Wolfgang Behr

Shoes played an important role in Chinese rituals since at least the Western Zhou 周 dynasty (1046–771 BCE). This is reflected by the example of two specialized types of shoes mentioned in gift lists which served as important status symbols for vassals within the Zhou ecumene: A type of red shoe with a double sole (chi xi 赤舄) and the so-called ‘toothed clogs’ (ya ji 牙屐) (Feng Shi 2019). Apart from these it can be assumed that people crafted sandals and textile shoes from different fibers. Shoes made of leather are traditionally identified with footwear common among non-Chinese people from the North and Northwest. However, it must be assumed that shoes made of leather featuring foreign styles were present in the Guanzhong 關中 area from at least the Eastern Zhou period (770–221 BCE) onward. With the introduction of riding technology during the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) at the latest, foreign footwear from the regions to the north and the northwest of the putative Sinosphere have substantially influenced Chinese shoemaking. Indices for the presence of foreign shoes or at least the knowledge thereof can also be found in a Zhouli 周禮 passage about foreign music and dance. By the Later Han dynasty, an astonishing range of terminology reflects the abundance of different shoe types available, many of which prove to be innovative forms imported from the West. One object of particular interest is the foreign leather shoe whose name is transcribed as jia-sha 䩡沙 (Old Chinese: *kˤep-sˤraj) in the Shuowen jiezi 說文解 字 and as he-sha 䩖 (Old Chinese *m-[k]ˤap-sˤraj) in the Guangya 廣雅, a word which is possibly related to Balti Tibetan kʌpša· (Rangan 1975), Changthang Ladakhi kapsha (Abdul & Norman 1998), and can be further traced back to Middle Persian kafš (‘shoe’).
This joint study focuses on the questions how foreign shoe styles influenced the Chinese conception of shoe wear and how far these influences are reflected in the terminology of shoes. Its first part focusses on the specialized terms for footwear which are found in Western Zhou bronzes, analyzing the importance of shoes in the ritual context. In the latter part, foreign influence is depicted on the level of everyday material culture, which sheds light on cultural exchange regarding profane objects and techniques, as it developed from the Western Zhou to the Han dynasty. By looking into historical data from both transmitted and excavated Chinese literature and focusing on the possible etymology of selected words like di-lou 鞮鞻 (‘soft leather shoes’), xue 鞾 (‘boots’), and the above mentioned jia-sha 䩡沙 , the study aims to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of exchange in the Chinese north-western border area during antiquity.

The language of pre-imperial China is usually presented as if it was an entity isolated from external influences, isolating in its morphological structure, monolithic in its geographical spread and petrified in its diachronic characteristics. Through the reductive lens of Early Imperial exegetes and lexicographers, idealized linguistic norms have been retroactively imposed onto the dim and distant past, more often than not tacitly serving the various ideological preferences of the present. While it is difficult to steer clear of the omnipresent " normative " pressure of Warring States and Western Han sociopolitical discourse, the talk will provide a few glimpses at linguistic variation in Early China. Looking both at transmitted and excavated texts, I will attempt to complicate narratives of unification, centralization and purity, which have quietly crept into the few available linguistic descriptions, and introduce some linguistic tools which may ultimately help us dig beyond the rhetoric and editorial tampering of the competing Han classicist guardians of the textual canon.

It seems that neither Sima Qian's 司馬遷 famous “compensation theory” of Hanfei’s eloquence (“Fei, as a person, suffered from a stammer and was incapable of leading a discussion, but he excelled in the production of writing” 非爲人口吃，不能道說，而善著書), nor the central position he accorded to the “Difficulties of persuasion« (《說難》) chapter (Hunter 2013) has provoked a sustained engagement with the master's stylistics. Exceptions notwithstanding (張覺 2001, Zádrapa 2014), premodern criticism and contemporary scholarship mostly revolve around the “richness of his wide-ranging comparisons” (博喻之富, 《文心雕龍》4.6), especially in anecdote quotations, his use of parallelism before the Later Han stabilization of 駢文 prose (王懷成 1989). Another popular topic, originating with Ren Fang 任昉 (460–508), is whether the 'pearls on a string' (連珠) poetic genre emerged from his “Inner/Outer thesauri of sayings” (《内外儲說》), rather than with Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE) (鄭良樹 1990, 孫良申 2010, 韓賢克 2010), well-known for his propensity towards imitatio (Schilling 2006), and how phrases coined or quoted in the text, survived as 'set phrases' (成語).
My talk will strive to complement this picture by analyzing three areas characterising “one of the most distinctive voices in all of Chinese literature” (Goldin 2013): (a) the use of line-end and internal rhyme to create textual cohesion (金毅 1984, Behr 2005), distinct from other prosimetric 散文 patterns of the Warring States; (b) argumentation via non-stock praonomastic puns; (c) tension resolution between innovated synonym compounds and phrasal repetition avoidance (魏得勝 1993).

Once it had relinquished its primary functions as a poetic figure, etymology became embedded into philological practices during the Han period in China as a tool to generate powerful arguments --  be they philosophical, political or religious in nature -- by creating a reservoir for synchronic linguistic motivation. Tracking, and, more often than not, creatively concocting homologies between phonological and semantic relationships in the lexicon, emerged not only as a heuristic procedure of the "Ru" scholars, but a as a hermeneutic device to ground readings of pre-imperial texts and to root  their canonization.

In India, etymolo gy was considered one of the ancillaries to the study of the Veda, and served as an important instrument for scriptural exegesis and the handling of ritual in the late Vedic corpus. Under a language metaphysics that took Sanskrit as underlined by a fixed semantic system corresponding to real existents, tracing the links between words via etymologizing was tantamount to uncovering the structure of being. This was achieved by a special kind of nirvacana analysis, semantic elucidation that was considered parallel but still a separate domain from grammatical analysis. Even when divorced form the Vedic metaphysics of language- for instance in the hands of the Buddhists – such analysis remained an important tool for the elucidation of Sanskrit philosophy and poetry.

As a philological and philosophical strategy to wrest meaning and persuasive power from the abyss of the arbitrariness of the sign, the Chinese and Indian developments share many properties despite the radical typological difference of the involved languages. What's more, some of the paronomastic bridges built between words within the two traditions would eventually get intertwined, when the rise of Buddhist exegesis in China became aware of its Indian predecessors, thus opening up the playground for bilingual meaning construction via juxtaposition Indian and Chinese etymologies.

In both cases, the appeal to purely semantic rather than historically oriented etymologies seem to render intertextual context more significant than the question of origins in respect to a textual realm, hence opening up a philological and exegetical space which is highly relevant to the humanities' recent revival of interest in philology.

Inscriptional Evidence and the Origins of Poetic Form in Early China

Wolfgang Behr

Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Zurich /
Distinguished Scholar in Residence, Hong Kong Baptist University Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology


Abstract
While some authors have claimed that a conscious use of poetic devices and incipient versification may be traced back to Shang oracle bone inscriptions (cf. e.g. 饒宗頤 1992, 孟祥魯 1992, 譚家健 1995, 周錫韍 1998, 李爾重 1999, 陳煒湛 2002, 劉奉光 2002, 劉昕 2012, 楊艷梅, 趙敏俐 2015, Schwartz 2015), the first undisputed specimens of rhyming and rhymed texts in Early China are ex­tant in the form of a corpus of several hundred bronze inscriptions from the Western and Eastern Zhou dynasties (王國維 1917, 郭沫若 1931, 真武直 1959, 白川靜 1967, 陳世輝 1981, Jao Tsung-Yi 1982, 陳邦懷 1985, 家井真 1986, 喻遂生 1993, 羅江文 1994, 1995, 1996, Behr 1996/7, 2009, 2017, 陳仕益 2006, 徐新亮 2011, 陈夏楠 2013, Tharsen 2015). The talk will review the evidence for the earliest instances of alliteration and end rhyme outside the transmitted literature, present a di­achronic sketch of the rise of regular tetrasyllabic meters towards the beginning of the Springs and Au­tumns period (cf. Behr 2004, 施向東 2016) and take a fresh look at other devices of early versification, such as line-internal and feminine (a.k.a. ‘long tail’ 長尾) rhyming (cf. 陸子權 1980), or the use of reduplication (e.g. 鄭剛 1996, 沈寶春2002, 揚明明 2006, 陳美琪 2007, Smith 2015) etc.
While arguing for the usefulness of such data for an understanding of Early Chinese morphology, the ex­ternal relationships of Chinese and the dating of pre-Qin accretional texts, problems in the de­tection of rhyme and its interdependence with models of phonological reconstruction will also be highlighted.

References

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While some authors have claimed that a conscious use of poetic devices and incipient versification may be traced back to Shang oracle bone inscriptions (cf. e.g. Schwartz 2015), the first undisputed specimens of rhyming and rhymed texts in Early China are extant in the form of a corpus of several hundred bronze inscriptions from the Western and Eastern Zhou

Contemporary Written Chinese [CWC] (xiàndài shūmiànyǔ 現代書面語, for useful discussions see, e.g., Hú Mínyáng 1957, Chéng Guānlín 1990, Rosner 1992, Féng Shènglì 2003, 2006; Sūn Déjīn 2005, 2010, 2012, Diào Yǎnbīn 2017) tolerates a great number of petrified phrases and syntactic con­structions from Classical Chinese, most of them only mildly productive – if at all –  and often strictly bound to particular registers (yǔtǐ 語體). Against this background, it is surprising that some pre-classical Chinese constructions not only have survived into CWC, but are used produc­tively or even playfully, if not necessarily with great frequency.
My presentation will look at three constructions sometimes characterised as inhe rited from Ar­chaic (pre-Classical) Chinese in the literature, i.e.

(1) Mandarin [唯~惟 Ο 是 V] focalization (cf. Liú Jǐngnóng 1994, Sūn Déjīn 2012)
(2) [direct-indirect] object patterns in Southern Chinese double object constructions and  Mandarin rhetorical “object inversion” (Shí Dìngxǔ et al. 2003, 2010; Diào Yǎnbīn 2012, Zhào Yīfán 2013, Eifring, in progress:11)
(3) [noun →  adjective] conversion (Diào Yǎnbīn 1994, Zhāng Wénguó 2005, Shào Jìngmǐn 2008, Lù Jiā & Mèng Guó 2012) or “word-class flexibility”

Apart from providing a sketch of the pragmatic settings, in which these constructions occur in Contemporary Written Chinese, I will discuss whether they are to be analyzed as retentions from Early Chinese, in how far they may be influenced by substrate influences, dialect mixture or metatypy (Ross 1999, 2006), or whether they are profitably analyzed as instantiations of drift (cf. Hodge 1970, Vennemann 1975). If time permits, I will also comment on how such constructions have been used in recent appeals  for “the revival of writing in Literary Chinese” (wényán fùxīng 文言復興, e.g. Bì Gēng 2003.a,b, Weì Míng 2006; Xiāo Yǐngchāo 2007 etc.) and appropriated into the current “great revival of the Chinese nation” (Zhōnghuá mínzú wěidà fùxing) 中華民族偉大復興 discourse of the Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 era.

Traditional approaches to reconstructed phonology, but also to historical syntax and sociolinguistics typically have a disquietingly monolithic view of pre-imperial Chinese. The widespread tacit assumption of linguistic uniformity and/or normativity, attributed to the “refined speech” (yǎyán 雅言) that emerged early on during the Zhōu period as a form of intercommunication among members of the nobility, is partly due to the nature of the sources at our disposal to reconstruct ancient social backgrounds, pragmatic settings, registers, and contact scenarios. More often than not, however, the notion of a homogenous yǎyán seems also influenced by subliminal political narratives of unification, centralization and purity which have quietly crept into the linguistic descriptions and interpretations of data, predictably resulting in, e.g., neat trees of dialect divergence, homogenous phonologies of an assumed prestige koiné, neglect of colloquial, deviant, technical, ritual speech, masking of loanwords, alloglottographies etc.
While some scholars (e.g. Lín Yǔtáng 1932, Erkes 1935, Dǒng Tónghé 1940, Grootaers 1943, Serruys 1960, 1962, Y.R. Chao 1946 etc.) criticized this state of affairs early on, voicing eloquent pleas to allow for variability and at least a rudimentary “Sitz im Leben” for the reconstructed Early Chinese language(s), it is only the recent flurry of excavated texts, less streamlined by editorial tampering of the Hàn guardians of the textual canon, that has  now opened up the possibility to arrive at a slightly more differentiated view of the possible variability found at the time.
After a short, critical review of the textual sources on the idea of an early yǎyán, my talk will focus on select examples from three areas where a more differentiated view of early variability has been gained: (1) phonology and lexicon of non-standard varieties of pre-Qín southern Chinese, esp. the so-called “Chǔ dialect” (cf. Yán Xuéqún 1983, Lǐ Jìngzhōng 1987, Lǐ Shùháo, Yù Sùishēng 1993, Huá Xuéchéng 2003, Xiè Róng’é 2005, 2009, Zhōu Bō 2008, Zhèng Wěi 2011, Liú Xìnfāng 2011, Hán Jiǒnghào 2014, Park 2016 etc.); (2) non-standard syntax of conjunctions and pronouns in Chǔ and Qín “dialects” (cf. Ônishi 1996, 1998, 2002, Zhōu Shǒujìn, Liào Xùdōng 2006, Lǐ Míngxiǎo et al. 2011 etc.); (3) sociolinguistics of substandards  and the emergence of maledictory speech (cf. Liú Fùgēn 2008, Guō Jùnrán 2013, Chén Tongshēng 2016 etc.) towards the end of the Warring States period.
The aim of the talk is not to simply jettison the “traditional” approaches. Instead, I hope to  identify some methodologically interesting examples pointing to areas where our knowledge of pre-Hàn Old Chinese could be usefully complicated, iff non-variationist proponents of “trees”, “standards” and “systems” engaged in closer cooperation with paleographers and variationists.

The idea that the part of a Chinese compound character commonly called bushou 部首 in Chinese and translated by ‘radical’ in English (or cognate expressions in other European languages) contains the semantic root of that character or the lexi­cal root it represents has a long European prehistory, which reaches back to the first accounts of the Chinese writ­ing system in missionary sources of the 17th cen­tury. In my talk I will trace the early history of both the Chinese and the European terms (as well as some com­peting designations). It will be shown that the term ‘radi­cal’ arose out of a peculiar constellation of a community of scholarly mission­aries working in East and South­east Asia as well as South-America under various presuppositions of ‘alterity’. Arguably, it inhibited the recognition of bushou  as se­mantic determinatives or classifiers for a long time – despite the emergence of the lat­ter concept in the same intellectual environment.
Building upon the discussion of a few selected ex­amples, I will show how this per­ception led to some seemingly ineradicable miscon­ceptions about the role of seman­tic and phonological elements in compound characters, as well as the na­ture of word-families and etymologies built upon them, which are still noticeable today in various domains of sinology and even Chinese linguistics.

Paronomastics, although known as an embellishment since the earliest stages of Chines poetry, reemerges as a massively deployed glossing strategy during the Pre-Imperial/Imperial transition period. Against the background shift from what has been called “nominalism” (Makeham 1991, 1994) in Early Chinese philosophy, i.e. the adbandonment of the previously widespread acceptance of merely conventional ties between extralinguistic referents and their linguistic representations (Ptak 1986-7, Djamouri 1993), a move towards forms of “essentialism” set in during the Early Empire, necessitating new motivations of the linguistic sign, whether oral or written. Trying to escape from the abyss of the arbitraire du signe by concocting invented traditions of nomothetic saints, the Han Ruists attempted to anchor the gloss in fashionable correlative cosmologies, and, at the same time, the signifié in its intrinsic ontology. Along with an increasing awareness of language change (Behr 2005), internal and external linguistic diversity (Behr 2004), a new articulation of philosophical arguments thus emerged, which depended on the harnessing of synchronic homophonies and the construction of wild intralingual paretymologies, through which the core terms of the Chinese philosophical lexicon could be paronomastically reappropriated.

After tracing the earliest reflexes of a vernacular-yǎyán 雅言 (Behr 2016) divide in excavated texts, and sketching the rampant loss of Old Chinese derivationsal morphlogy under conditions of heavy language contact and its consequences for the emergence of a recalibrated relationship between writing and language, my contribution will focus on paronomasia as a synchronic intralingual practice (cf., e.g.,. Huang Lili 1995, Zhao Zhongfang 2003, Geaney 2010, 2016, Zhang Guoliang 2011, Meng Xin 2014, Suter 2015, 2016). Aimed at creating powerful philosophical propositions, it will be argued that this practice played an important in the establishment of what would eventually be construed as a “classical” canon of Chinese texts and a corresponding normative language (tōngyǔ 通語), effectively disguising the less presentable aspects of its quasi-creolized linguistic pedigree.

The Sino-Tibetan etymon reflected by the Written Tibetan (WT) noun snying ‘heart, mind, breast’, also used verbally as ‘to love, show affection towards’, was replaced by xin 心 ‘heart’ as a noun in Old Chinese (OC). As first shown in Baxter (1991), snying is cognate with OC rén 仁 ‘to show affection for others, love’, a semantic layer reflected in the famous gloss 愛人 in Lunyu 12.22 or in the Yucong 語叢 slips (3.35), where we read: 愛，<身+心>（仁）也. Behr (2015) has argued that concomitant to the Confucian appropriation of rén 仁 (OC *niŋ) as an ethical category and to the semantic narrowing of its exoactive derivation *niŋ-s represented by 佞 ‘be eloquent’, the lexical gap left for the activity of ‘loving’ was filled by ài 愛 (OC *qˁəp-s). Graphically a corruption of 夊 below ài 㤅 ‘to love’, as shown by the Chǔ manuscripts, ài belonged to a word-family meaning ‘to draw towards oneself’ (Schwermann 2011), whence the at first sight counterintuitive polysemy with ‘go easy on someone, be sparing’. But where does this root come from, if it was not, as Xǔ Shèn thought in his gloss on the phonetic 旡, simply onomatopoetic of a choking, sucking sound?
Building upon the observation that an OC homophone of ài spelled 僾 means ‘to pant, lose breath’ the new uvular reconstruction of ài in Baxter & Sagart (2014) opens an interesting link with a fairly distributed breath related word-family, minimally including xī 歙 < *qhəp ‘suck, inhale’, xì 翕 < *qhəp ‘draw in, inhale’, xī 噏 *qh(r)əp ‘draw together’, hē 欱 < *qhˁəp ‘sip’, xī 吸 < *qh(r)əp ‘inhale’, kài 愾 *qhəp-s ‘sigh out’, and, of course, the notoriously untranslatable qì 氣 < *C.qhəp-s ‘odem, pneuma’. ‘To love’ would thus originally not have been conceptualized as just any ‘drawing near’ but as a kind of ‘sucking in’. Building upon manuscript attestations, the paper will explore this word family connection within and beyond OC and argue for its crosslinguistic typological plausibility.

Unlike China’s earliest readable texts, the late Shāng 商 (13th-11th c. BCE) ‘oracle bone inscrip­tions’, preserved mostly on water turtle plastrons and bovine shoulder blades (jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文), which were largely forgotten until their rediscovery at the turn to the last century, bronze in­scriptions (jīnwén 金文), attested from the 12th century BCE onwards, seem to have been always known and were occasionally mentioned throughout the classical period. They were first system­atically cataloged during the Northern Sòng 宋 dynasty (960-1127). It was already during this ini­tial phase of scholar­ship already that several authors noticed that some of the most archaic bronze texts include graphs with a strongly  “pictograph” character, often clearly distinct in posi­tion, size and ductus from the more linear and abstract graph shapes en­countered in the texts which they accompany. The famous Chinese paleographer and writer Guō Mòruò 郭沫若 (1892-1978) first called these graphs “lineage symbols” (zú huī 族徽) in a study published in 1930, where he argued that they represent quasi-totemic identity markers of ancient Shāng lineages and poli­ties and stressed their status as proto-writing. While Guō’s theory continues to receive wide sup­port in Western and Chinese studies on the subject, there is no lack of controversies about whether they should be classified and analyzed as “glottographic” writ­ing sensu strictu or rather as “emblems”, i.e. non-linguistic symbol systems, functioning somewhat like heraldic signs or “coats of arms” in various Europan traditions. Nor is there any clear consensus, whether they repr­esent names of individuals, kin-, lineage- or ex­ogamy-based groups, or even other social and political entities.

Proceeding from the most recent catalog and study of these signs (Hé Jǐngchéng 2009), I will first introduce the extant corpus some 900 simplex graphs, summarize the recent Chinese and Japa­nese scholarship on their archaeological contexts, distributional patterns and possible relation­ship towards neolithic pottery marks, and then focus on their combinatory prop­erties, as evi­denced in a corpus of some 530 compound graphs known so far. It is hoped that this glimpse into the early history of  transitions from non-textual to textual functions of such symbols will allow for the formulation of some more theoretical points, useful for a comparative typology of the emer­gence of logographic writing.

As Heiner Roetz once perceptively put it: in working with pre-imperial Chinese texts it is often easier to translate a sentence than a single term or concept. Making use of recent advances in the historical phonology of Old Chinese (Zheng-Zhang Shangfang 2011, 2013, Baxter and Sagart 2014 etc.) the paper will be looking at the reconstructed morphology of the two terms conventionally translated as 'reciprocity, fairness' (OC *nna-s) and 'shame' (OC *nnrəʔ), their lexical field in inscriptional Chinese, and their cognates in Tibeto-Burman languages, to trace their earliest historical semantics (cf. Behr 2007, 2012, 2015 for methodologically similar approaches to other Early Chinese keywords). It will be argued,
that a variety of conversion theory, as sucessfully applied to denominal derivations of OC verbs in Zádrapa (2011), is a useful tool to understand the etymological link of 'reciprocity, fairness' to the lexical root of the verb 'to be like' (如) and the non-clitic (“heavy”) 2 nd person pronoun (汝) and that the origins of the word for 'shame' are best traced via the the word family of tài 態 (OC *nnˁə-s) 'bearing, attitude, posture'.
A final section of the paper will then explore how an awareness of the word family/etymology thus reconstructed may (or may not) influence our understanding of the early reinterpretation of these terms into ethical concepts by the “Confucians”.

In der traditionellen Historiographie Chinas wird die kurzlebige Dynastie des Ersten Erhabenen Kaisers von Qin (221-206 v.u.Z.) durch die unmittelbar folgende Etablierung einer konfuzianischen politischen Elite im Kaiserreich der Han (207 v. - 220 n.u.Z.) oftmals als radikaler Bruch mit den antiken Traditionen auf allen Ebenen beschrieben. Tatsächlich lässt sich vor dem Hintergrund neuer Textfunde und archäologischer Ausgrabungen zeigen, dass nicht nur diese Perspektive erheblich zu relativieren sein wird, sondern umgekehrt auch das Nachwirken der durch den Staat Qin etablierten politischen, rechtlichen und sozialen Institutionen sehr viel intensiver und länger war als bislang vermutet.

Der Vortrag wird versuchen, einige Grundkonstanten des chinesischen Staates zu identifizieren, die in der Reichseinigung ihren Ausgangspunkt genommen und auch die zahlreichen "Fremdherrschaften" überlebt haben, die zeitlich fast die Hälfte der "chinesischen" Geschichte ausgemacht haben. Gleichzeitig wird er Versuche kritisch beleuchten, politische Entwicklungen der "ersten" chinesischen Moderne seit der Song-Zeit (1126-1279) und namentlich seit dem Eindringen westlicher Mächte in China in einen simplen linearen Zusammenhang mit Institutionen des alten China zu stellen. Die in diesem Zusammenhang oftmals postulierte lineare "longue durée" von "Mentalitäten" und "Verhaltensweisen" bis in die Politik und Wirtschaft der Gegenwart entspringt. nicht selten eher europäischen Abgrenzungs- und Selbstdefintionsdiskursen über das als Gegenbild imaginierte China als der Komplexität historischer Entwicklungen und Interaktionen in Ost- und Eurasien.

As Michael Nylan has recently shown (“Beliefs about Social Seeing: Hiddenness (微) and Visibility in Classical-era China”, Ms. Berkeley 2015), the topos of hiddenness and concealment is mostly played out in the arena of political philosophy and historiographical argumentation in early Chinese transmitted literature. “... [T]he social advantages of or disadvantages accruing from hiding and displaying ... the very choice to position oneself along a spectrum of possible degrees of visibility” and the corresponding “… valences implied by the words used for ‘seeing’, ‘gazing’, ‘contemplating’, ‘peering’, ‘watching’” shaped a discourse which posited the emulation of an assumed parity of hiddenness and display during the period of the archaic sage-kings as its ideal. It is only during the late pre-imperial period of internecine struggles between the “Warring States” (475 – 221 bce) that the culture of prominent display of the powers and virtues embodied (體 *r̥ˁijʔ > tǐ) by the early kings and maintained through the ritual propriety (禮 *rˁijʔ > lǐ) of those overawed (畏 *ʔuj-s > wèi) by their visible decorum (威 *ʔuj > wēi), gave rise to a preference of concealment and reticence, with corresponding consequences for an adjustment of social etiquette, the fear of “public shame” and rhetorical tropes of “paradoxical enlightenment”. The recalibration of the balance between appearance and invisibility can be traced, albeit with some difficulty, along the development of notions represented by the character wēi 微 (*məj), conventionally glossed as ‘minute, small, hidden, subtle, mysterious …’ during the classical period, but historically a negative form of a non-indicative copula used to mark irrealis constructions (‘if it were not … ’, ‘if it had not been for …’, ‘assume that there wasn’t …’ etc.)

My talk will set out to summarize arguments about concealment of representation and formlessness of embodiment in the pre-imperial philosophical discourse of those groups retrospectively identified as “Confucians” and “Daoists” by the early imperial classicists, and it will try to show how the idea of ineffability of language – so prominent in medieval arguments about cosmology, metaphysics and perception – is underpinned by the topos of hiddenness, contoured by wēi 微. As a key notion of Warring States discourse, I will argue, wēi is not only graphically but also etymologically related to měi 美 (*mrəjʔ) ‘be beautiful, fine’, i.e. the term which eventually came to epitomize the whole sphere of beauty in the history of Chinese aesthetics. Obviously, how a notion so glaringly revealed as ‘beauty’ hinges upon the ‘hidden’ in early Chinese rhetoric is a conundrum I will not be able to elucidate, but hope to shed some darkness on.

The paper will be looking at the lexical field of writing and writing related terminology in Early Old Chinese paleographical materials from the pre-imperial period. While the signs referring to activities, objects and officials associated with writing practices (such as shu 書，ce  冊/策, wen 文, shi 史, yu/bi 聿/筆 etc.) have often been subject to learned historiographical, archeological and anthropological discussions, little is known about the origins of the lexicon they represent and its internal organization. While the focus will be on the etymological reconstruction of the Chinese-internal lexical field, the ultimate purpose of the paper is to study the writing related lexicon in several genealogically unrelated traditions beyond Chinese and Tibeto-Burman (especially Indo-European and Semitic). Eventually, this could serve as a first step towards a comparative history of the earliest conceptualizations of writing in ancient societies during the period of their emergence from orality.
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在先秦的古文字學材料中，「書寫」及與「書寫」相關的術語構成了一個語義場（lexical field）。儘管這些表示有關「書寫」的活動、器物與官吏的字符（譬如「書」、「册」/「策」、「文」、「史」、「聿」/「筆」等）歷來都深為史學、考古學以及人類學學者所重，然而我們對於這個「書寫」詞匯（lexicon）的起源及內部結構卻所知甚少。本文旨在從語源學角度對早期上古漢語中的「書寫」語意場進行重構，進而對漢語及藏緬語系以外語源傳統中的相應詞匯（尤其是印歐語及閃語族）作出探討，藉此以期為構建關於遠古社會中「書寫」脫離口語的早期概念化過程的「比較」史奠定基礎。

Contrary to a widespread perception in Europe since its first tentative encounters with China in the Yuan-Ming periods, and a deeply engrained self-perception of mainstream Confucian scholar literati since at least the Early Imperial construction of Han identity vis-à-vis the "Barbarians of the four quarters", linguistic diversity was an important part of everyday Chinese life during the Classical period. Contacts with at least half a dozen of genealogically non-related language families have left their considerable imprint on the early Chinese lexicon, and, more rarely, also in Chinese morphosyntax and phonology. Some scholars even argue that the emergence of the monosyllabic-isolating profile, associated with Classical Chinese after the loss of its once elaborate derivational morphology, is a result of bilingualism over extended periods of time and subsequent pidginisation/creolisation processes.

Amidst the narratives of language as an identity building device along often rather obliquely demarcated language family borders, it gets easily overlooked that an enormous linguistic diversity must have also existed within the Sinitic groupd of languages, as first reflected in Eastern Han and Early Medieval lexicography. Of course, language is always a construct, whether in its delineation from dialects (or other hyphen-lects), its relationship towards writing or its role in narratives of statehood, ethnicity and nation-building. But it is often tacitly assumed that at least its boundaries versus animal communication are universal. In my talk, I will show that this is not always the case, by comparing texts on "animal language", especially that of parrots and non-human primates, in Early Medieval and Medieval China with similar discourses in "the" West, where more often than not, philosophically somewhat different conclusions were drawn from the unsettling presence of speaking animals. A closer look at this human-non-human linguistic boundary will also be useful, I argue, to understand standard conceptualizations of early Chinese ethnographers with respect to the behavioural patterns, and, a fortiori, the cultures and traditions of their non-Sinitc neighbours.

Was eine Sprache von einem Dialekt unterscheidet ist sehr stark abhängig von den zugrundegelgten Kriterien. Während der vielzierte Sprachenkatalog “Ethnologue” von ca. weltweit gesprochenen Sprachen 236 in China verortet, dürften Schätzungen chinesischer Linguisten von ca. 130 realistischer sein. Das ist immer noch mehr als das Doppelte der Zahl der offiziell anerkannten “nationalen Minderheiten”. Die weltweite
Situation, in der nach konservativen Berechnungen die Hälfte, nach besorgeteren Schätzungen gar 3/4 dieser Sprachen im 21. Jahrhundert aussterben werden, da sie nur noch von wenigen hunderten oder tausenden Sprechern gesprochen werden, wird in China weitgehend gespiegelt. Neben den grossen sinitischen Sprechergemeinschaften entwickeln sich hier nur einige wenige Sprachen robust, die meisten jedoch sind in ihrem Überleben bedroht.

Der Vortrag führt zunächst in die historischen Hintegründe und spezifischen Eigenschaften der Sprachenvielfalt in China ein und bietet dann eine Abriss ihrer heutigen  soziolinguistischen Situation. Schliesslich wendet er sich den Versuchen chinesischer und internationaler Sprachwissenschaftler zu, sie zu dokumentieren und
erhalten und führt in spezifische Sonderdiskurse der VR China, wie die über “gefährdete Dialekte” und “aussterbende Schriften” ein.

While logical and analogical modes of argumentation in Early China have been explored in considerable detail, and, more often than not, dichotomized since the beginnings of sustained comparative studies of Classical Chinese philosophy and rhetoric in the 19th century, interest in the harnessing of figures of sound to construct persuasive statements or to vindicate evidence seems fairly recent (cf., e.g., Long Yuchun 1962/63, Behr 2006, Suter 2014). Against the background of new models of Old Chinese phonology and morphology, this talk will trace some aspects of the early history of "sound argumentation" in China, from the Odes down to the Early Medieval period, and it will discuss how it fits into recent areal perspectives on the relationship between sound, meaning and aesthetics in East and Southeast Asia (Williams 2013) as well as into broader comparative debates about the "poetics of grammar" (e.g., LaPorta and Shulman 2007).

Throughout the history of European linguistic alterity constructions, probably no other language has been labeled "vague", "imprecise", "ambiguous" or "underspecified" as much as Chinese since the beginning of its description in missionary accounts in the 16th century. While it can be readily shown that many of such observations are mere clichés, stemming from the failure to distinguish between writing and language or from the subliminal projection of typological expectations informed by the model of Indo-European languages, some serious linguistic questions remain: what is the place of vagueness – deliberate or unintentional – in the historical development of Chinese? How is ambiguity in different linguistic domains influenced by categorial elaboration and its loss? Is grammaticality a graded rather than a binary phenomenon, and if so, is the is the underlying scale calibrated differently in Chinese than in other typologically similar languages? What is the relationship between vagueness, ambiguity and grammaticality (universally and in Chinese)?
Setting aside the implications of such questions for the periodically resurging discourse on linguistic relativity, the talk will draw upon on a number of examples from pre-imperial, medieval and contemporary Chinese in order to delineate the role of vagueness in Chinese more precisely, especially by looking at areas where it is correlated with covert obligatory marking and definiteness.

Plato’s famous critique of the invention of “letters” (γράμματα) as a cultural technique in the Phae­drus (274c–275e), although put into Socrates mouth and couched in a non-alphabetic Egyptian set­ting, which, as his interlocuter Phaedrus moreover insinuates, is moreover “made up”, focuses on the relationship of writing in general (γραφή) with forgetfulness (ἀμελετησία). As is well known, his depreciation of the written, almost entirely neglected in the reception of the Phaedrus in late an­tiquity and the medieval period (cf. Yunis ed. 2011: 25-30) which was typically concerend with eros and rhetoric, has risen to enormous prominence again in the 20th century, largely thanks to Fou­cault's hijacking of the topic in "De la grammatologie" (1967) and "La pharmacie de Platon" (1968) under the highly problematic label of “Greek phonocentrism”.
Early Chinese discourses on the deficiencies of writing, on the other hand, are less concerned with the fear of mnemonic oblivion and rhetorical vigour as (a) with the normative, often straightfor­wardly political question of what should (not) be written down in historigography, and (b) with the incapacity of the written to fully express words and their intended meanings (shū bù jìn yán, yán bù jìn yì 書不盡言，言不盡意). The latter type of discourse, first formulated in early Confucian Yi­jing commentaries dealing with hexagram fuctions and line statements, becomes increasingly entan­gled with two other topics in the early medieval period, namely the early Daoist idea of the freedom gained by forgetting the written (wàng wén 忘文) as well as the metaphysical inadequacy of speech in general, and early Buddhist reflections on what may or may not be translated from Buddhist Hy­brid Sanskrit or Central Asian languages into Chinese. In my talk I will first summarize some of the early discussions about the deficiencies of writing in China and compare them with the Greek situa­tion. I will then attempt to show what kind of influence such per­ceptions of writing had on the Chinese perception of foreign writing systems, especially Brāhmī, since the Sòng (960-1279) and later periods.
Returning to a different, more systemic aspect of the normative discourse (a) on what should (rather than what can) not be written, a third part of my presentation will look at the various ways in which religious, political and ethical taboos have been handled on the level of the written graph and its constituent components throughout the history of Chinese writing. I will be especially interested in techniques such as homophone replacement, character mutilation and stroke deletion in early impe­rial paleography as well as in current censorship subversion on the Chinese internet.

Early Chinese non-obligatory kind-individuating lexical devices modifying nouns, commonly referred to as “sortal classifiers” (Aikhenvald 2000) in the typological linguistic literature, have sporadically appeared since the oracle bone period (Huang Zaijun 1964, Peyraube 1991, Drocourt 1993, Zhang Yujin 2001, Behr 2009 etc.). Their origins are rarely transparent, such that various scenarios explaining their emergence have been competing in the literature so far. Is it related to the concomitant loss of morphological individuation strategies in nominal morphology (Peyraube 1997, Wu Anqi 2005, Zhang Jun 2009)? To the prosodic restructuring of the language (Feng Shengli 2003, 2011) or tonogenesis? What role does areal contact influence (cf. R.B. Jones, 1975, Li Jinfang & Hu Suhua 2005) play, given that classifiers cannot be reconstructed to shared Sino-Tibetan (Jiang Ying 2009, Sun Hongkai 2014)? What is the relationship towards the proliferation of determinatives in the writing system and its regional variation in the same period? And why do classifiers –  at least if viewed from a cross-linguistic typological perspective –  show such an erratic semantics and distribution (Bisang 2009), protracted development and syntactic instability (Campbell 2000)? These are some of the questions I would like to address and discuss with the graduate students.

In Western popular literature, the Chinese writing system is often portrayed as being mindbogglingly complex and idiosyncratic, while the typical sinological narrative, in China as well as abroad, still prefers to analyse character structures in terms of the six categories of writing (liù shū 六書) inherited from the Shuōwén 說文 tradition. If the popular Western account, harkening back to the first missionary treatments of Chinese in the 16th century, tends to look for complexity in all the wrong places, the Eastern Han liù shū theory and most of its later derivatives notoriously mix up functional and structural layers, emic and etic perspectives. It thus fails to capture some of the less mainstream character construction principles, odd at first sight, but intriguingly recurrent throughout the history of Chinese writing.

My lecture will approach these fairly marginal character structures from the vantage point of a comparison with examples from other complex logographic writing systems of the Ancient world, such as Egyptian, Hittite and Sumerian, and it will point to parallels and remnants of such structures in the areal Sino-Xenic logographies developed in close contact with Chinese  (such as Sino-Miao, Sino-Vietnamese, or Yi). Complexity, whether seeming or real, of the Chinese writing system, will thus be put into a typological perspective and complemented by some recent psycholinguistic insights into Chinese character processing. It is hoped that such a “sidelong glance” from the margins will help to address the perennial questions of why mainstream Chinese writing “failed” to develop into syllabic or even subsyllabic writing, and how the notion of writing system oddity can be usefully complicated if acquisition, performance and play are better separated.

The standard Modern Mandarin Chinese word for ‘concept’, gàiniàn 概念, belongs to a group of mid-19th century lexical innovations coined in Japan on the basis of lexical material from Classical and Medieval Chinese, known as wasei kango 和製漢語 in Japanese, which were re-borrowed into Chinese during the late Qīng period (late 19th c.). It is therefore the product of a cycle of borrowings leading from the European Classical languages via the important languages of the colonial powers in East Asia – mostly English, French and Dutch – into Japanese and from there back into Chinese. A few years later, the French word concept also replaced понятие (literally ‘understanding’) as a loanword in Russian in 1928.
Obviously, not having a word for ‘concept’ which is at the same time a translation, transcription or calque of the underlying “Western” word, is not necessarily tantamount to not having a concept of it. While concepts of ‘concept’ have been ardently debated in Western philosophy at least since the late medieval period, concepts of wordhood, more often than not pre-supposed within them, are by no means less contested battle grounds in linguistics as a whole or between its core sub-branches (morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics). When talking about concepts of ‘concept’ outside the more familiar lexical realms of the standard European languages, i.e. about metaphors and imagery relating to them in genealogically distinct languages before the onset of contact with European languages, it would therefore seem advisable to step back a bit and start with concepts of ‘sounds’, ‘words’, ‘utterances’ or ‘names’. The proposed paper will thus be interested in the lexical field for such notions in Early Chinese, looking at the etymologies of the involved terms and their parallels outside Chinese, and at early lexicographic definitions and semasiological debates about them, before trying to relate the emerging lexical field of ‘wordhoood’ to its further abstractions. If time permits, related discourses such as the seemingly nativistic takes on concepts or the absence of linguistic determinism in Early China will be sketched, in order to complicate the comparative picture in a (hopefully) productive way.

"The apparent chunking of the world into semantic prototypes by lexical means in Classical Chinese always occupied a special place in the European imagination of Chinese linguistic (or cognitive!) alterity since the Ming missionary linguistic beginnings, which first systematically studied them (Kl枚ter 2009, 2011). It is well-known that Early Chinese non-obligatory kind-individuating lexical devices modifying nouns, commonly referred to as "sortal classifiers" (Aikhenvald 2000) in the typological linguistic literature, appeared since the oracle bone period (Peyraube 1991, Drocourt 1993, Zhang Yujin 2001, Behr 2009 etc.). Their origins -- likely related to the concomitant loss of morphological individuation strategies and possibly under areal contact influence (cf. R.B. Jones, 1975, Li Jinfang & Hu Suhua 2005) -- are rarely transparent (but see Bisang 1999, forthc. 2014 on this), and cannot be reconstructed to shared Sino-Tinbetan (Jiang Ying 2009). What was traditionally equally puzzling, at least if viewed from a cross-linguistic or typological perspective, is their protracted development and syntactic instability. However, the "explosive" extension of classifiers in the Early Medieval Chinese period (Liu Shiru 1065, Shi Yuzhi 2002) looks like a much more steady enlargement cline today, due to the increasing availability of paleographic data on classifiers from the crucial Warring States-Qin-Han intervening period (see e.g. Wang Guiyuan 2002, Zhang Yujin 2002, Liang Huaiyuan 2011).
The proposed paper will look at newly emerging semantic fields of classification developed during this crucial transitionary period, using mosly excavated texts. Partial homologies with the classifier system encountered in Warring States writing (cf., e.g., Wiebusch 2006) will be discussed. Special attention will be given to classifier variaton in paleographic writing and its mismatches with oral classificaton strategies. If time permits, a comparative note on iconcity and universal gaps of classification systems in logographic writing will be ventured, and its importance for an understanding of the taxonomical principles underlying works like Shiming and the Shuowen (cf. Bottéro & Hrbsmeier, forthc.), will be sketched."

"Before the large-scale availability of excavated Mss., statements about the early presence and geographic pervasiveness of a standard language of interstate communication (雅言, 通語 etc.), were typically based upon the observation of rhyme class stability and phonophoric consistency in bronze inscriptions (Wang Guowei 1917). Thus, Guo Moruo pointed out in 1931 already that " ... in the inscriptions from Yan and Jin in the North to Xu and Wu in the South, from Qi and Zhu in the East to Qin and Ruo in the West, the concepts encountered [in bronze inscriptions] were unanimous and that moreover their use of rhyme was uniform, which suffices to prove that factually the 'use of the same graphs in writing and of the same wheels in transport' was defintitely in place within the central provinces towards the end of the Zhou already; it was not only immediatly after the Ying emperor's unfication of Qin that it developed as a mater of course." (…諸彝銘，則北自燕晉，南迄徐吳，東自齊邾，西迄秦鄀，構思既見從同，用韻亦復一致，是足徵周末之中州確已有『書同文，行同倫』之實際。未幾至嬴秦而一統，勢所必然也。). Later studies, using different sets of evidence including, gradually, excavated manuscripts from different areas, have by and large substantiated this view, to the inclusion even of rhetorical patterns (C. Cook 1991). It is still difficult to speak of the existence of inscriptional Warring States "dialects" with confidence (Park 2009, 2011, 2013, pace Zhao Tong 2006, Yang Jianzhong 2011), despite the growing corpus of "non-standard" phonological features especially in Chu Mss., now neatly catalogued in Yang Suzi (2012) and Hong Bo (2013).

If the observed early cross-regional stability is not only apparent, it implies an "orthoepical" awareness that should be reflected in scribal practices, which one hesitates to call "orthographic" in view of our poor view of what constitutes normativity ouside and even within one Ms. group. An admittedly oblique view of what was perceived as a "correct" pronunciation during a given Ms. period comes from "repair strategies" encountered in the writing habits of some mss., when scribes replace diachronically older phonophorics, presumably to adapt graphs to phonological change in the spoken language, or when they use phonetic elements as phonetic "determinatives" or "complements" to pre-existing phono-semantic characters. My talk will therefore take a closer look at the phenomena of phonetic determination (a.k.a. 「加注音符」 in Chinese) and the rare phenomenon of "phoneticization by shape change" (「變形音化」, Liu Zhao 2005) in Chu writing, whereby non-phonetic material of an existing simplex or synsemantic graph is altered in such a way that it may be recycled for phonetic purposes. If time permits, some of the "weirder" rhyme and tongjia characters which would seemingly transgress the integrity of the CVC lexical root (Sagart 1999) appearing in the corpus of Hong Bo 2013 will be discussed. It will be argued that some of such apparent violations, often classified as dialectal or diatopic phenomena in the literature, are better viewed as reflections of a still productive derivational morphology or as incidences of diachronic change, rather than regional variation.
"

"After a rough introduction to the various forms of graph and inscription placements and standard textual layouts during the Shang (13th-11th c.) and Western Zhou (11th-8th c.) periods, my talk will focus on Eastern Zhou (770-221 B.C.) bronze inscriptions. It has been often observed that inscriptions, formerly mostly placed within ritual vessels, and thus invisible underneath the sacrificial objects offered to the spirits, move onto the outside of the vessels along with the decentralisation of political power during the "Springs and Autumns" era (770-476 BC). Especially on bells, weapons and other non-food or libation containers, the text becomes on the one hand more intertwinded with the object decorations on the outside of the bronzes and an object of display in its own rigth on the other, which has a conisderable influence on character ductus and structure. This move is assumed not only to correlate with certain reforms in the sumptuary rituals at the time, but also with a new anthropology of writing and its relationship to orality. This is also reflected in the appearance of certain literary forms (such as regular tetrasyllabic verse and rhyme) and the self-reflective use of certain figures of speech in the texts.

During the same period, characters start to get aesthetically "embellished" by various techniques such as stroke elongation, aesthetic punctuation or the addition of components which have no immediately recognizable function in the representation of phonology, semantic content or diacritic differantiaton. Such added elements, especially in the case of meaningless zoomorphic augmentation in so called "bird and insect script", considerably add to the visual density and stroke complexity of characters. They thus clearly violate models of linear and/or teleogical writing system development towards less complex forms, or ideas of "entropy" maintenance within writing systems through tradeoff or compensation processes. Presenting a few typical examples of bird script in detail and a sketched typology of its usage throughout the whole Eastern Zhou period, I will proceed to discuss the relationship between readability and sign complexity, first looking at some notions of complexity in linguistics, then at the different perspectives of reading and writing in acquisition and processing suggested by seemingly counterintuitive developments, such as those encountered in bird script. If time permits, I will also comment on the relationship of these processes with dialectal and diachronic deiversity, and extra-linguistic parameters such as social scale and structural complexity."

"Etymography, the practice of retrospectively construing graphical elements in complex  writing systems in such a way that reference to a linguistic object is simulated via the semantic interaction between the combined meaning bearing graphs, irrespective of the lexical history of the represented object (J. Assmann 2003, 2012), shares its neglect of the “genuine” diachronic etymology of lexical items with paronomasia, the practice of simulating referential motivation by the juxtaposition of the semantics of lexemes relatable, but not identical, in their synchronic phonological surface forms. Whenever paronomasia is not merely punning, but entails a claim to historical relatedness of the compared semantics (as in “folk etymology”, often used synonymously), it may or may not capture regular etymologic principles of word formation and derivation, depending upon the amount of obfuscation historical sound change has brought about in the compared synchronic items, which are thought to generate the “combined” meaning. It thus differs categorically from figura etymologica (a modern term, invented by the classicist Christian August Lobeck in 1837), although it would be pretentious and anachronistic to criticize the blurred boundary between the two in the absence of an awareness of the regularity of sound change in the pre-Neogrammarian and of the arbitraire du signe in the pre-Saussurean times.

Horapollo's much bemoaned misconstrual of the phonetic and phonological properties encoded in hieroglyphic writing may be usefully compared to the oblivion of Wang Anshi 王安石 (1021-1086), a famous politician, poet and moonlighting grammatologist, mostly remembered for economic and institutional reforms which ushered in the first Chinese modernity during the Song dynasty. In his  Discussion of characters (Zi shuo 字說), originally a massive 20-fascicle compendium which only survives in quotations collated by later editors, he offers fanciful syssemantic explanations of some 600 odd complex Chinese graphs. To the dismay of later more well-informed Chinese paleographers, not less acerbically articulated than in the case of Horapollo in egyptological research, his explanations consistently disregard the phonophoric explanations which govern some 90 % of the analysed characters, to motivate the component combinatorics via principles which typically invoke metaphorical, metonymical and meronymical relationships. Rather than blemishing Wang's phonological naïveté, my talk will be interested in points of comparison arising from such “invented” motivations in genealogicaly independent cases of etymography (in Egyptian, Sumerian diri signs, Naxi writing), as well as in parallel cases of inner-Chinese paronomasia.

Since it has been argued, despite the great fluidity of the notion throughout the work of Peirce, that the type of reference underpinning such graph-meaning and lexeme-lexeme relationships in syssemantic character formation and paronomasia is indexical, rather than iconic (cf. Boltz 2006, Boltz/Galambos 2013, cf. also Jespersen/Reintges 2008), the last part of my talk will discuss the usefulness of such a semiotic approach, and, hopefully provide some points of contact to broader issues of “multimodality”, addressed by the conference.
"

In J.D. Salinger's famous American college novel Franny and Zooey (1957) Franny is "talking to a rather pompous Orientalist" at her unnamed ivy league college and tells him, truthfully as it turns out, she has "a little brother who once got over an unhappy love affair by trying to translate the Mundaka Upanishad into classical Greek", wherepon he laughs, "uproariously-you know the way Orientalists laugh". Although we know little about the emotional life of T.W. Kingsmill (a.k.a., Jin Simi 金斯密, 1837-1910), British pioneer geologist, indefatigueable NCBRAS architect, prolific amateur sinologist, Daodejing translator and long term Shanghai resident, we have a few specimens of his efforts in the reverse direction, i.e. translations from the Shijing 詩經 into (pseudo-) Classical Sanskrit. My talk will look at the historical background of these curious excrescences of learned late 19th century sinology in a semi-colonial context, but also at the rhetorical and epistemological topos, quite widespread even today, that some languages are more "suitable" than others to translate Old Chinese poetry.

Based on the single pre-Qin attestation of the compound yǎyán 雅言 in the Confucian Analects (Lúnyǔ 論語 7.18) the idea of a normative spoken standard language is often projected back by early modern and modern authors into remote pre-imperial antiquity. An overview of the conceptual history of the term and of the competing etymologies of yǎ in early Chinese texts is offered in order to problematize this "invented tradition" and its ideological baggage. Four types of evidence (uniformity of phonology and syntax in excavated texts, ode citation practices, phonophoric repair by double phonophoric characters, lexical variation) are then presented and their usefulness to support an early written standard of elite intercommunication is discussed. Straightforward creolization and mixed language accounting for the emergence of Old Chinese are rejected. Instead, a scenario of interrupted language transmission in a highly diverse linguistic Sprachbund area is sketched and argued to best account for the

Canonically deformed spacetime, where the commutator of two coordinates is a constant, is the most commonly studied noncommutative space. Noncommutative gauge theories that have ordinary gauge theory as their commutative limit have been constructed there. But these theories have their drawbacks: First of all, constant noncommutativity can only be an approximation of a realistic theory, and therefore it is necessary to study more complicated space-dependent structures as well. Secondly, in the canonical case, the noncommutativity didn&#39;t fulfill the initial hope of curing the divergencies of quantum field theory. Therefore it is very desirable to understand noncommutative spaces that really admit finite QFTs. These two aspects of going beyond the canonical case will be the main focus of this thesis. They will be addressed within two different formalisms, each of which is especially suited for the purpose. In the first part noncommutative spaces created by star-products are studied...

Paläolinguistik und Hyperdiffusion bei Hentze (1883-1975) und Chang (1931-2000): zum wis­senschaftsgeschichtlichen Kontext einiger Methoden und Ideen der Frankfurter Altsinologie in: K. Kinski et al. eds., FrankAsia: Beiträge zur zur Geschichte der Ost- und Südostasien­wissenschaften in Frankfurt a.M., München: iudicium 2015.

&lt;strong&gt;Abstract:&lt;/strong&gt; Modern definitions of &#39;philosophy&#39; commonly – though by no means unanimously (cf. for an array of competing definitions for instance HWP VII, Sp. 714-31, s.v.) – build upon the diagnostic presence of &#39;principled&#39;, &#39;systematic&#39;, and &#39;rational&#39; modes of asking questions about knowledge, ontology, ethics etc., and the presumably universal notions extrapolable from answers to them. Throughout most of the 20th century, the perceived lack of a broadly &#39;epistemological&#39; definiens for the assignment of ancient Chinese authors, texts or &#39;schools of thought&#39; to the category of &#39;philosophy&#39; has formed a recurrent debating ground for its respective sinological detractors and proponents. Moreover, the very act of asking the question which forms the theme of this conference with respect to China has a long and fairly convoluted histori(ographi)cal and political prehistory, which might be traced back even beyond the Jesuit beginnings, from which Ori Sela&#39;s masterful recent outline (&quot;Philosophy&#39;s Ascendancy: The Genealogy of Tetsugaku/Zhexue in Japan and China, 1870-1930 &quot;, Ms., Princeton, 2010) of the conflicting Chinese, Japanese, and Western narratives on the topic proceeds, i.e. well down into European Late Antiquity. &lt;br&gt; &lt;br&gt; To continue to pose this question, then, is deliberately reductionist in the sense that it nonchalantly disregards such historical underpinnings, and, in that it consequently &quot;pushes careful readings of Chinese texts into a narrow corner of self-defence, predetermining the type of evidence marshalled for a question that was only asked out of the historical coincidence that China&#39;s … desperate opening to western knowledge happened just around the time analytical philosophy flourished in the Anglophone world&quot; (Denecke 2006: 26-7). Despite such quite well-taken caveats, I will argue that there is still a role to be played for attempts to shoulder the heavy, time-honoured European &quot;conceptual baggage&quot; within the &quot;loaded stratosphere of philosophy&quot; (ibid., 36). Rather than to re [...]

In several recent studies stressing the performative subtext and commemorative functions of the early layers of the shi 詩(* s-təә) and the shu 書(* s-ta) corpora, Martin Kern not only perceptively unveils the odes and speeches as consciously “idealizing artifacts”, through ...

&lt;strong&gt;Location: &lt;/strong&gt;EACS 2012: Deconstructing China, Paris, Université Paris-Diderot, INALCO &amp;amp; BULAC &lt;strong&gt;Conference End Date: &lt;/strong&gt;Sep 8, 2012 &lt;strong&gt;Conference Start Date: &lt;/strong&gt;Sep 5, 2012

&lt;strong&gt;Abstract:&lt;/strong&gt; Contrary to a widespread perception in Europe since its first tentative encounters with China in the Yuan-Ming periods, and a deeply engrained self-perception of mainstream Confucian scholar literati since at least the Early Imperial construction of Han identity vis-à-vis the &quot;Barbarians of the four quarters&quot;, linguistic diversity was an important part of everyday Chinese life during the Classical period. Contacts with at least half a dozen of genealogically non-related language families have left their considerable imprint on the early Chinese lexicon, and, more rarely, also in Chinese morphosyntax and phonology. Some scholars even argue that the emergence of the monosyllabic-isolating profile, associated with Classical Chinese after the loss of its once elaborate derivational morphology, is a result of bilingualism over extended periods of time and subsequent pidginisation/creolisation processes. &lt;br&gt; &lt;br&gt; Amidst the narratives of language as an identity building device along often rather obliquely demarcated language family borders, it gets easily overlooked that an enormous linguistic diversity must have also existed within the Sinitic groupd of languages, as first reflected in Eastern Han and Early Medieval lexicography. Of course, language is always a construct, whether in its delineation from dialects (or other hyphen-lects), its relationship towards writing or its role in narratives of statehood, ethnicity and nation-building. But it is often tacitly assumed that at least its boundaries versus animal communication are universal. In my talk, I will show that this is not always the case, by comparing texts on &quot;animal language&quot;, especially that of parrots and non-human primates, in Early Medieval and Medieval China with similar discourses in &quot;the&quot; West, where more often than not, philosophically somewhat different conclusions were drawn from the unsettling presence of speaking animals. A closer look at this human-non-human linguistic boundary will also be useful, I argue, to under [...]

&lt;strong&gt;Abstract:&lt;/strong&gt; The Sino-Tibetan etymon reflected by the Written Tibetan (WT) noun snying &#39;heart, mind, breast&#39;, also used verbally as &#39;to love, show affection towards&#39;, was replaced by xin 心 &#39;heart&#39; as a noun in Old Chinese (OC). As first shown in Baxter (1991), snying is cognate with OC rén 仁 &#39;to show affection for others, love&#39;, a semantic layer reflected in the famous gloss 愛人 in Lunyu 12.22 or in the Yucong 語叢 slips (3.35), where we read: 愛,&amp;lt;身+心&amp;gt;(仁)也. Behr (2015) has argued that concomitant to the Confucian appropriation of rén 仁 (OC *niŋ) as an ethical category and to the semantic narrowing of its exoactive derivation *niŋ-s represented by 佞 &#39;be eloquent&#39;, the lexical gap left for the activity of &#39;loving&#39; was filled by ài 愛 (OC *qˁəp-s). Graphically a corruption of 夊 below ài 㤅 &#39;to love&#39;, as shown by the Chǔ manuscripts, ài belonged to a word-family meaning &#39;to draw towards oneself&#39; (Schwermann 2011), whence the at first sight counterintuitive polysemy with &#39;go easy on someone, be sparing&#39;. But where does this root come from, if it was not, as Xǔ Shèn thought in his gloss on the phonetic 旡, simply onomatopoetic of a choking, sucking sound?&lt;br&gt; Building upon the observation that an OC homophone of ài spelled 僾 means &#39;to pant, lose breath&#39; the new uvular reconstruction of ài in Baxter &amp;amp; Sagart (2014) opens an interesting link with a fairly distributed breath related word-family, minimally including xī 歙 &amp;lt; *qhəp &#39;suck, inhale&#39;, xì 翕 &amp;lt; *qhəp &#39;draw in, inhale&#39;, xī 噏 *qh(r)əp &#39;draw together&#39;, hē 欱 &amp;lt; *qhˁəp &#39;sip&#39;, xī 吸 &amp;lt; *qh(r)əp &#39;inhale&#39;, kài 愾 *qhəp-s &#39;sigh out&#39;, and, of course, the notoriously untranslatable qì 氣 &amp;lt; *C.qhəp-s &#39;odem, pneuma&#39;. &#39;To love&#39; would thus originally not have been conceptualized as just any &#39;drawing near&#39; but as a kind of &#39;sucking in&#39;. Building upon manuscript attestations, the paper will explore this word family connection within and beyond OC and argue for its crosslinguistic typological plausibility. &lt;strong&gt;Location: &lt;/strong&gt;St. Peterburg &lt;str [...]

The idea that the part of a Chinese compound character commonly called bushou 部首 in Chinese and translated by &#39;radical&#39; in English (or cognate expressions in other European languages) contains the semantic root of that character or the lexi­cal root it represents has a long European prehistory, which reaches back to the first accounts of the Chinese writ­ing system in missionary sources of the 17th cen­tury. In my talk I will trace the early history of both the Chinese and the European terms (as well as some com­peting designations). It will be shown that the term &#39;radi­cal&#39; arose out of a peculiar constellation of a community of scholarly mission­aries working in East and South­east Asia as well as South-America under various presuppositions of &#39;alterity&#39;. Arguably, it inhibited the recognition of bushou as se­mantic determinatives or classifiers for a long time – despite the emergence of the lat­ter concept in the same intellectual environment. &lt;br&gt; B...

Traditional approaches to reconstructed phonology, but also to historical syntax and sociolinguistics typically have a disquietingly monolithic view of pre-imperial Chinese. The widespread tacit assumption of linguistic uniformity and/or normativity, attributed to the &quot;refined speech&quot; (yǎyán 雅言) that emerged early on during the Zhōu period as a form of intercommunication among members of the nobility, is partly due to the nature of the sources at our disposal to reconstruct ancient social backgrounds, pragmatic settings, registers, and contact scenarios. More often than not, however, the notion of a homogenous yǎyán seems also influenced by subliminal political narratives of unification, centralization and purity which have quietly crept into the linguistic descriptions and interpretations of data, predictably resulting in, e.g., neat trees of dialect divergence, homogenous phonologies of an assumed prestige koiné, neglect of colloquial, deviant, technical, ritual speech, ...

Contemporary Written Chinese [CWC] (xiàndài shūmiànyǔ 現代書面語, for useful discussions see, e.g., Hú Mínyáng 1957, Chéng Guānlín 1990, Rosner 1992, Féng Shènglì 2003, 2006; Sūn Déjīn 2005, 2010, 2012, Diào Yǎnbīn 2017) tolerates a great number of petrified phrases and syntactic con­structions from Classical Chinese, most of them only mildly productive – if at all – and often strictly bound to particular registers (yǔtǐ 語體). Against this background, it is surprising that some pre-classical Chinese constructions not only have survived into CWC, but are used produc­tively or even playfully, if not necessarily with great frequency. &lt;br&gt; My presentation will look at three constructions sometimes characterised as inhe rited from Ar­chaic (pre-Classical) Chinese in the literature, i.e. &lt;br&gt; &lt;br&gt; (1) Mandarin [唯~惟 Ο 是 V] focalization (cf. Liú Jǐngnóng 1994, Sūn Déjīn 2012) &lt;br&gt; (2) [direct-indirect] object patterns in Southern Chinese double object constructions and Man...

Spiegelreflex: Reste einer Wu-Überlieferung der Lieder im Licht einer spät-Han-zeitlichen Bron­zeinschrift [Mirror reflex: Remnants of a Wu tradition of the Odes in the light of a Late Han bronze inscription] in: Michael Friedrich, unter Mitwirkung von Reinhard Emmerich und Hans van Ess, Han-Zeit: Festschrift für Hans Stumpfeldt aus Anlaß seines 65. Geburtstages (= Lun Wen, Studi­en zur Geistesgeschichte und Literatur in China; 8), Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006, pp. 333–358.

Einführende Notizen zum Lesen mit be­son­derer Berücksichtigung der Früh­zeit&quot; [Introductory notes on &#39;reading&#39;, with particular consideration of the early period] in: B. Führer (ed.), Aspekte des Lesens in China in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Edi­­tion Ca­thay; Bei­träge zur 4. DVCS-Tagung), Bochum: Projekt Verlag, 2005, pp. 1-44.

The Extent of Tonal Irregularity in Pre-Qin Inscriptional Rhyming in: Anne O. Yue, Ting Pang-hsin & Hoh Dah-an eds., Hànyŭshĭ yánjiū — jìniàn Lĭ Fāngguī xiānshēng băisuì míngdàn lùn­wénjí 漢語史研究—紀念李方桂先生百歲冥单誕論文集, Taipei: Academia Sini­ca, pp. 111-146.

&lt;strong&gt;Abstract:&lt;/strong&gt; The emergence of first, non-obligatory &quot;sortal&quot; noun classifiers, as documented in Ancient Chinese inscriptional documents (Huang Zaijun 1964, Ma Guoquan 1979 , Wen Qianxi 1992, Xu Lili 1997, Zhao Peng 2006, Xu Li 2007 etc.), coincides temporally with the attrition and, eventually, complete loss of a productive Old Chinese derivational morphology in non-peripheral Chinese dialects (Sagart 1999, Jin Lixin 2006, Schuessler 2007), the rise of lexical tone (Mei Tsu-lin 1970, Sagart 1986, 1993, Wang Feng 2006) in Late Old Chinese and several adjacent language families (Luo Meizhen 2007), as well as the proliferation of semantic determinatives in phonosemantic compounds, attested in the locally diverse epigraphical writing systems of the so-called Warring States (mid 5th c.-221 BCE), Qin (221-206 BCE) and Han (206 BCE-220 CE) periods. It has been repeatedly suggested that the gradual obsolescence of affixal morphology, including morphemes for the marking of certain fairly specific noun classes (e.g. countable items, kinship terms, insect names etc.), and the slow rise of monosyllabic noun classifiers might have been related (Sagart 1999, Behr 2002). Substantial parts of the morphology encoding noun properties were expressed in affix positions which underwent functional coalescence and subsequent loss of phonological material, a process which was then compensated by the rise of contour tones during the Late Old Chinese period. Once fully phonologized, these lexical tones continued, albeit very unsystematically, to encode certain noun properties, formerly expressed segmentally. At the same time, the sets of spoken classifiers, formerly by and large limited to ritual objects of high value or prestige, expanded greatly in number and came to include other semantic fields, such as fauna, flaura, everyday utensils, body parts etc. &lt;br&gt; &lt;br&gt; In the writing system, the same period witnessed a fairly sudden accretion and diversification of non-pronounced script classifiers (a.k.a, if wrongly, as &quot;rad [...]

&lt;strong&gt;Organization: &lt;/strong&gt;Con­fer­en­ce: Chinese Paleography: Theory and Practice, University of Chicago &lt;strong&gt;Conference End Date: &lt;/strong&gt;May 30, 2005 &lt;strong&gt;Conference Start Date: &lt;/strong&gt;May 27, 2005

Translation practices and theories are typically embedded in their respective linguistic, cultural, historical social, or functional contexts.
This panel examines discursive frameworks of translation within, across and beyond languages, language families and cultures in Europe and East Asia. Three papers explore these questions from the perspectives of etymology and conceptual history in classical Europe, of linguistic transpositions specific to literary genres and social settings on the Korean peninsula, and of the appropriation or criticism of Western translation theories in Japan. Another focus will be on the relevance of Jakobson’s theories of translation and transmutation for current debates of cultural translation.

""This workshop aims to explore the multivalent relationship between reading and readability and different modes of written representation in complex systems of writing. Readability can be affected in various ways, i.e. it can be being enhanced or impaired, depending on the modes of written representation along the phonography – logography continuum or on the visual density, iconicity or salience of the written
sign. Studying these aspects is central to a comparative typology of complex writing systems, to the functional and cognitive determinations of reading in them, and to the various cultural significations which can be embodied in and expressed by writing in general.

One tenacious myth holds, for example, that a higher degree or frequency of phonographic writing should correspond to easier access to the written sequence in processing. This view implies a quasi-evolutionary, tacitly teleological optimization of writing, the crowning achievement of which would be pure phonography. Yet, this stands in stark contrast to both the historically documented development of complex, mixed phono-logographic writing systems such as Egyptian, Chinese, or Anatolian hieroglyphs and the dual modes of reading via both phonetic and lexical pathways as formulated in current cognitive models of the reading process. Readability issues can arise from both phonetic and logographic modes of writing, and need to be further differentiated, taking into consideration the more detailed configurations of different systems of writing and, very likely, their different readers. For example, strongly phonographic realizations of e.g. the Egyptian writing system (such as in texts from the Saite period through to the 30th Dynasty, ca. 650-330 BCE) turn out to be among the most difficult ones to read, for both present-day Egyptologists and, arguably, for the Egyptians themselves. Moreover, readability may be strongly influenced by ‘paragrammatological’ features such as punctuation, the usage of diacritics and matres lectionis, spacing and mise-en-page.

A similar misconception is that a higher degree of figurative density of signs of writing will naturally translate into a higher density of meaning being conveyed in a fairly ‘direct’ fashion. Yet enhanced figurative density can also result in making a linguistic message less immediately accessible: a higher visual resolution of signs often triggers the highlighting other dimensions, such as the sign as a visual form, possibly even as an ‘immediately depictive’ one. This can cause a layering of possible levels of signification which, in turn, can make reading considerably less immediate. Under other circumstances and in different ways, reduced iconicity may also impair reading, whenever, for example, a certain relationship between the more and less iconic parts in the written representation of a word is integral to the recognition and lexical retrieval of that word or its boundaries. Thus, there may well be a certain balance—which may vary cross-culturally as well as historically or synchronically— between phonographical and logographical modes of representation that underpins the
functionality of reading in complex writing systems. Similar considerations apply to the figurative density and visual resolution of signs of writing in such systems. These two dimensions of written representation intersect one another in various intricate ways, such that approaches separating the two modes would seem well-nigh impossible. The cross-cultural variance of such configurations and their limitations
provides a strong heuristic for the study of the functional determination of reading. Much may also be learned from experimental studies of the cognitive processes of reading in (complex) writing systems within living traditions, for instance in China and Japan. Cognitive and neuropsychological approaches may shed new light on seemingly basic, yet traditionally largely unexplored, issues such as the visual
resolution, intra-systemic distinctiveness, and salience of sign forms. Of major interest is also a detailed empirical study of the various types of deviations, or breaches, from ‘regular’ modes of written representation, whether on systemic or on visual levels. Studies of such deviations from common modes of written representations may reveal various otherwise hidden aspects of how a given writing system functions in regular performance.

Accordingly, this workshop pursues a reader-oriented perspective on complex writing systems, naturally extending to other pertinent aspects of literacy. As various historical configurations document or suggest, the degree of figurativeness of a given realization in a given script may correlate with different anthropologies of writing, while other meaningful correlations may be encoded in the degrees to which variation
in orthography and spelling is curbed. In different traditions, the relative degree of phonography and logography in a specified usage of a script may further correlate with register, and thereby with the sociology of literacy, but also with other cultural determinants beyond the intended audience. Last but not least, the reconstruction of specific historical contexts in which more marked breaches from regular forms of a writing system were licensed and did in fact occur are of particular relevance.

Topics to be addressed by the workshop include the following:

- Reading and readability in relation to the logography – phonography continuum;
- Reading and readability in relation to the figurative density, visual resolution, and iconic density of signs of writing;
- Cognitive approaches to the reading process;
- Reading as an inferential process underlying the reciprocal disambiguation of signs of writing within a given word or within a given written sequence;
- Clues given to and games played with the reader in contexts of particularly complex or ludic writing; complicated readings encoded in different manners (playful, cryptographic, enigmatic spellings, etc.), viewed from a theoretical perspective;
- Different modes of reading in regular performance and in extended usages of writing systems; breaching of conventional modes of written representation within a given tradition and the resulting effects on readability;
- Varying degrees of readability in relation to the visibility, placement, and materiality of writing and their intentions;
- The comparative typology of complex writing systems, domains of variability and limits thereof; motivations for major diachronic changes in complex writing systems throughout history;
- Contrasts along the phonography – logography continuum and in visual density in relation to sociologies and registers of writing;
- Definitions of literacy levels (e.g. illiteracy, partial/limited literacy, crafts literacy, scholarly literacy, disconnection of reading and writing skills) and associated questions (e.g. communicative powers of logograms/determinatives via recognizable shapes of the object depicted/indicated); placement of reading skills along the orality – literacy and textual familiarity – novelty scales in
ancient societies, embedding in ‘textual communities’ of production, reception, and education.
""

"
Background and objectives

The Warring States period (475-221 B.C.) is often considered as the epoch of the maximum flourishing of classical Chinese philosophical argumentation and as the golden age of Chinese “rhetoric”. The precarious situation of political fragmentation and the increasing supremacy of feudal lords who usurped the title of kings, effectively divesting the legitimate Zhou dynasty of its former political and cultural predominance, had a strong impact on the development of the phenomenon of patronage. The need to secure and legitimize their newly acquired political power induced local sovereigns to gather large crowds of retainers at their courts. This was partly a mere display of political preeminence, economic wealth and more sublime forms of “symbolic capital”. But the increasingly independent feudal lords also relied on the employment of skilled experts, who had mastered all sorts of technical, bureaucratic or military knowledge crucial to governmental practice. This situation eventually led to the emergence of a body of “wandering persuaders”, intellectuals who travelled from court to court, offering their service as political advisers and diplomats, and constantly in search of princes willing to hire them in order to realize their political agendas. This thriving political activity finds its expression in a rich tradition of pre- and early imperial texts, which reflect how rhetoric became a tool, even a weapon, in political and polemical debates in early China.

Because of their cunning intelligence and shrewdness many skilled debaters were harshly criticized by later tradition as “hair-splitters”, and in some cases stigmatized for their apparent lack of overarching ethical goals. They were considered as individuals characterized by a devious and deceitful nature, equipped with sharp tongues, who took undue pleasure in subverting “reality”, only to gain an ephemeral victory in outtalking one’s opponent. Many ended up dismissed as mere court entertainers, since a “true scholar” would never indulge in “thorny speeches”. Upon closer analysis, however, this standard view turns out to be a later (mis)conception, since even those received texts associated with the teaching of masters considered epitomes of “virtue” make widespread use of the very same argumentative techniques, tropes and rhetorical devices which the “sophists” were customarily accused of employing.

So far most studies on rhetoric, argumentation and persuasion in China have been characterized by a piecemeal, sometimes downright romanticizing approach, rather than by a sober and structured analysis of the available data. Textual evidence shows that classical Chinese works are not improvised or extemporaneous sketches, but rather premeditated and adroitly articulated conceptual constructions, mostly abiding by a strict, recoverable logic and a high degree of internal coherence. From this perspective, the Western experience of the study of Greek and Roman rhetoric is precious, since it helps in delineating suitable methodologies to be adopted in dealing with classical Chinese texts, without, of course, limiting scholarly inquiry into practices of argumentation and persuasion in China to such classical “occidental” modes.

Indeed, it will be necessary first to determine whether and in which terms we can speak of a “rhetorical” tradition in China. In the light of shared operational categories and hopefully contouring a common referential core, it would seem that Chinese and Western rhetoric could be preliminarily analyzed under the three key aspects of composition, transmission, and performance, i.e. focusing on the active role of the persuader and the performative nature of his rhetorical deliveries. Particular attention should be given to contemporary and later conceptions and misconceptions of rhetoric in various Chinese and Western (Greek, Roman, Medieval) “schools” or “traditions”. Individual contributions will address one of the following conceptual domains, according to the field of expertise of the speaker, and focus on no more than two of the proposed core issues:

a. From Rhetoric to Sophistry

- How does the gradual transition from orality to literacy influence and alter the relationship between the written and the spoken word in argumentation?

- What do we learn from prejudices against rhetoric and the negative connotation of sophistry? To what extent is the “deceptive power” of the spoken word a later misconception or misreading of former modes of expression?

b. Taking the Stage: Rhetoric as Performance

-The polemical aspect of rhetoric: rhetoric as a “battle of words”, dialectical skirmishes and diplomatic craft

-The written text as living word: functions and modes of the dialogue in rhetorical literature

-The role of the draft between aide-mémoire, didactic treatise and as a basis for later editions

c. Rhetorical devices

- How did persuaders build their arguments? Structure and “structural” techniques (parallel-ism, ring composition, formulaic language, prosody etc.) as means of rhetorical effectiveness

- Is it possible to identify a specific technical language of rhetoric?

- The historical anecdote, “handcraft” and “natural” metaphors as a shared repertoire drawing on popular lore

Several conference panels and workshops on rhetoric and artistic prose in Early China have been organized over the past years at Halle, Freiburg, Oxford and Jerusalem, proving the current vivid interest in this topic shared by sinologists all over the world. Treasuring the results achieved through these previous experiences, the workshop configures itself as their prospective continuation. It will bring together a wide and varied group of prominent scholars in the field, in order to enable a lively interdisciplinary discussion on rhetoric in Chinese and in western “antiquities”, welcoming but not necessarily limited to philologically informed perspectives from the fields of history, philosophy, literary studies, and linguistics. Aiming at a fruitful international exchange against a comparative perspective, the overall goal of this conference will be to shed new light on the figure of the persuader and of the argumentative means at his disposal in Early China.

LI/WB (5/2012)"