes not only the Chinese Story of the Western Chamber through titular reference but also the Chinese vernacular tradition as a whole. Written entirely in Chinese characters, the text weaves vernacular Korean words into the syntax of Chinese baihua vernacular, an unusual form which upsets the conventional diglossic binary of literary Chinese (hanmun) and vernacular Korean (hangŭl). This essay situates the text in a late Chosŏn discourse of linguistic difference marked by pronounced anxieties about the temporal and spatial contingency of language. Some late Chosŏn writers, including the text’s putative author, Yi Ok, embraced difference to carve out a localized literary space in Chosŏn Korea. For King Chŏngjo, it threatened the textual foundation of royal authority. Eastern Chamber spoke to these dilemmas by imagining a linguistic space where vernacular Korean usage could be represented as a literary language in the Chinese script, reconciling kingly authority with local specificity.

Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in Han Kitab by Kristian Petersen

Reviewed by: Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in Han Kitab by Kristian Petersen Guangtian Ha Kristian Petersen, Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in Han Kitab. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiii, 285 pp. £64 (HB). ISBN 9780190634346 Kristian Petersen’s new book is an excellent addition to the growing body of literature on the Sinophone Hui Muslims in imperial China. It shows with great clarity how a group of Hui intellectuals from the seventeenth century onwards combined [End Page 212] a multitude of sources to fashion a new Muslim identity that straddled Islamic and Chinese tradition(s). The texts drawn from Islam included both Arabic and Persian sources, with the majority being of Persian origin—a point mentioned but not elaborated on by Petersen. The Chinese sources were predominantly Confucian, though Daoist and Buddhist ideas inevitably found their way in. No doubt this was a highly intellectual project dominated by those proficient (in reading at least) in literary Chinese, classical Arabic, and Persian, the lingua franca of Central Asia for centuries. Such exacting linguistic requirements meant that most ordinary Hui would have been excluded from effective participation. Thus, the literature composed in this tradition, while read and cherished by some advanced clerics who were literate in classical Chinese, was perhaps less for mass consumption than for non-Muslim mandarins and emperors. In other words, what we nowadays consider Sino-Islamic thought is an ideological as well as an intellectual project. To some extent, it was (failed) PR for Sino-Muslims in imperial times. Organized into five chapters with an introduction and a short epilogue, Petersen’s excellently researched book unfolds around three themes, namely, pilgrimage, scripture, and language. The question of translation—both linguistic from Arabic and Persian to Chinese, and philosophical from Islam to Confucianism—linked scripture and language, while pilgrimage, i.e., the hajj, by offering encounters with new ideas and practices generated among the Hui returnees new drives for Islamic revival and new modes of engaging with Islam. New texts were avidly composed, older ones re-organized and re-interpreted. Petersen shows the painstaking efforts involved in this labor of faith by examining several prominent works in the Han Kitab 漢克塔布 tradition, a term designating the collective body of theological literature produced by the Sino-Muslim intellectuals from the late Ming (1368–1644) to the Qing (1644–1911) period. Out of this extensive pool, three authors are chosen as the main object of study: Wang Daiyu 王岱輿 (ca. 1570–1660 CE), arguably a pioneer of this tradition; Liu Zhi 劉智 (ca. 1660–1739 CE), indisputably the most erudite and at times the most abstruse author included in the Han Kitab; and Ma Dexin 馬德新 (1794–1874 CE), a native of Yunnan, a resolute pilgrim and unfortunate victim of politico-religious violence. Petersen’s focus is on the creative translingual processes whereby Islamic ideas are imaginatively rendered into Chinese; in particular, he is interested in how the physical experiences, as well as literary imaginations of pilgrimage along with the shifting role of Arabic, inflected this linguistic and philosophical translation. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive overview of the history of Sino-Muslim communities in China. The broad strokes employed by the author, while necessitated by the nature of the subject matter, at times run the risk of subsuming other histories under that of the Sino-Muslims, as, for instance, when the Yaq’ūb Beg insurrection is used to support the perhaps overstated claim that “Sino-Muslims generally viewed the Qing imperial government as an oppressive political regime that failed to provide sufficient structural means for instituting Islam” (46). Proceeding along this historical line of inquiry, chapter 2 provides a meticulous mapping of the intellectual networks that gave rise to the works of Wang Daiyu, Liu Zhi, and Ma Dexin. This helps to both situate Sino-Islamic thought in the broader history of Islam in China and lay the foundation for a more elaborate discussion of the extraordinary work of translation and exposition performed by these three eminent minds. [End Page 213] However, it is chapter 3 that constitutes the most distinct contribution of this book, since it provides the most comprehensive account to date...

BRUSH TALK AS THE ‘LINGUA FRANCA’ OF DIPLOMACY IN JAPANESE–KOREAN ENCOUNTERS, c. 1600–1868

AbstractThe study of early modern diplomatic history has in recent decades expanded beyond a bureaucratic, state-centric focus to consider the processes and personal interactions by which international relations were maintained. Scholars have begun to consider, among other factors, the role of diplomatic gifts, diplomatic hospitality, and diplomatic culture. This article contributes to this discussion from an East Asian perspective by considering the role of ‘brush talk’ – written exchanges of classical, literary Chinese – during diplomatic missions from the Korean Chosŏn court to the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Drawing upon official records, personal diaries, and illustrations, I argue that brush talk was not an official part of diplomatic ceremony and that brushed encounters with Korean officials even extended to people of the townsman classes. Brush talk was as much about ritual display, calligraphic art, and drawing upon a shared storehouse of civilized learning as it was about communicating factual content through language. These visual, performative aspects of brush talk in East Asian diplomacy take it beyond the realm of how alingua francais usually conceived, adding to the growing body of scholarship on how this concept applies to non-Western histories.

Bodies of Texts: Women Calligraphers and the Elite Vernacular Culture in Late Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910)

Men's references to women's writing in vernacular Korean script never term this practice “calligraphy,” and yet articles of women's intricate brushwork reveal that in late Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) this was a highly aestheticized practice with recognized social importance and a meticulous training process. This article captures the moment when vernacular Korean scriptural practices ascended the elite canon, which resulted in the emergence of high vernacular culture. It historicizes the gendered logic of representation in a male-authored historical archive to uncover the contours of a women-centered vernacular aesthetic canon that assumed a status of prestige alongside male culture in literary Chinese. The article unravels the meaning of the term “calligraphy” when it is applied to women's vernacular handwriting and ponders the connection between women's bodily discipline, productive work, and exquisite vernacular brushwork. This opens an alternative perspective not only on the gender politics of the Chosŏn society but also on the culture of the time, which is hitherto seen as dominated by a male-centered literary Chinese canon.

Mandarin over Manchu: Court-Sponsored Qing Lexicography and Its Subversion in Korea and Japan

The Manchu language studies of the Qing empire emerged in Beijing during the late seventeenth century and spread to Chosŏn Korea and Tokugawa Japan during the eighteenth century. The Qing court sponsored the compilation of multilingual thesauri and thereby created an imperial linguistic order with Manchu at the center and vernacular Chinese, or Mandarin, in a subordinate position. Chosŏn and Tokugawa scholars, by contrast, usually placed Mandarin—not Manchu, Korean, or Japanese—as the leading language in the new multilingual thesauri they compiled on the basis of Qing works. I show how the balance between Manchu and Mandarin changed as Korean and Japanese scholars reworked lexicographic books from Beijing. The lexicographic evidence demonstrates that the international languages of pre-twentieth-century East Asia included Manchu and vernacular Mandarin as well as literary Chinese. 摘要: 本文以乾隆『御製增訂清文鑑』為例，探討清朝構造的以滿文為中心的多 語言制度及其在朝鮮和日本的傳播和轉變。日本和朝鮮學者利用滿語辭書所載的 漢語白話譯文與官話注音來學習漢語。漢語對學習滿文必不可少，於是日朝學者 往往把辭書中的漢語白話部分作為研究的對象。

Making the marginal figures literary protagonists: Writing as the most effective social critique in the hands of Bak Jiwon

Bak Jiwon is best known as a leader in the “practical studies” (Silhak) movement in 18th century Korea which advocated for the careful application of modern science and technology to contemporary issues and a more systematic understanding of the outside world. Bak played a critical role in raising awareness about the outside world within a rather insular Korea. Yet much of his most profound writing can be found, not in his academic treatises, but rather in a series of ten short stories he wrote in literary Chinese which offer a counterpoint to the concrete discussion of policy and technology that makes up most of work. It is in his literary writings, his novels, that Bak most clearly articulates his concern for the lives of ordinary people and describes in depth the lives, and the concerns, of beggars, illiterate farmers, street performers and lower-ranking widows. These stories make visible the ordinary, tragic and at times comic experiences of quotidian life and offer some of the most vivid writing on Korea in the 18th century to be found anywhere. The paper argues that Bak Jiwon employed this approach of writing in the most abstruse literary Chinese about the lives of ordinary people as a tool for making the experience of ordinary people visible to intellectuals of his age. His writings offered the possibility that the educated would see the world of ordinary citizens, and even the wretched poor that carried on beyond the walls of their homes. As such, these novels were a significant experiment for the late eighteenth century, and a hint of the growing concern with a realist portrayal of institutions and human experience in the Silhak movement. This development in literature was a critical first sprout of a new awareness of the potential of literature in the late Joseon period which adumbrated the rise of realism in the twentieth century as part of a broad reevaluation of the Korean tradition.

Creation and Causality in Chinese-Jesuit Polemical Literature

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Jesuit missionaries in China published a variety of apologetic and polemical materials in literary Chinese. In these, they opposed the Neo-Confucian idea of cosmogony as the natural evolution of a primordial substance called qi, following set patterns called “principle” or li, with their own Aristotelian-Thomistic interpretation of the process of creation. This article will first summarize the Neo-Confucian view, and then present the Jesuit view as taught in their colleges by looking at their normative commentary on the subject as discussed by Aristotle. Following that, it will examine the cases made by two Jesuits, Matteo Ricci and Giulio Aleni, in books published in China. Lastly it will explore two specific philosophical issues upon which the two sides failed to connect by looking at the unarticulated presuppositions that impeded communication: (1) the issue of the infinite regress, and (2) the nature of causality itself.

Quelques réflexions sur la traduction littéraire du chinois vers les langues européennes

Abstract The present paper is the result of a workshop on the translation of Chinese literature that was held between March 2012 and May 2013 at the Confucius Institute at the University of Geneva. It aimed to identify major obstacles in rendering literary Chinese into English, French, Italian, German, and Russian, and to explore the differences and similarities of the problems encountered. Nine works of Chinese literature were selected for studying and examining a number of difficulties in translation: Terms with culturally specific connotations, transposition of certain grammatical structures, treatment of idioms and metaphors, translation of titles. We have found a great similarity of approaches chosen for the various target languages, Russian being an exception. Due to cultural and political influences, this language displays certain similarities to Chinese, especially in vocabulary; but there are additional aspects in which the Russian case differs from the other four languages.

The Transmission and Translation of Chinese Vernacular Narrative in Chosŏn Korea: Han’gŭl Translations and Gentry Women’s Literature

During the Chosŏn period (1392–1897), especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, gentry women created their own literary world independent of men wherein they wrote and read novels and diaries in han’gŭl as a part of their education and their entertainment. Reading and diligently copying those texts in the women’s quarters was not just a pale reflection of male discourse in literary Chinese, but a distinct practice with its own rules. The most interesting of the texts that these women read were the translations of Chinese vernacular novels. Those translations formed a critical literary genre that would have profound implications for Korean literary history because the translations included highly vernacular passages that are not to be found in Korean indigenous narrative. The Chinese vernacular narratives, through the act of translation, forced Korean narrative toward a true vernacular. These translated texts, about which few records survive, are closer to the Korean modern novel than any other premodern texts. It is critical that we consider them as a significant part of the evolution of Korean narrative.

Interviewing Daoist Masters: A Reality Check

213 Interviewing Daoist Masters A Reality Check CHRISTOPHER COTT Much of the confusion and misinformation that have plagued Daoist studies until recently is due to Western scholars interpreting Daoist texts and teachings on their own terms. Had early missionaries and sinologists allowed living Daoists to have more of a voice in their research, rather than relying on often poorly translated texts and other sources from, for example, the Neo-Confucian tradition, a different picture may have emerged. Thus, while it is important that we form our own scholarly opinions about Daoists texts and ideas, we must also be sure to check in regularly with the living Daoist community and allow them a prominent voice in Daoist scholarship. On this background, as part of my dissertation on the utility of Daoism in psychology (Cott 2013), I recently went to China to confer with ordained Daoist practitioners regarding their views on Daoism. Primary Considerations Cott and Rock (2009) outline two primary sources of material for the academic study of Daoism. The first is the textual tradition as contained in collections such as the Daozang 道藏 and Zangwai Daoshu 藏外道書. The second is the living tradition as found in predominantly the Quanzhen 全真 and Zhengyi 正一 movements. Needless to say, scholars of Daoism spend a great deal of time with textual sources. These are relatively easy to come by and can be accessed without leaving the office. Fur- 214 / Journal of Daoist Studies 7 (2014) thermore, they cover the entire spectrum of Daoism from virtually any point in its history. However, it is important that we do not neglect the living tradition for a number of reasons. The Black/Green Ram of Qing Yang Gong.1 Perhaps the first and most obvious reason for conferring with the living Daoist tradition, rather than relying solely on textual sources, is the Chinese language. Although many scholars of Daoism are proficient in literary Chinese, there are still often many possible interpretations of a given passage. It is common practice in Daoism to have verbal transmissions that go along with the texts but are passed on only by word of mouth. Indeed, the author has encountered complex explanations of the various components of single characters, let alone whole texts. It may therefore be beneficial for scholars to confer with living Daoists in order 1 Qing 青 may be translated as either ‘green’ or ‘black.’ The ram appears black now, but is made of bronze so may have appeared green at an earlier date. Cott,‚Interviewing Daoist Masters‛ / 215 to consolidate which of a number of interpretations may be correct in a given context. This is especially true where concepts specific to Daoism are involved . For example, a text might make mention of jing 靜, which might be translated as ‚stillness,‛ ‚tranquility,‛ or the like. A scholar reading this might assume they understand what ‚stillness‛ means and move on. However, the term may indicate a specific meditative state in a given Daoist school, which may or may not be just as we expect it to be, and may have profound implications for the interpretation of the rest of the text. In this case, a scholar who simply reads the text and assumes they understand the concepts based on their prior knowledge of different systems may well be misled unless they confer with living representatives of the tradition. There are also fundamental psychological differences between the Eastern and Western minds (see Nisbett 2003). For example, Western cultures tend to be more individualistic, viewing the self as a unitary freeagent and valuing individual expression and personal achievement. In contrast, Eastern cultures tend to be more collectivist, viewing the self as part of a greater whole and privileging group harmony and collective benefit over individual expression and personal gain. Easterners and Westerners also seem to experience the world in different ways. Easterners, more than Westerners, tend to emphasize background and context, even in simple things such as looking at a photograph , suggesting that they see the world more as a complex series of relationships, rather than a collection of independent components (e.g., Ji, Peng, & Nisbett 2000; Masuda & Nisbett 2001). Another interesting example can be found in Imae and Gentner (1994), who showed Japanese and American participants...