Missionary Approaches and Linguistics in Mainland China and Taiwan

Missionary Approaches and Linguistics in Mainland China and Taiwan
Author: Weiying Gu
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2001
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9789058671615

This book offers a series of attempts at analyzing the place of Christianity in traditional Chinese society from the different sociological, historical, theological and philological approaches. It is based on papers and discussions from the sixth international conference on Church activities in Qing and early Republican China (Verbiest Foundation, Leuven, 1998). Scholars like von Collani, Criveller, Walravens and Wiest established already a well-deserved reputation with a series of previous publications in the field. Their articles in this volume on the position of women in the Chinese Catholic community, the shifting Jesuit methodology, Jesuit apologetics and the direct sources of the Qiqi tushou are fine examples of fundamental research. Equally interesting are the papers of the scholars Heuschert-Laage, Kollmar-Paulenz, Pang and Stary. They throw an interesting light on the Manchu-Mongolian aspect of the history of the Chinese Catholic Church. Special attention must also be given to the studies on Taiwan by Borao, Heylen and Heyns. Taiwan is a region relatively unknown to the Western sinological public. From the Church historian's point of view however it is a highly interesting place because it was the first place in the Chines world where Protestantism and Catholicism coexisted. The historical framework of the studies in this volume is mainly the seventeenth century. Although this volume is not a comprehensive treatment of the Christian mission in Ming and Qing China, it brings together studies that illuminate the manner in which the Christian missionaries--Protestants and Catholics alike--developed different methods to realize their communal ideal of "the Kingdom of God on Earth".

Missionary Grammars and Dictionaries of Chinese

Missionary Grammars and Dictionaries of Chinese
Author: Otto Zwartjes
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2024-08-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 902724684X

This monograph aims to shed light on the linguistic endeavors and educational practices employed by 17th century Spanish Dominicans in their efforts to understand and disseminate knowledge of the Chinese language during this historical period. Ample attention is dedicated to the evolution of Chinese grammars and dictionaries by these authors. Central to the monograph is the manuscript “Marsh 696”, which comprises a Chinese-Spanish dictionary and a fragmentary Spanish grammar of Mandarin Chinese, a hitherto unknown and unpublished anonymous and undated text entitled Arte de lengua mandarina. This text is probably a fragment of the earliest grammar written by a Westerner of Mandarin Chinese (completed in Manila in c.1641), previously presumed lost. It is presented here as a facsimile, a transcription of the Spanish text and an English translation alongside a detailed linguistic analysis. The historical framework outlined in this monograph spans from the predecessors of Francisco Díaz (1606–1646) around 1620, including the Jesuit linguistic production in mainland China and Early Manila Hokkien sources, to the era wherein Antonio Díaz (1667–1715) finalized his revised version of Francisco Díaz’s dictionary. The monograph scrutinizes these texts in relation to the linguistic contributions of Francisco Varo (1627–1687). Additionally, the monograph incorporates other unpublished texts that are significant for reconstructing the educational curriculum for teaching and learning Chinese by Dominican friars during this period.

臺勢教會 The Taiwanese Making of the Canada Presbyterian Mission

臺勢教會 The Taiwanese Making of the Canada Presbyterian Mission
Author: Mark A. Dodge
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2021-04-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1648891853

"臺勢教會 The Taiwanese Making of the Canada Presbyterian Mission" explores the Canadian Presbyterian Mission to Northern Taiwan, 1872-1915. The Canada Presbyterian Mission has often been portrayed as one of the nineteenth- century’s most successful missions, and its founder, George Leslie Mackay, has been called the most successful Protestant Missionary of all time. Mark Dodge challenges the heroic narrative by exploring the motives and actions of the Taiwanese actors who supported and established the mission. Religious leaders, teachers, doctors, and businessmen from Northern Taiwan collaborated to build a strong and vital mission, whose phenomenal success brought fame and status to Mackay and their cause. In turn, this status provided a protective space in which these Taiwanese patrons were able to exert significant economic and political autonomy in spite of pressures from competing colonial interests. This book will be of particular interest to students and historians of nineteenth-century East Asia as well as scholars of comparative colonialism, with a focus on missionary history and cultural colonialism.

Translating Early Modern China

Translating Early Modern China
Author: Carla Nappi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2021
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198866399

The history of China, as any history, is a story of and in translation. Translating Early Modern China tells the story of translation in China to and from non-European languages and Latin between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and primarily in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Each chapter finds a particular translator resurrected from the past to tell the story of a text that helped shape the history of translation in China. In Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, Latin, and more, these texts helped to make the Chinese language what it was at different points in its history. This volume explores what the form of an academic history book might look like by playing with fictioning as part of the historian's craft. The book's many stories--of glossaries and official Ming translation bureaus, of bilingual Ming Chinese-Mongolian language primers, of the first Latin grammar of Manchu, of a Qing Manchu conversation manual, of a collection of Manchu poems by a Qing translator--serve as case studies that open out into questions of language and translation in China's past, of the use of fiction as a historian's tool, and of the ways that translation creates language.

Language Choice and Identity Politics in Taiwan

Language Choice and Identity Politics in Taiwan
Author: Jennifer M. Wei
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2008
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780739123522

Language Choice and Identity Politics in Taiwan brings new perspectives to--and invites comparative study within--the general study of language choice through its empirical focus on Chinese sociopolitical contexts and cultural practices.

Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora

Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora
Author: Jing Tsu
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2011-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0674060547

What happens when language wars are not about hurling insults or quibbling over meanings, but are waged in the physical sounds and shapes of language itself? Native and foreign speakers, mother tongues and national languages, have jostled for distinction throughout the modern period. The fight for global dominance between the English and Chinese languages opens into historical battles over the control of the medium through standardization, technology, bilingualism, pronunciation, and literature in the Sinophone world. Encounters between global languages, as well as the internal tensions between Mandarin and other Chinese dialects, present a dynamic, interconnected picture of languages on the move. In Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, Jing Tsu explores the new global language trade, arguing that it aims at more sophisticated ways of exerting influence besides simply wielding knuckles of power. Through an analysis of the different relationships between language standardization, technologies of writing, and modern Chinese literature around the world from the nineteenth century to the present, this study transforms how we understand the power of language in migration and how that is changing the terms of cultural dominance. Drawing from an unusual array of archival sources, this study cuts across the usual China-West divide and puts its finger on the pulse of a pending supranational world under “literary governance.”

Han-Mongol Encounters and Missionary Endeavors

Han-Mongol Encounters and Missionary Endeavors
Author: Patrick Taveirne
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 700
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789058673657

The study describes the origins of the Southwest Mongolia vicariate beyond the Great Wall and along the Yellow River Bend during the transition period from Lazarist missionary activities in the 1840s to the Scheutists in the early 1870

Developing Mission

Developing Mission
Author: Joseph W. Ho
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2022-01-15
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1501760955

In Developing Mission, Joseph W. Ho offers a transnational cultural history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses through time and space—tracing the lives and afterlives of images, cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People's Republic of China. When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times of peace and war. Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so, Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across twentieth-century China and the United States.

Handbook of Christianity in China

Handbook of Christianity in China
Author: Nicolas Standaert
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 1092
Release: 2009-12-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004114300

The second volume on Christianity in China covers the period from 1800 to the present day, dealing with the complexities of both Catholic and Protestant aspects.