|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
Chinese characters were pronounced, however, the meanings of each remained substantially the same.
In a similar fashion, and with similar permutations, linguistic common denominators facilitated the spread of ideas in medieval and early modern Europe through the shared medium of Latin (which, of course, evolved from Ancient Latin into Classical Latin, Late Latin, Medieval Latin, and Renaissance Latin).28 Or, to use a more recent example, the way that English in its various forms became the lingua franca not only in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Canada, Australia, and the United States but also in India, at least a dozen African states, and several countries in the Caribbean as well.
But, as Hofmeyr’s study and many other such studies affirm,29 interpretive communities (pace Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities”) in places where “foreign” texts traveled were not simply empty vessels waiting to be filled. Quite naturally, Japan, the Ryūkyū Kingdom, Korea, and Vietnam had their own cultural traditions, including, of course, their own spoken languages. In these environments, texts originally written in literary Sinitic could be “domesticated” by the incorporation of national or local stories, culture heroes and traditions, narrative conventions, changes in terminology, and so on.30 And although in each country Chinese characters served initially as the only medium for written communication, they were used in sometimes radically different ways over time.
In seventh-century Japan, for example, a writing system known as man’yōgana, which was used in the ancient poetry anthology Man’yōshū 萬葉集 (Collection of myriad leaves), developed. It employed Chinese characters (pronounced kanji 漢字 in Japanese) primarily for their sound, rather than for their meaning. Over time, kanji that were used as man’yōgana eventually gave rise to syllabaries such as hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな) and katakana (片仮名, かたかな, カタカナ). The Japanese also developed systems of reading texts written in literary Sinitic (Japanese: kanbun), in Japanese word order (Japanese: wabun 和文), and with variant pronunciations based on Chinese or Japanese.