The Oral Dimension

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Francis Kornicki
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Limited Extent ◽  
Chinese Origin ◽  
Chinese Texts

This chapter first examines the oral dimension of the dissemination of Sinitic texts in East Asia. Although a few individuals who had spent many years in China or who were of Chinese origin were able to read Chinese texts in some form of Chinese pronunciation, this was not the case even for most members of the elites, for few spent much time in China. In most societies, conventional pronunciations developed for Chinese characters and these conformed to local phonologies. The first stage of vernacularization, therefore, was in the oral domain. Conversely, however, since there was no common spoken language like Latin, opportunities for intellectual exchange with people from other societies were limited. The remainder of this chapter, therefore, examines the limited extent to which interpreters were trained and other people learned spoken foreign languages. The chapter concludes with an examination of brush conversation, a written substitute for oral conversation.

Languages, scripts, and Chinese texts in East Asia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Francis Kornicki
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Chinese Script ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Crucial Difference ◽  
The Common ◽  
Chinese Texts ◽  
Common Era

This book is a wide-ranging study of vernacularization in East Asia, and for this purpose East Asia includes not only China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam but also other societies that no longer exist, such as the Tangut and Khitan empires. It takes the reader from the early centuries of the Common Era, when the Chinese script was the only form of writing and Chinese Buddhist, Confucian, and medical texts spread throughout East Asia, through the centuries when vernacular scripts evolved, right up to the end of the nineteenth century when nationalism created new roles for vernacular languages and vernacular scripts. Through an examination of oral approaches to Chinese texts, it shows how highly valued Chinese texts came to be read through the prism of the vernaculars and ultimately to be translated. This long process has some parallels with vernacularization in Europe, but a crucial difference is that literary Chinese was, unlike Latin, not a spoken language. As a consequence, people who spoke different East Asian vernaculars had no means of communicating in speech, but they could communicate silently by means of written conversation in literary Chinese; a further consequence is that within each society Chinese texts assumed vernacular garb: in classes and lectures, Chinese texts were read and declaimed in the vernaculars. What happened in the nineteenth century and why are there still so many different scripts in East Asia? How and why were Chinese texts dethroned and what replaced them? These are some of the questions addressed in this book.

Sinitic in a Global Perspective

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Francis Kornicki
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
The Common

This chapter focuses on the language rupture in East Asia, that is to say, the loss of the common written language known as literary Chinese or Sinitic. The gradual replacement of the cosmopolitan language Sinitic by the written vernaculars was a process similar in some ways to the replacement of Latin and Sanskrit by the European and South Asian vernaculars, as argued by Sheldon Pollock. However, Sinitic was not a spoken language, so the oral dimension of vernacularization cannot be ignored. Charles Ferguson’s notion of diglossia has been much discussed, but the problem in the context of East Asia is that the only spoken languages were the vernaculars and that Sinitic was capable of being read in any dialect of Chinese as well as in the vernaculars used in neighbouring societies.

Early Sino-Japanese Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wiebke Denecke
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Japanese Literature ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Chinese Texts ◽  
Textual Culture

Sino-Japanese literature stands out among the Chinese-style literatures of East Asia for the wealth of texts preserved from the early period, its complex symbiosis with a flourishing vernacular tradition, and its pervasive reliance on gloss-reading techniques of Chinese texts (kundoku). These techniques allowed the transformation of Chinese texts into Japanese sound, syntax, and morphology and enabled a distinctive linguistic and creative distance from continental literary production. This chapter surveys the literary culture and production of Early Japan (Asuka, Nara and Heian Periods, seventh through twelfth centuries). After introducing the debates about the varied nomenclature of the corpus of “Sino-Japanese Literature” (kanbun; also called Japanese Literature in Chinese), it sketches the contexts of the emergence of Sino-Japanese textual culture and literature in Japan and gives an overview of major texts in their cultural context. It concludes with reflections on what students of China can learn from Sino-Japanese Literature.

马来学生对汉字的认知方式和认字教学的实践方法

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-134
Author(s):  
黄灵 燕
Keyword(s):  
Language Learners ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Chinese Language ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Comprehension Test ◽  
Chinese Texts ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
High Level ◽  
Alphabetic Writing ◽  
Chinese Language Learners

AbstractThis study mainly investigated cognitive methods adopted by Malay learners who were taking Chinese proficiency courses at the University of Putra Malaysia. The respondents were learners who came from an alphabetic writing background. The findings of this study revealed that three cognitive methods were adopted by these respondents to recognize and retrieve the meanings of Chinese characters. The first method was to use phonetic symbols to write down the pronunciations of Chinese characters in order to comprehend the meanings of the characters. The respondents needed to pass through the intermediary stage of the inner language to activate the meanings of the characters. This response is a normal psychological reaction from the Chinese language learners who come from an alphabetic writing background.For the second method, the respondents used the vocabulary of their mother tongue to translate the meanings of Chinese characters. The findings showed that they depended on their mother tongue when comprehending the meanings of Chinese characters. Some respondents needed to search for the equivalent vocabulary in their mother tongue to translate the meanings of Chinese characters before they could retrieve the accurate meanings of the characters. This reaction shows that the method of acquisition of the mother tongue can affect the cognition ability of learners when comprehending the meanings of Chinese characters and during the reading process of Chinese texts.The third method concerned some respondents who could master Chinese characters and obtain a high level of Chinese proficiency. They were able to retrieve the meanings of Chinese characters directly from Chinese orthography without depending on the stimulus of the inner language or translation of the mother tongue to decode the meanings of the characters. The results of the Chinese comprehension test revealed that the respondents who obtained a high level of Chinese proficiency were not hindered by the difficulties in recognizing and comprehending the meanings of the Chinese characters. Their scores in the comprehension test were the highest.The feedback from the questionnaire used showed that some respondents did not necessarily have to rely on the stimulus of the inner language as the intermediary stage to activate the meanings of Chinese characters. Most of the respondents preferred to use the vocabulary of their mother tongue to help them to retrieve the meanings of the characters. Regarding the stimulus of the inner language or the translation of the mother tongue for decoding, both these methods showed that there was interference from the mother tongue’s orthography of the respondents. However, the results of the comprehension test revealed that when the respondents were familiar with Chinese characters, they could abandon both the methods mentioned when retrieving the meanings of the characters.Finally, this study suggests some instructional practices for recognizing Chinese characters to assist Chinese language learners from the alphabetic writing background to better recognize the characteristics of Chinese orthography. These practices emphasize learning activities for standard Chinese language orthography. Emphasis also is given to the knowledge relating to the features and characteristics of Chinese characters from an ideogram language. Further stress is on the effective methods to retrieve the meanings directly from Chinese characters.

scholarly journals Teaching Foreign Languages to Students of the Philological Direction Using the Academic Language

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 2423-2442
Author(s):  
Oksana V. Asadchykh ◽  
Liudmyla H. Smovzhenko ◽  
Iryna V. Kindras ◽  
Ihor I. Romanov ◽  
Tetiana S. Pereloma
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Academic Language ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Linguistic Competence ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Knowledge And Skills

Modern socio-educational student environment, which stands on communication is based on the exchange of visual images and philological units. Philology students see in communicating with foreign language communicants an opportunity to develop the spoken language of a non-native language, as well as to supplement this knowledge with cultural characteristics and new images. The perception of academically correct lexical group is relevant in combination with spoken language. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that the authors go beyond the stereotype, according to which the academic language is conventionally considered an anachronism and, in general, not an effective means to expand linguistic competence. The article proves that students are ready to learn the academic language not only ion the cultural plane, but also with the help of pedagogical methods. The study also confirms the authors' assertion that it is advisable to introduce an extended learning format into the curriculum in line with the techniques of linguistic learning. The practical value of this article lies in the fact that the study of the academic language by philology students will help them apply the acquired knowledge and skills in different social situations, which are often based on in-depth historical linguistic knowledge.

scholarly journals Discourse Markers of French: Multifaceted Look at a Controversial Category

Kalbotyra ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 268-285
Author(s):  
Elena Vladimirska ◽  
Jelena Gridina ◽  
Daina Turlā-Pastare
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Distributional Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Level ◽  
Learning Path ◽  
The One ◽  
Criteria For Evaluation ◽  
Linguistic Approaches

In this paper, we discuss the question of discourse markers (DM) – a category conceived differently by theoretical and applied linguistic approaches. Unlike in applied approaches, in which DMs are considered desemantized/grammaticalized lexical units devoid of their own semantics and therefore of status in the language, we consider DMs to constitute a full-fledged category of language, having its own semantics and distribution, both of which play a crucial role in the construction of discourse (Paillard 2011, 2012; Franckel 2008, 2019). This hypothesis has been developed in theoretical linguistics and has seen little evidence from a perspective of the acquisition and didactics of foreign languages. Based on cross-analysis of linguistic theories (Benveniste 1974; Ducrot 1980; Hopper & Traugott 1993; Culioli 1990,1999; Franckel & Paillard 2008) and on distributional analysis of data of the spoken corpora, we show that the absence of specific linguistic status for DMs has repercussions at the didactic and acquisition levels: DMs are generally approached in an ad hoc manner, all functions combined, which leads on the one hand to gaps in the acquisition of French and, on the other hand, to the ambiguity of criteria for evaluation. Therefore, at the level of applied linguistics, we suggest the integration of DMs in the learning path as a full category, an integration that must be carried out on several axes – semantic, syntax and prosodic – and be based on an authentic oral corpora of the spoken language. At the theoretical level, we use transversal analysis in order to give yet another argument in favor of a semantical-enunciative approach to discursive markers.

scholarly journals Academic language as an object of teaching foreign languages to philology students

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (S4) ◽  
pp. 657-676
Author(s):  
Oksana V. Asadchykh ◽  
Liudmyla H. Smovzhenko ◽  
Iryna V. Kindras ◽  
Ihor I. Romanov ◽  
Tetiana S. Pereloma
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Academic Language ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Practical Significance ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Language Research ◽  
Intercultural Exchange ◽  
Knowledge Communication

In the modern socio-educational environment, which is developed through intercultural exchange and the implementation of new methods of spreading knowledge, communication in the student environment is based on the exchange of visual images and philological units. For students of the philological direction, communication with foreign language communicants is determined by the possibility of improving the function of conversation, perception of cultural characteristics and obtaining new images. Of relevance is the perception of not only spoken language by students, but also of the academically correct lexical group. The novelty of the study is determined by the fact that academic language is often perceived as a kind of anachronism, as something insufficient to expand linguistic competence. The study proves that the readiness of students to implement the provisions of academic language is possible not only culturally, but is also achievable by pedagogical methods. The study demonstrates that the implementation of the extended learning format is achieved through the techniques of linguistic learning. The practical significance of the study is that the perception of academic language will allow students of the philological direction to implement their skills in various social spheres, which may require historical language research and be predominantly fundamental.

scholarly journals Sources of Expanding of the Youth Jargon in Ukrainian at the Beginning of the XXI Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 32-43
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Styshov
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
University Students ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Vocational Schools ◽  
Loan Words ◽  
Effective Source

The article focuses on one of the important layers of the lexical system of the national Ukrainian language at the beginning of the XXI century, namely the youth jargon neologisms. The recording of the spoken language of young people (schoolchildren, students of vocational schools, university students, cadets, etc.), as well as texts from the Internet and contemporary Ukrainian journalism and fiction, served as the material of the present study. The body of newly formed slang words under analysis comprises more than 200 units. The author defines and analyses the main sources of the mentioned units’ enrichment. The most effective among them is the word formation on the basis of specific and borrowed derivative sources. It has been shown that within the analyzed period the youth jargon neologisms are mostly enriched by nouns-neologisms formed, in particular, by means of suffixation, univerbalization, abbreviation, compounding, lexico-semantic derivation or without any affixes at all. Newly formed adjectives, verbs and adverbs, being not numerous in comparison with nouns-sociolects of youth, are coined primarily by suffixation. Another effective source of the youth social dialect enrichment is their direct entry into Ukrainian from foreign languages, such as English, Russian, German, Spanish, French, and Chinese. Among these new borrowings, English loan words prevail. Besides, a certain part of the youth neologisms has penetrated into speech of the young people from other jargons, such as computer, sports, automobile jargons. Some new units of the analyzed sociolect have come into use (mainly with a change in semantics) from a less effective source, i.e. a criminal argot.

Chinese Characters and Their Impact on Other Languages of East Asia

1971 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 187
Author(s):  
William S-Y. Wang ◽  
Liu Shih-Hong
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Chinese Characters
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