'Speaking beasts and beastly tongues' - on the boundaries of 'language' in Early and Early Medieval China

Abstract: Contrary to a widespread perception in Europe since its first tentative encounters with China in the Yuan-Ming periods, and a deeply engrained self-perception of mainstream Confucian scholar literati since at least the Early Imperial construction of Han identity vis-à-vis the "Barbarians of the four quarters", linguistic diversity was an important part of everyday Chinese life during the Classical period. Contacts with at least half a dozen of genealogically non-related language families have left their considerable imprint on the early Chinese lexicon, and, more rarely, also in Chinese morphosyntax and phonology. Some scholars even argue that the emergence of the monosyllabic-isolating profile, associated with Classical Chinese after the loss of its once elaborate derivational morphology, is a result of bilingualism over extended periods of time and subsequent pidginisation/creolisation processes. Amidst the narratives of language as an identity building device along often rather obliquely demarcated language family borders, it gets easily overlooked that an enormous linguistic diversity must have also existed within the Sinitic groupd of languages, as first reflected in Eastern Han and Early Medieval lexicography. Of course, language is always a construct, whether in its delineation from dialects (or other hyphen-lects), its relationship towards writing or its role in narratives of statehood, ethnicity and nation-building. But it is often tacitly assumed that at least its boundaries versus animal communication are universal. In my talk, I will show that this is not always the case, by comparing texts on "animal language", especially that of parrots and non-human primates, in Early Medieval and Medieval China with similar discourses in "the" West, where more often than not, philosophically somewhat different conclusions were drawn from the unsettling presence of speaking animals. A closer look at this human-non-human linguistic boundary will also be useful, I argue, to understand standard conceptualizations of early Chinese ethnographers with respect to the behavioural patterns, and, a fortiori, the cultures and traditions of their non-Sinitc neighbours. Location: Göttingen University, 11-­‐13 June 2015 Event Date: Jun 11, 2015 Organization: Language Diversity in the Sinophone World: Policies, effects, and traditio