When meeting with a foreigner, one would converse in “brush talk”-by passing notes back and forth. That meant they could write in their own vernacular as well as in Classical Chinese. As the sphere of Chinese influence grew to include the preliterate areas now known as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, those peoples’ rulers, diplomats, administrators, merchants, poets, and monks adapted the Chinese script and the literary language of Classical Chinese to their own use.įew people even in the educated classes were bilingual-they spoke only in their own local vernacular-but most in the educated elite became “biliterate,” as Denecke has explained in her latest book, Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons (Oxford University Press, 2014). But while cuneiform, hieroglyphs, and Mesoamerican glyphs have long since died out, Chinese-which is actually three millennia old, having been in use in China for a thousand years before it began to spread-survives today as the world’s only logographic script. The history of writing started with such scripts.
It uses a logographic script, in which each character represented not a sound but a word. The scripta francaįor almost two millennia, Classical Chinese was the lingua franca-or better, Denecke says, the scripta franca-of East Asia. Today, this script is used in both North Korea and South Korea. In contrast to the Classical Chinese script that continued to be used in court, the simpler Hangul script is an alphabetic syllabary, meaning the symbols represent sounds rather than words. Korea’s King Sejong invented Hangul in the 15th century for the use of women and peasants. The text praises the accomplishments of the founders of Korea’s Chosŏn Dynasty (1392–1910). An early copy of the Yongbiŏch’ŏnga (S ongs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven), the first text written in the Korean vernacular script, Hangul, alongside Chinese translations. Once people realize that Classical Chinese was a tremendous asset before the modern period and the invention of ‘national literatures,’” Denecke hopes, then they can begin moving toward reconciliation by looking back to a shared history. “You can see the dynamic of literary creation, reception, and renewal play out over a long duration, which we cannot yet see with the comparatively short history of European vernacular languages. That tradition has been carried through hundreds of centuries by a writing system still readable today. “One of the things that makes East Asia distinctive is that they have a very long cultural tradition,” Denecke says. She believes these ancient documents may hold an important key to harmony in East Asia, promoting what she calls a “positive transnational identity.” The fellowship will allow Denecke to travel with her family to China, Korea, and Japan throughout next year to research all-but-forgotten poetry from the 7th through 12th centuries C.E. Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship.
And this year Denecke became the first BU recipient of an Andrew W. Rediscovering Classical Chinese, Denecke argues, might help East Asia heal the war wounds of the recent past.Ī German native who has lived all over the world and is fluent in a dozen languages, Denecke was the East Asia editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature (third edition, 2012). One result of this was that the region lost a common literary heritage. In the early 20th century, the Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese abandoned Classical Chinese, promoting their vernacular tongues as their nations’ official languages. Once the “Latin” of East Asia, Classical Chinese was the shared language of government, Buddhism, scholarship, and high literature for almost two millennia. A vast trove of literature penned in Japan, by Japanese poets, and for a Japanese audience is sorely underappreciated in Japan simply because it was written in Classical Chinese, says Wiebke Denecke, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of Chinese, Japanese, and comparative literature. To a great extent, that is the attitude informing today’s cultural and educational climate in East Asia. Imagine if French historians willfully ignored ancient accounts of Gaul, because they were written in Latin, language of the invading Roman legions.
Imagine if the Irish refused to read James Joyce because he wrote in English, the tongue of the colonizer.
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