Ancient Chinese sentence final particle ěr 爾

The article amounts to a fully comprehensive study on the sentence final particle ěr 爾 in Classical Chinese. After an overview of the explanations of the functions of the particle in reference books, all relevant occurrences in the pre-Qín texts are analysed, and the results are compared with its usage in the documents of the Western Hàn era. The possible interpretations of its meaning(s) proposed by the author are subsequently put in relation to hypothetical etymological links based on the theory of Old Chinese morphology in Sagart’s vein.

Father Iakinf Bičurin’s theory of mental inflection in Chinese

Summary The article deals with the highly original idea of mental inflection [умственное словоизменение] in Chinese put forward by the prominent nineteenth-century Russian sinologist Nikita (比丘林, Father Iakinf or Hyacinthus) Bičurin (1777–1853) in his Kitajskaja Grammatika (1835) and other language-related works. The concept refers to the internal features of Chinese morphology which compensate for the absence of common grammatical inflection. Fostered in an Humboldtian spirit, the theory established a link between covert categories and their surface representations a century before functional syntax appeared on the linguistic stage.

On Early Chinese Morphology and its Intellectual History

The medieval Chinese tradition tells us that a given Chinese character may change its meaning when its reading is altered slightly. Modern scholars have sought principles for these changes, and from those principles have reconstructed a skeletal system of early Chinese morphology – with such elements as derivation by tone change, causative infixes, transitivising prefixes, etc. Yet it is an arresting fact that some of pre-modern China's linguistically most astute scholars inveighed against the multiple readings on which this research is based. They seem to have held strong opinions, not always made explicit, about precisely how it is that Chinese characters represent language. These two views, modern and traditional, represent fundamentally different models of how early Chinese evolved into modern Chinese.