Writing Chinese horizontally - Cambridge Dunhuang Seminars - Imre Galambos скачать в хорошем качестве

Writing Chinese horizontally - Cambridge Dunhuang Seminars - Imre Galambos

This talk is part of the Cambridge Dunhuang Seminars series. For some of the other talks, see our YouTube channel at    / @cambridgedunhuangseminars1680   https://ko-fi.com/imregalambos Writing Chinese Horizontally: A Millennium of Interaction between Chinese and Western Scripts In the pre-modern period, Chinese texts read in vertical columns from right to left. Among the occasional exceptions from this were the horizontal alignment of titles and names above the entrance to temples, halls, palaces and other buildings, which read in a right-to-left direction. It is around the turn of the twentieth century that books printed with horizontal lines running from left to right appeared on the scene. On the whole, this development coincides with initial attempts directed at Chinese writing reforms and the adoption of Western-style punctuation, which partly followed similar trends in Japan. The first books with this kind of textual alignment were scientific or technical manuals translated from English. Chinese researchers go back a step and identify Robert Morrison’s Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815–1823) as the earliest printed book with Chinese text arranged horizontally, in a left-to-right direction. This paper shows that English was merely one of the languages involved, and by no means the earliest. In reality, the process that eventually led to the wide-scale adoption of horizontal writing in China was considerably more complex, lasting hundreds of years and involving a variety of languages and scripts. We can find early cases of this phenomenon way before the modern period, since the time China came in touch with other languages and scripts along the Silk Road. The entire phenomenon is a fascinating example of the complex interaction of languages and scripts. ---Video's Table of Contents--- 00:00 Intro 02:55 Horizontal writing in modern China 07:04 First books with horizontal text 11:45 Morrison's dictionary 16:57 Bichurin's grammar 19:24 French scholars 26:01 Ricci and Ruggieri's dictionary 28:06 Multilingual Buddhist texts in the Qing dynasty 32:50 Examples from the Yuan and before 36:35 A complex situation