Introduction: Sounds, Scripts, and Linking Language to Power

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Notes

1 “Yuyanxue jia Zhou Youguang ying 110 sui dashou, zhudao jianli Hanyu pinyin xitong” (Linguist Zhou Youguang greets his 110th birthday, having led the establishment of the Chinese romanization system), China News, January 13, 2015.

2 David Prager Branner, The Chinese Rime Tables: Linguistic Philosophy and Historical-Comparative Phonology (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006); David Prager Branner, Problems in Chinese Dialectology: The Classification of Miin and Hakka (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000); W. South Coblin, A Handbook of Eastern Han Sound Glosses (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2003); A Compendium of Phonetics in Northwest China (Berkeley, CA: Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 1994); Edwin G. Pulleyblank, Middle Chinese: A Study in Historical Phonology (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984); Bernhard Karlgren, Sound and Symbol in Chinese (London: Oxford University Press, 1946); Grammata Serica Recensa (Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1972). For an account of the difficulties in parsing and categorizing sounds in Chinese phonology in a comparative context, see Charles W. Kreidler, Phonology: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (London: Routledge, 2000–2001).

3 Henning Klöter, The Language of the Sangleys: A Chinese Vernacular in Missionary Sources of the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Francis Varo, Francis Varo's Grammar of the Mandarin Language (1703): An English Translation of “Arte de la Lengua Mandarina,” ed. W. South Coblin and Joseph A. Levi (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000); Bruce Rusk, “Old Scripts, New Actors: European Encounters with Chinese Writing,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 26 (2007): 68–116; Wang Feng, Cong hanzi dao hanzi xi wenzi: hanzi wenhua quan wenzi yanjiu (From the Chinese script to sinoscript: a study of the sinoscript cultural world) (Beijing: Minzu, 2003); Li Shiren, “Dongya Hanzi wenhua quan” geguo gudai xiaoshuo de yuanyuan fanzhan (Source and development of classical fiction among countries of the “East Asia sinoscript cultural world”) (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University, 2009); He Jiuying, Hanzi wenhua quan (Cultural world of the sinoscript); Li Yunbo, Hanzi wenhuaquan jindai yuyan wenhua jiaoliu yanjiu (Study of modern linguistic and cultural exchange within the sinoscript world) (Tianjin: Nankai daxue, 2010); Zhou Youguang, Xiandai wenhua de chongji bo (Clashing waves in modern culture) (Beijing: Sanlian, 2000); Chen Yulong, Han wenhua lungang: jianshu Zhong-Chao Zhong-Ru Zhong-Yue wenhua jiaoliu (An outline of Chinese culture: cultural exchanges between China and Korea, Japan, and Vietnam) (Beijing: Beijing daxue, 1993).

4 Minglang Zhou and Hongkai Sun, eds., Language Policy in the People's Republic of China: Theory and Practice Since 1949 (Boston: Kluwer, 2004); Chen Ping and Nanette Gottlieb, eds., Language Planning and Language Policy: East Asian Perspectives (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 2001); Gulbahar H. Beckett and Gerard A. Postiglione, eds., China's Assimilationist Language Policy: The Impact on Indigenous/Minority Literacy and Social Harmony (London: Routledge, 2012); Li Yuming, Language Planning in China (Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015).

5 For a sample of views, see: Peter Schmidt, “At U.S. Colleges, Chinese-Financed Centers Prompt Worries about Academic Freedom,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 22, 2010; Marshall Sahlins, “China U,” Nation, October 29, 2013, http://www.thenation.com/article/china-u/; Tao Xie and Benjamin I. Page, “What Affects China's National Image? A Cross-National Study of Public Opinion,” Journal of Contemporary China 83 (2013): 850–67; Is Academic Freedom Threatened by China's Influence on U.S. Universities?, Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, 113th Cong. (2014), http://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA16/20141204/102778/HHRG-113-FA16-Transcript-20141204.pdf. For Hanban's website, see http://english.hanban.org/node_10971.htm.

6 Erik Baark, Lightning Wires: The Telegraph and China's Technological Modernization (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997); Wook Yoon, “Dashed Expectations: Limitations of the Telegraphic Service in the Late Qing,” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 3 (2015): 832–57; Thomas Mullaney, “Semiotic Sovereignty: The 1871 Chinese Telegraph Code in Historical Perspective,” in Jing Tsu and Benjamin A. Elman, eds., Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s–1940s (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Xia Weiqi, Wan Qing dianbao yu shehui bianqian yanjiu: yi youxian dianbao wei kaocha zhongxin (A study of telegraphy and social change in the late Qing: with a focus on wired telegraphs) (Beijing: Renmin, 2012); Sun Li, Wan Qing dianbao jiqi chuanbo guannian (1860–1911) (Telegraphy and the ideas it disseminated) (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 2007); Li Xue, Wan Qing xifang dianbao jishu xiang Zhongguo de zhuanyi (Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu, 2013).

7 At its inception, Sinophone studies was met with both criticism and support. For representative views, see Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2010). See also Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards, eds., Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

8 See Michael Lachner, Iwo Amelung, and Joachim Kurtz, eds., New Terms for New Ideas: Western Knowledge and Lexical Change in Late Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Joachim Kurtz, The Discovery of Chinese Logic (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Elizabeth Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education. 1895–1919 (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Lydia H. Liu, ed., Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

9 Mark Changizi, The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision (Dallas: Benbella, 2009); Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (New York: Viking, 2009); Daisy L. Hung and Ovid J. Tzeng, “Orthographic Variations and Visual Information Processing,” Psychological Bulletin 90, no. 3 (November 1981): 317–44.

10 For recent opinions on the likely contender for the next lingua franca, see “English as a Growing Lingua Franca, and Why Mandarin Is Unlikely to Replace It,” Washington Post, January 22, 2016; Geoffrey Pullum, “The Unsuitability of English,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2015; “The Language Barrier Is About to Fall,” Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2016.

11 Compare David Crystal, Txtng: The gr8 db8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (London: Routledge, 1995); “Emoji: The First True Universal Language?” Guardian, August 14, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/31/emoji-became-first-global-language; “Are Emojis Becoming the New ‘Universal Language'?” Newsweek (Europe), September 18, 2015, http://europe.newsweek.com/are-emojis-becoming-new-universal-language-333213.

12 Contemporary artists such as Gu Wenda (1955–), Zhang Huan (1965–), and Qiu Zhijie (1969–) have attempted new expressions with the mediality of Chinese writing. See Maxwell K. Hearn, Ink Art: Past as Present (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013). Within the former Sinosphere of a shared script, a group of young Vietnamese avant-garde calligraphers, known as the Zenei Gang of Five (Tran Trong Duong, Pham Van Tuan, Nguyen Duc Cung, Ngyuen Quang Thang, Le Quoc Viet) have also been experimenting with the writing of the Vietnamese sinoscript, Nôm, in order to reclaim this dead script for the present. I thank Pamela N. Corey, who is working on this fascinating topic, for this reference.

13 John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London: Printed for Sa. Gellibrand and for John Martyn, 1668); Donald F. Lach, The Preface to Leibniz' Novissima Sinica: Commentary, Translation, Text (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1957).

14 “Hanzi gaige” (Han script reform), special issue, Guoyu yuekan (National language monthly) 1, no. 7 (1923).

15 John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1984); Nationalism and Language Reform in China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950).

16 Li Jinxi, Guoyu yundong shigang (History of the national language movement) (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1990). Ni Haishu (1918–1988) is the other leading authority, though even some of his data and samples are also incomplete. See his most influential works: Qingmo Hanyu pinyin yundong biannian shi (A chronology of the phoneticization movement of the late Qing period) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1959); Zhongguo pinyin wenzi yundong shi jianbian (Simple history of China's phonetic script movement) (Shanghai: Shidai shubao, 1948). See also Qiu Xigui, Chinese Writing, trans. Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman (Berkeley, CA: Society for the Study of Early China, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2000).

17 For a recent example, see the three-volume publication Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue, eds., Asia Inside Out (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), consisting of Asia Inside Out: Changing Times (2015), Asia Inside Out: Connected Places (2015), and Asia Inside Out: Mobile Peoples (forthcoming). See also Kenneth Pomeranz's introduction, “Moving the Historiography West,” in “West China,” ed. Kenneth Pomeranz and Kristin Stapleton, special issue, Twentieth-Century China 40, no. 3 (October 2015): 168–80.

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Jing Tsu

Jing Tsu, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature at Yale University. She has published widely on sinophone literature, the science and technology of scripts, and Chinese diaspora and nationalism. Her forthcoming book, The Kingdom of Characters: Language Wars and China's Rise to Global Power (Penguin Random House), is a new account of what happened to the Chinese script in the age of the alphabet.