Sound and Script: Phonological Scholarship and Intellectual Life in Early Modern East Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Early modern East Asia was a site of great linguistic diversity, reflected in the scholarship of the time in a variety of ways now often forgotten or misunderstood. In modern China, Korea, and Japan, proponents of new national languages and academic disciplines saw in earlier dynamic relationships between languages, registers, scripts, and genres an opposition between the fixed written media of high culture and local vernaculars, gradually elucidated by increasingly refined philological studies. Their narratives of national languages and level-headed philological research, still influential today, make little sense when we consider the contents and stated purposes of early modern scholarship on language. This panel illuminates the linguistic landscape of early modern East Asia by investigating how scholars at the time conceptualized language and put it to work for various purposes.

In China, phonological scholarship was more than the elucidation of the past; in dialogue with opera, scholarship shed new light on human speech and influenced the arts in the process. Sometimes, it was simply treated as a game. In Japan, the study of ancient language led to an examination of dialectal diversity and the creation of new theories of cultural development and value. In Korea, finally, scholars experimented with Chinese characters, the local alphabet, and the several registers of lexicon and phonology that they could represent to change literary style or even speech habits. This panel investigates linguistic scholarship in East Asia before national linguistic unification and concurrent regional fragmentation.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Chair

• David Lurie, Columbia University

Individual Presentations

• Indexing Euphony: Kokugaku and the Linguistic Grounding of Identity in 18th-Century Japan - Emi Foulk, University of California, Los Angeles

• Inscribing and Erasing the Vernacular in Late Chosŏn Linguistic Imaginations - Si Nae Park, Harvard University

• “Shooting Characters”: A Phonological Game and Its Uses in Late Imperial China - Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

• The Marvel of Natural Harmony: Literary Phonology in 16th and 17th Century China - Nathan Vedal, Harvard University

Discussant

• David Lurie, Columbia University