Kornicki, Languages, Scripts and Chinese Texts in East Asia, 2018

Peter F. Kornicki.  Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia.  Oxford  Oxford University Press, 2018.  416 pp. 

The opening sentence of the introduction to Peter Kornicki's study of vernacularization in East Asia describes the book as "absurdly ambitious" (p. 1). This is true. To a remarkable extent, the book lives up to that ambition. In 310 densely filled pages, accompanied by 32 illustrations, two maps, and 12 boxes providing supplementary information, Kornicki explores the historical, cultural, textual, and linguistic relationships between the classical Literary Chinese written language and various kinds of texts that can all be characterized as "vernacular" to some degree--that is, linked to spoken local languages. It is a stunningly impressive achievement and a major contribution to the scholarly investigation of the literary and literacy histories of the region. In my view, the title of the book fails to adequately reflect the groundbreaking achievement of its contents. It is at once too broad ("Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts" implies too great a scope) and too narrow ("East Asia", however construed, is only a part of the geolinguistic landscape that is subject to analysis). Oddly absent from the title is the key term "vernacularization," which is the central subject of Kornicki's study. This term "refers to the process whereby learned or prestige languages, often of external origin, coexist with local languages which, over a long span of time, develop a written form and ultimately replace the prestige languages" (p. 28). It is a phenomenon that has recurred in many times and places but has only recently attracted the attention of scholars who, following the lead of the South Asian intellectual historian Sheldon Pollock, are taking a multidisciplinary approach to its description and theorization.

Kornicki's book is intended not for "specialists on China, Japan, Korea, or Vietnam" but "for readers with an interest in vernacularization as a global phenomenon and an interest in the forms it took in East Asia" (p. 2). Its main subject is "the dissemination, interpretation, vernacularization, and ultimate replacement of Chinese texts in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and other societies on the periphery of China" (p. 21). Kornicki is interested in these processes themselves, in the points of commonality and divergence seen across the various regions and linguistic spheres that participated in them, and in how cultural and linguistic peculiarities of the Chinese-dominated region distinguished these processes from vernacularization pathways in other parts of the premodern world. As a linguist, rather than a cultural or literary historian, my disciplinary perspective is likely inadequate to fully evaluate all aspects of Kornicki's study, a point the reader of this review should keep in mind.

The introduction is preceded by detailed, useful notes on terminology in the areas of chronologies, dynasties and periods, names, and geography. In a work of this kind dealing with immense linguistic and cultural complexity over a long time period and wide geographic expanse, all of these areas present challenges of nomenclature and interpretation. These challenges are handled with sensitivity to the complexities involved, but also with an eye toward practicality and usability for the general reader.

The book proper contains ten chapters grouped into three main sections, followed by a brief conclusion. The first section, "Orientations," contains five chapters that provide necessary background and context. Because of the inherent complexity of the topic, this section occupies half of the book. Chapter 1, "Sinitic in a Global Perspective," summarizes the role of Literary Chinese (aka Classical Chinese, termed "Sinitic" by Kornicki) in the premodern world of China and its neighbors, while also addressing the problem of applying a suitable theoretical framework to that role. Chapter 2, "Scripts and Writing," explores the many different writing systems in use over time and space, their relationship to Chinese writing, and their influence on (a) the dissemination and interpretation of Literary Chinese texts, (b) the development of vernacular writing, and (c) spoken vernaculars. Chapter 3, "The Oral Dimension," discusses the role of spoken language in the use of texts: how they were pronounced, how they were performed, and how they were translated. Chapter 4, "Material Texts: Manuscripts, Xylography, and Typography," details the history of the technology of text production and its impact on modes of dissemination. Finally, chapter 5, "Book Roads and Routes," discusses the physical pathways through which texts traveled throughout the region. While much of this section is synthesis rather than original scholarship, its organization and presentation are so extensive and insightful that it deserves to be seen as a major contribution to scholarship in its own right.

The second section, "Reading and Translation," although relatively brief at sixty pages, is the heart of the book, as it deals with the mechanics of vernacularization. In this section Kornicki demonstrates the ways that vernacularization in East Asia has differed from premodern processes of vernacularization in other parts of the world, such as South Asia and Europe. Chapter 6, "Reading Sinitic Texts in the Vernaculars," explores the technique that can be crudely described as "vernacular reading," by which a text written in Literary Chinese was, via a more or less conventionalized algorithm, transformed ephemerally into a non-Chinese vernacularized form capable of being understood by readers or listeners who were not fully conversant in Literary Chinese. These techniques--which became most highly developed and conventionalized in Japan and Korea--were instrumental in the later creation of written forms of local vernaculars. Moreover, they powerfully influenced later methods of translation of Sinitic texts into vernacular written texts, as described in chapter 7, "Written Vernacular Translation."

The third and final section, "Chinese Texts and the Vernaculars," is an overview of the dissemination, vernacularization, and translation of texts in a number of important genres. It explores the political and cultural contexts in which these texts were embedded. This section is not exhaustive (indeed, an exhaustive treatment would be impossible given the enormity of the literary history of the region), instead focusing on three areas: "The Chinese Buddhist Canon and Other Buddhist Texts" (chapter 8), "Classics, Examinations, and Confucianism" (chapter 9), and "Primers, Medical Texts, and Other Works" (chapter 10).

A number of admirable decisions taken by Kornicki in his approach to this project deserve special mention. The first is his careful questioning of conventional terms and concepts that are, or have the potential to be, historically inaccurate or misleading. This is not merely a question of using precise terminology for its own sake; the imposition of today's geographic, cultural, and linguistic categories on the complex interactions of past peoples and civilizations can lead to gross misunderstandings of historical causes and events. In some cases, like that of the title's "East Asia," Kornicki recognizes and discusses the inadequacy of a term, but finding no ready alternative, decides to use it in an expansive sense with caveats. In other cases, he chooses a term that has few existing associations. An example is the use of "Sinitic" to denote what is typically called "Literary Chinese" or "Classical Chinese." Following Victor Mair, Kornicki prefers the term because it avoids associating the written language "necessarily with China or Chinese" (p. 19). From my perspective, this rhetorical gambit does not work well. "Sinitic,"

after all, is simply the Latinate word meaning "Chinese," and in my field, the term is frequently applied to the family of Chinese languages, imbuing the word with an unshakable association with Chinese language. Regardless of its connotations, however, it allows Kornicki to terminologically distinguish between this transnational written language and written forms of specific Chinese languages (such as modern Mandarin and Cantonese).

A second decision by Kornicki is to look beyond the usual trio of nations conventionally viewed as part of the "Sinographic cosmopolis" (a term invented by Ross King on the model of Pollock's "Sanskrit cosmopolis," p. 17): Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Their positions are privileged by their current status as nation-states, as well as the relative abundance of historical materials attesting to their textual histories. But as Kornicki rightly observes, the history of vernacularization within the sphere of influence of Chinese writing is broader, and any adequate investigation must take into account developments in peripheral and/or now-vanished political and cultural regions. One of the strengths of the book is the attention given, to the degree possible given the limitations of available data, to Tibet, Tangut, Uyghur, Jurchen, Khitan, Ryūkyū, Parhae, and other peoples and kingdoms that have had cultural, textual, and political interactions with Chinese cultural products. Developments in those places often went in different directions than they did in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, providing a valuable perspective on what is universal and what is contingent, and on the specific local conditioning factors that influenced processes of vernacularization.

Despite its ambitious scope, Kornicki's book succeeds in being both broad and deep. It functions effectively as a general introduction to the literary history of East Asia and as an important scholarly contribution to the development of a theoretical framework to explain the rise of vernacular written languages. Kornicki judiciously balances overviews of large temporal and geographic expanses with detailed, specific exemplars of cultural interactions, literary composition and dissemination, and manuscript and book production.

The first chapter of the first section lays the groundwork for the rest of the book by clarifying the nature of the relationship between Literary Chinese, the spoken Chinese languages, and the vernaculars spoken--and later written--outside of China. Kornicki is careful to draw a distinction between the sociocultural role of Chinese within the Sinographic cosmopolis and the roles of its analogs, Latin in Europe and Sanskrit in South Asia. Crucial for Kornicki is the fact that over the last two thousand years Literary Chinese has been divorced from spoken language. Not only is it lexically and grammatically distinct from the spoken forms of Chinese that developed in the medieval period and into the modern era, it also has no fixed phonology. Instead, it is read aloud in conventionalized, learned character pronunciations that draw on the phonologies of local spoken languages (whether Chinese or non-Chinese languages). This makes the nature of the interaction between Literary Chinese and spoken vernaculars distinctive, in a way that precludes the casual imposition of a Pollock-like framework to explain developments in East Asia. This claim--that the East Asian situation was unique because of a lack of spoken diglossia in the Sinographic sphere--is of central importance to Kornicki's study (pp. 37-38). A caveat must be raised, however. Kornicki's claim that bilingualism in the Chinese script-using world was rare to non-existent is only partly true at best. While it is true that Japanese and Korean speakers interacted almost exclusively with Literary Chinese and not with spoken forms of Chinese language, this was not the case in northern Vietnam in the first millennium, or indeed throughout what is now known as south, southwest, and northwest China. In these areas bilingualism and multilingualism--often including one or more spoken varieties of Chinese--was the norm, as it still is for the many of the millions of non-Han ethnic minorities currently living within the boundaries of modern China.

Notably absent from the discussion of interpreters and translators in chapter 3 is mention of the Buddhist text translation operations carried out in what is now northwest China over several centuries. A high degree of multilingualism was a feature of many areas on the Chinese frontier, as evidenced by the profusion of languages represented in the texts found preserved in the Dunhuang caves. Kornicki points out that there were Tangut speakers and Chinese speakers in the Tangut empire (pp. 99-100), but does not recognize that the Tangut empire, like many of the other polities that formed and dissolved in Central Asia on the Chinese periphery, was ethnically diverse and decidedly polyglot. Moreover, this was (and still is!) also true of southern China, Vietnam, all of the polities on the Southeast Asian peninsula, northeastern China, and even of Korea and Japan in the first millennium. In these places, just as is true in western China today, it could not have been unusual for ordinary people to speak two or three languages in their daily lives. For this reason, an analysis based on a simple linguistic dichotomy (written Literary Chinese vs. the spoken vernacular) is oversimplified, and Kornicki's statement that "most of pre-modern East Asia was, therefore, monolingual, unlike the ancient Mediterranean world" (p. 100) is certainly incorrect. That said, this linguistic dichotomy and lack of spoken bilingualism may well have been true of many of the literate elites who shaped literary culture in many of the polities that Kornicki discusses; it is a question that deserves further investigation.

In the second section of the book, which makes the most original and important scholarly contribution, Kornicki describes processes of vernacular reading of Literary Chinese texts. These processes were most highly developed in Korea and Japan. By means of a set of formulaic practices, sometimes signaled by textual annotations, a base text in Literary Chinese was transformed into a stylized form of the local spoken language. This vernacularization method was quite different from anything known in the West. It seems to straddle the divide between reading and translation, raising the question of what language is in fact represented by the base text. But the very question of whether such "vernacular glossing" is best classified as reading or translation is predicated on a false dichotomy, as Kornicki notes. He describes the result of the process as a "bound translation": a "'foreignizing' translation rather than a 'domesticating' one" (p. 166). As such it is indeed a species of translation, but one that Kornicki describes as "bound" because the core lexical items of the translation cannot deviate too far from those in the original text. The resulting "bound translation" therefore may still require some exegetical apparatus to be fully intelligible to a native speaker or reader of the vernacular (p.187).

A central point of Kornicki's argument is that, unlike in other parts of the world, in the Sinographic cosmopolis the development of vernacular writing and the related developments of vernacularization and the rise of vernacular literature were inextricably tied up with vernacular glossing and the resulting bound translations of Literary Chinese texts. Kornicki formulates this key point thus: "The drive to vernacularize Chinese texts came as a result of glossing techniques to facilitate vernacular reading, and it came _before_ the emergence of vernacular scripts. Japanese and Koreans could read Sinitic texts in their own languages well before they had any means of writing their own languages" (pp. 163-4). Kornicki's second major contribution is the compelling case he makes in chapter 7 that "written vernacular translation," which became possible after native scripts were developed, "played a much bigger part in making Chinese texts accessible and domesticating them in pre-modern East Asia than has hitherto been realized" (p. 187).

Kornicki's mastery of the details of how these practices developed in Korea and Japan is impressive, including discussion of recent, exciting discoveries concerning early practices in Korea that have revolutionized our understanding of the development of writing on the peninsula. It is unfortunate that the discussion in chapter 6 lacks the clear examples necessary to make these practices fully understandable to the target audience of readers who are not necessarily familiar with the languages and scripts involved; this is a missed opportunity. The extensive illustration of Japanese vernacular glossing of a Literary Chinese sentence (pp. 164-5) will probably be frustratingly opaque to all but the most expert reader.

Key details are omitted: Kornicki points out that Japanese typically has subject-object-verb (SOV) word order but does not mention (so far as I can tell) that the Literary Chinese source language has verb-medial (SVO) word order. An original Literary Sinitic line (from the Confucian _Analects_) is given in Chinese characters and in English translation, but the individual words are not glossed with either pronunciations or meanings, making it difficult for the reader to identify and distinguish nouns, verbs, and grammatical function words. The glossed version of that base text is never shown in the form it would have traditionally taken, but is only given in a modernized, left-to-right horizontal form. The pronunciations and meanings of the Japanese words in the resulting bound translation are not given either. For this reason, only someone already extensively familiar with Chinese characters and one or both of the languages involved will be able to follow the example well.

In chapter 7, Kornicki makes some claims about translation practices into and out of Chinese that seem to betray an unwarranted reverence for the semantic qualities of Chinese characters. His discussion makes an implicit claim that Chinese characters are more meaningful and stable written representations than are written words in Sanskrit, Latin, or Arabic scripts. While this hardly derails Kornicki's larger claims about vernacularization or the force of his overall argumentation, I think this aspect of Kornicki's analysis warrants some critical evaluation.

On p. 188, he observes that Sanskrit Buddhist terms were often rendered phonographically in Chinese. He gives as an example the word _nirv__āṇa_, rendered phonetically into Chinese as 涅槃 (Modern Standard Chinese _nièpán_, from an earlier pronunciation closer to _netbwan_). These two Chinese characters are conventionally used to write Chinese words meaning "blacken" and "tray," but in this specialized usage only their sound values are employed. Kornicki considers this and similar sound-based borrowings to be a "failure of translation," because they "render only the sound and not the sense," yielding a Chinese Buddhist canon "prickly with unexplained loanwords." It is not clear to me why Kornicki views these phonetic loanwords so negatively. Given that these Sanskrit Buddhist terms had no precise equivalents in Chinese, the use of direct loans seems no odder or less effective than the use of loans like _nirvana_, _karma_, _dharma_, _Buddha_, and so on in English-language texts that deal with Buddhism. Although initially strange, new terms for new concepts soon become familiar through exposure and explanation and are eventually fully integrated into the lexicon. Indeed, the evident success of Buddhism and of the Chinese Buddhist canon in China would seem to belie Kornicki's claim that these translations were hobbled by "shortcomings."

Kornicki makes similar claims of inadequacy for translations out of Chinese and into languages that do not incorporate the Chinese script into their vernacular writing: "In Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, the Sinitic vocabulary of the Chinese Buddhist canon was retained and became the standard term in each of the vernaculars.... Since the Tanguts did not use Chinese characters in their written language, this option was not open to them. Instead, they transliterated the Chinese or Tibetan terms phonetically ... this had the result of littering Buddhist texts with unexplained phonetic loans" (p. 209).

But the distinction is a false one. A Buddhist text translated into Tangut was no more or less "littered" with phonetic loans than the Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese texts. There is no inherent reason that the word for _nirv__āṇa_ would be more or less accessible to a Korean upon first encounter when written 涅槃 and pronounced _yŏlban_ than it would be to a Tangut speaker when written with two Tangut graphs having a similar pronunciation. Kornicki commits a similar confusion of script with language when he claims that Tanguts and Manchus, unlike Koreans and Japanese, lacked the option of using borrowed Chinese words when translating Chinese texts, because they "did not mix scripts [i.e., employ Chinese characters to write Chinese loanwords] and therefore had to find vernacular equivalents for Confucian and Buddhist [Chinese] terminology" (p. 203; see also p. 243). But one need not mix scripts in order to borrow and write a Chinese word. Tangut and Manchu do indeed contain loanwords from Chinese, even though they are not written in a distinctive script (just as modern English speakers can render loanwords from Chinese and other languages in Roman script). In cases where Manchu speakers chose to translate using a near-equivalent native term, Kornicki finds the process problematic. For example, he observes that the Chinese Confucian concept _rén_ 仁 (humane) is imprecisely translated by the Manchu word _gosin_ (love). But one might equally protest that Kornicki's English translations "humane" and "love" are themselves imprecise renderings of the Chinese and Manchu senses, and therefore fail to indicate the exact nature of the semantic mismatch between Chinese and Manchu. These are issues of translation that apply equally to all languages and have nothing to do with the peculiarities of the Chinese and Manchu scripts. Just as English-speaking students of Confucianism come to adjust their understanding of the word "humane" when reading it in Confucian contexts, readers of Confucian texts in Manchu eventually adjust their interpretation of _gosin_ to incorporate the appropriate meaning for a Confucian context.

The chapters of section 3 are a tour de force of historical-literary scholarship. Kornicki traces the history of transmission and translation of texts across East Asia (mostly, though not entirely exclusively, out of China), focusing on several of the most important genres. The coverage here is extensive and detailed. This section could stand alone as a unique and valuable English-language overview of the history of East Asian literary interactions. But Kornicki does more than just summarize and enumerate. Connecting patterns of transmission with processes of glossing, annotating, and translating, and even extending the discussion to source texts written in Chinese vernacular rather than Literary Chinese, Kornicki builds on the foundation of the book's second section to provide a theoretical framework for understanding these transmissions. At the same time, Kornicki raises key questions about the ways that different cultures and polities responded to Chinese texts, some of which he is able to answer and some of which are fruitfully left to further exploration. To give just one example, chapter 8 on Buddhist texts begins with the question of why the Chinese Buddhist canon (itself translated from Indic languages) was adopted in its Literary Sinitic form in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam and resisted further translation into their written vernaculars, while "in Tibet, in the Tangut and Mongol empires, and amongst the Manchu-speaking rulers of Qing China, translation was fundamental to the spread of Buddhism" (p. 217).

Kornicki eventually reaches several conclusions about the key factors, including differences in script and the "sacralization of Sinitic as the language of Buddhism" in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. This sacralization parallels the roles of Quranic Arabic, Sanskrit and Pali, and Latin in sacred texts of Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity in other parts of the world (p. 244). Throughout this chapter and the following ones, Kornicki reminds us of the complex and shifting interactions of script, language, culture, politics, and technology in shaping literary canons and readerships.

A question I am left with is whether the history of Literary Sinitic texts in Vietnam really parallels that of Korean and Japanese to the extent that Kornicki implies, even when allowing for the likelihood that many early manuscripts have been lost to the ravages of the Southeast Asian climate. Kornicki asserts that surviving Vietnamese texts that are annotated with vernacular glosses of Chinese characters were used to produce "bound translations," much as annotated Korean and Japanese texts were (p. 204). But I see little evidence to support such a claim. For example, there are no "reordering marks" of the kind seen in Japanese and Korean, and (so far as I know) no vernacular written versions reflecting bound translations. Could it be that Sinitic word order was similar enough to Vietnamese that the texts could be read and understood straight through as long as the lexical items were glossed, and therefore no vernacularized translation was produced at all? And if glossing practices did not exist in Vietnam, or existed only minimally, how does this affect our understanding of the role of glossing in the development of vernacular writing in Vietnam and as a general phenomenon in East Asia?

Clearly, this rich work will be a catalyst spurring discussion and debate across many disciplines. There are few scholars in the world with the linguistic and intellectual skills to undertake a project of this scope and sophistication, let alone do it so well. A glance through the 63-page bibliography shows how comprehensively Kornicki has made use of scholarship in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Although primarily engaged with the question of vernacularization, the book's contents range broadly and deeply through many related disciplines, providing a wealth of facts and analysis. Both practical and theoretical, this is a work that bears reading through and returning to as a reference again and again.