Encoding the Spoken and Decoding the Written: A Comparative Study of Sinographic Writing in Premodern East Asia

Abstract

This dissertation is a comparative study of the transmission and adaptation of the Chinese script in premodern East Asia based on the linguistic analysis of written sources in various languages, genres, and periods within their historical and cultural contexts. It is an interdisciplinary project encompassing multiple fields such as linguistics, grapholinguistics (study of writing), philology, literature, and history. The object languages are the three major languages which historically borrowed the Chinese script for writing: Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese. It examines the relationship between spoken language and writing from two opposite perspectives: encoding the spoken language into written form, and decoding the written text into spoken language. The first perspective pertains to how the non-Chinese languages are represented in writing by Sinograms (Chinese characters), and the second perspective pertains to how texts written in the Chinese language are processed and read in the non-Chinese languages.Building on the ongoing scholarly conversations on the “Sinographic Cosmopolis,” this dissertation contributes to deepening our understanding of the literary history and culture of premodern East Asia in two ways. First, by integrating the two main approaches (linguistic and historical) taken in previous studies, it aims to observe how the process and techniques of script adaptation on one hand, and textual transmission and literary practices on the other hand, influenced and shaped each other. While the general pattern of adapting the Chinese script is determined by the structural features of the borrowing language, specific techniques or cases of character use and methods or practices of reading are also contingent upon various factors, such as the genre or function of the text, established convention in a culture or writing system, personal or idiosyncratic choice, etc. Second, by incorporating the theoretical and linguistic study of writing which has emerged in Western academia in the last few decades with the philological traditions of the East Asian cultures, it develops a theoretical framework and accompanying terminology in English to facilitate discussions of Sinographic writing and relevant linguistic, textual, and literary issues across languages. There are six chapters in this dissertation. Chapter 1 serves as the introduction and lays out the theoretical and terminological framework of the entire dissertation. Chapter 2 is an overview of the early history of writing in Korea and Japan by presenting a number of representative textual examples to show the trajectory of the development of vernacular writing. From the perspective of encoding the spoken language into written form, chapters 3, 4, and 6 examine full vernacular writing of Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese attested in the earliest extant sources in each language: Korean hyangka, Japanese Man’yōshū, and Vietnamese Nôm poems. While chapters 3 and 6 discuss the regular patterns and techniques of character use in the respective language, chapter 4 discusses a special orthographic phenomenon known as “playful writing” in Man’yōshū. In addition, a statistical analysis on the function and adaptation type of the characters is conducted for each corpus. From the perspective of decoding the written text into spoken language, the topic of chapter 5 is the transmission and reception of Vernacular Chinese literature in premodern Japan, and it includes a case study on the early Japanese editions of the Vernacular Chinese novel The Water Margin. Finally, there are also five appendices presenting detailed textual sources and data attached after the main body of the dissertation.