When the West met the East: Early Western Accounts of the Languages of the Sinosphere and their Impact on the History of Chinese Linguistics

Conference website: https://westeastconference.wixsite.com/2018

Date: September 10-11, 2018

Venue: CHSS Building, National Tsing Hua University

A short description of the conference:
The conference ‘West meets East’: Early Western Accounts of the Languages of the Sinosphere and their Impact on the History of Chinese Linguistics to be hosted by the Institute of Linguistics and the Institute of History at National Tsing Hua University 2018, September 10-11, aims to provide a bridge between history, language and linguistics. The general theme of the conference will be early contacts between the West and the Sinosphere, their reflection in early grammars and linguistic studies of different Chinese languages, and their impact on the development of the field of Chinese linguistics in the West and the East. Particular focus will be on the history and linguistic situation of Taiwan and its first encounters with the West. A special objective of the conference is the presentation of the 17th century transcriptions of Taiwanese Southern Min in Spanish that have been discovered recently in the University of Santo Tomas, the Catholic University of the Philippines. The conference will give Prof. Lien Chinfa the opportunity to present his research on these materials to an international scholarly audience. These manuscripts are invaluable for the study of the Taiwanese language, but also for the historical study of early contacts of Westerners with China, and in particular with Taiwan.

The transcriptions, grammars, dictionaries and reports mostly written by Western missionaries constitute the basis for the first encounters of the West with the different languages of the Sinosphere.

When these early linguistic works on the languages of the Sinophere first made their appearance in the West in the early 18th century, they created a great interest in the typological differences of the languages in the world. This interest resulted into the first typological and syntactic studies on the Chinese and Austronesian languages (and other non-Indo-European languages) by linguistics such as Joseph Edkins, Friedrich Schlegel, August Conrady and Georg von der Gabelentz in the 19th century.

A tentative program of the conference:

Lien, Chinfa: Spanish Transcriptions of Taiwanese Southern Min from the 17th century

Henning, Klöter: The beginnings of Hokkien manuscript lexicography

Peyraube, Alain: The History of Chinese Grammars in Chinese and Western Scholarly Traditions

Aldridge, Edith: The linguistic relevance of the Austronesian languages in Taiwan for Historical Linguistics

Lee, Yuzhong: The underlying logic of 17th century Spanish-Phillippine Minnan dictionaries and the evolution of their compilation

Ochiai, Izumi and Chao-Kai Shih: Siraya songs in dormancy: Decipherment.

Adelaar, Alexander: When the West met the East: impressions from 17th century Formosan and Dutch texts

Uchida, Keiichi: 關於近代西洋人的漢語研究

Gianninoto, Mariarosaria: Transposing linguistic categories and terminology: examples of interplay of Western and Chinese linguistic traditions

Meisterernst, Barbara: Georg von der Gabelentz and Chinese and East Asian Linguistics

Yoshida, Yukata: Chinese in Sogdian script and Sogdian in Chinese characters