Speaker: Tamara Chin, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University

The study of ancient language contact traditionally lacked prestige in both Confucian classical studies and European philology.  This changed somewhat in the early twentieth century.  The discovery of multilingual manuscript archives in and around Dunhuang coincided with the internationalization of Western-style linguistics, prompting both scientific and political interest in the linguistic dimension of cross-cultural contact.  This talk explores where, when, and why during the 1870-1970 period spanning the late Qing through the Cold War, Sino-xenic language contact became both a dedicated object of academic inquiry and a political symbol of internationalist ideals.  I ask what did the new units of analysis—such loanwords taken from foreign languages and transcriptions of sounds across writing systems—do to the mainstream study of national traditions?  To better understand how we study ancient language contact now, I return to the role of loanwords within earlier debates about the disciplinary aims and methods of Dongfang xue, Oriental Philology, historical phonology, and Area Studies.

Tamara Chin works on Han dynasty literature, cross-cultural history and aesthetics, and the modern reception of antiquity.  She is an associate professor of comparative literature at Brown University and the author of Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard 2014).  The talk draws on her second book, The Silk Road Idea: Ancient Contact in the Modern Human Sciences, 1870-1970 (currently under review).