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7.1: Written Chinese and Government

  • Page ID
    135128
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    East Asians spoke not three, but many languages. The Sino-Tibetan language family, which may have spread with millet-growing from somewhere between Xinjiang and Sichuan from 8,000 BC included, in the period of division, Tibetan, ten Chinese languages (sometimes called dialects), Tangut and related languages, and hundreds of other languages we know little about. Mandarin had not yet developed, and scholars are not sure whether the Middle Chinese spoken at the Sui-Tang court of Chang’an (along with other languages) was Chang’an dialect or a conglomeration of various dialects like modern Shanghainese. A Sichuanese monk named Zhixuan (809-881) had so much trouble communicating in the capital that he avoided discussions until one night, in his dreams, a divine monk switched tongues with him. The next day, he was able to speak correctly – that is in the capital dialect.1 In the steppe, people spoke many Mongolian and Turkic languages; in the southern mainland people spoke languages in the Thai, Hmong-Miao, Yao, and Austronesian language family. Some languages had fused SinoTibetan with earlier local languages: Cantonese, for instance, is a Sino-Tibetan language with a Thai tonal system and lots of Thai vocabulary. The peninsula and archipelago also had multiple languages. Present-day Korean is related to the Tungus languages of Manchuria and Siberia.2 Japanese may have evolved from a language of Kaya, with a lot of influence from the Ainu and Malayo-Polynesian languages already being spoken in the islands.3 (See Map N.)

    Linguistic borrowings were common. Korean and Japanese borrowed Chinese words; and Chinese borrowed Turkic words. The area around Canton and along the southern Fujian coast may have contributed to Chinese words from Australia and Polynesia, including the name for the Yangzi River (jiang 江). Some travelers learned many languages. The children of intercultural marriages, or elite children whose nannies spoke local languages, were bilingual. Rulers valued language skills. Yamato Emperor Bidatsu was very pleased in 583 when Kibi no Ama no Atai Hashima negotiated with the king of Paekche in his own language, and brought a Paekche man back to the Yamato court. Language could be a focus of fights within regimes. Under Empress Dowager Feng (442 - 490), for instance, the Tuoba Wei dynasty adopted Chinese surnames and required that Chinese be spoken at court. A few decades later, in reaction, Xianbei names were required; some whose surnames had originally been Chinese now took Xianbei ones, and learned to speak Xianbei to serve at court.

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    Map N. About language. Places mentioned in the text.

    In this multi-lingual world, the tiny but powerful stratum of educated people across East Asia adopted the whole Chinese-language written tradition – the Classics, the philosophers, the histories, literature, the texts of Confucianism and Daoism, and Buddhist texts translated into what we call Classical Chinese, which has a grammar different from today’s spoken versions of Chinese. Reading the Book of Documents and the Shiji, Koreans came to see themselves as the heirs of Prince Ji (Kija) (remember him, back in Chapter Two?). Silla aristocrats scolded their kings in the language of Mencius. Paekche immigrants brought Chinese poetry to the archipelago, and Yamato noblemen wrote reams of poetry in Classical Chinese, alongside poems in Japanese that initially used Chinese characters to represent sounds.

    Classical Chinese was the written language of government, too. King Kwanggaet’o’s stele is in Classical Chinese, and so are the excavated records and registers on wooden tablets and bamboo slips that attest to the spread of bureaucratic government. Prince Shōtoku’s “17- Article Constitution” and the laws of Nara, as well as all the East Asian histories, use Classical Chinese. Educated people across East Asia were bilingual, at least.


    This page titled 7.1: Written Chinese and Government is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Sarah Schneewind (eScholarship) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.