Brush Conversation in the Sinographic Cosmopolis

The contributors to this book outline the historical background of, and the lingua-cultural conditions that led to, widespread literacy development in premodern and early modern East Asia, where reading and writing for formal purposes was conducted in Literary Sinitic, or wényánwén.

For hundreds of years until the 1900s, in today's China, Japan, North and South Korea, and Vietnam, literati of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic (wényán ) could communicate in writing interactively, despite not speaking each other's languages.

This book outlines the historical background of, and the material conditions that led to, widespread literacy development in premodern and early modern East Asia, where reading and writing for formal purposes was conducted in Literary Sinitic. To exemplify how 'silent conversation' or 'brush-assisted conversation' is possible through writing-mediated brushed interaction, synchronously face-to-face, this book presents contextualized examples from recurrent contexts involving (i) boat drifters; (ii) traveling literati; and (iii) diplo- matic envoys. Where profound knowledge of classical canons and literary works in Sinitic was a shared attribute of the brush-talkers concerned, their brush-talk would characteristically be intertwined with poetic improvisation.

Being the first monograph in English to address this fascinating lingua-cultural practice and cross-border communication phenomenon, which was possibly sui generis in Sinographic East Asia, it will be of interest to students of not only East Asian languages and linguistics, history, international relations, and diplomacy, but also (historical) pragmatics, sociolinguistics, sociology of language, scripts and writing systems, and cultural and linguistic anthropology.

Autorentext

David C. S. Li () is Professor and Head of the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies (),, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (). He received his BA in English (Hong Kong), MA in Applied Linguistics (France), and PhD in Linguistics (Germany). He has published widely in multilingualism in Greater China, World Englishes, Hong Kong English, China English, bilingual education and language policy, bilingual interaction and code-switching (translanguaging), Cantonese as an additional language, and South Asian Hongkongers' needs for written Chinese. He speaks Cantonese, English and Mandarin fluently, is conversant in German and French, and is learning Japanese and Korean. More recent interests focus on the historical spread of written Chinese (Sinitic) and its use as a scripta franca until the early twentieth century in Sinographic East Asia (China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam).

Reijiro Aoyama's () research is concerned with transnational and global processes mediated by migration and the movement of information, symbols, capital and cultural commodities. His research interests include anthropology of work and mobility, narratives of migration, and material and non-material culture of cross-border interactions. He has conducted several long-term ethnographies of the Japanese presence in East Asia, and has published on Japanese diaspora, craftsmanship, and emotional work in service industries, Sino-Japanese animation, and historical cross-border interactions mediated by Sinitic writing. Before taking up his post at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, he taught at Fudan University, Tsinghua University, and City University of Hong Kong.

Tak-Sum Wong () is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He received his BEng in Computer Science from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2004), and PhD in Linguistics from City University of Hong Kong (2018). He has built a treebank of the Tripiaka Koreana during his doctoral study and has been working on the quantitative study of historical syntax. His research expertise covers Chinese historical linguistics, Cantonese linguistics, corpus linguistics, computer-assisted language learning, Chinese dialectology and Chinese palæography.

Klappentext

For hundreds of years until the 1900s, in today's China, Japan, North and South Korea, and Vietnam, literati of Classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic (wényán ) could communicate in writing interactively, despite not speaking each other's languages. This book outlines the historical background of, and the material conditions that led to, widespread literacy development in premodern and early modern East Asia, where reading and writing for formal purposes was conducted in Literary Sinitic. To exemplify how 'silent conversation' or 'brush-assisted conversation' is possible through writing-mediated brushed interaction, synchronously face-to-face, this book presents contextualized examples from recurrent contexts involving (i) boat drifters; (ii) traveling literati; and (iii) diplo- matic envoys. Where profound knowledge of classical canons and literary works in Sinitic was a shared attribute of the brush-talkers concerned, their brush-talk would characteristically be intertwined with poetic improvisation. Being the first monograph in English to address this fascinating lingua-cultural practice and cross-border communication phenomenon, which was possibly sui generis in Sinographic East Asia, it will be of interest to students of not only East Asian languages and linguistics, history, international relations, and diplomacy, but also (historical) pragmatics, sociolinguistics, sociology of language, scripts and writing systems, and cultural and linguistic anthropology.

Inhalt

Frontispiece 1

Frontispiece 2

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Contributors

Foreword to Brush Conversation in the Sinographic Cosmopolis: the second miracle xvii

Preface

Epigraph

Map

1 Writing-mediated cross-border communication face-to-face: from Sinitic brush-talk () to pen-assisted conversation

DAVID C. S. LI, REIJIRO AOYAMA AND WONG TAK-SUM

2 East Asian brush-talk literature: introduction and proposed classification

WANG YONG

PART 1

Brush-talk involving traveling literati and boat drifters in East Asia

3 Brush conversation between maritime officials and foreign seafarers in drifting records in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century East Asia

MATSUURA AKIRA AND REIJIRO AOYAMA

4 Senzaimaru's maiden voyage to Shanghai in 1862: brush conversation between Japanese travelers and people they encountered in Qing China

DAVID C. S. LI AND REIJIRO AOYAMA

5 Identity verification and negotiation through Sinitic brush-talk in Ming China and Japan: drifting accounts by Ch'oe Pu (1488) and Yi Chi-hang (16961697)

HUR KYOUNG-JIN

6 A study of salient linguistic features of two Ryukyuan brush conversations in Sinitic, 1611 and 1803

WONG TAK-SUM

PART 2

Brush-talk involving diplomatic envoys in East Asia

7 Sinitic brush-talk between Vietnam and China in the eighteenth century: a study of vice-envoy Lê Quý ôn's mission to Qing China

NGUYN TUN-CNG AND N GUYN TH-TUYT

8 Lingua-cultural characteristics of brush-talk: insights from kchi Documents

WANG BAOPING

9 The charm and pitfalls of Sinitic brush-talk: a study of brush conversation records involving the first legation staff of Late Qing China in Japan (1870s1880s)

LIU YUZHEN

10 Japanese-Korean brush-talk during the early Edo period, 16031711

KOO JEA-HYOUN AND JOO IAN

11 Brush-talk between Chosn envoys and Tokugawa literati: contesting cultural superiority and 'central efflorescence' , 17111811

JANG JIN-YOUP

PART 3

Script-specific communication in Sinitic: significance for historical pragmatics, cultural anthropology, and East Asian studies

12 Sociocultural functions of Chinese characters and writing: transnational brush-talk encounters in mid-nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century East Asia

REIJIRO AOYAMA

13 Discussion paper

REBEKAH CLEMENTS

Index