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we have chosen to transliterate the name of the Ryūkyūs according to Japanese pronunciation, which is the general convention in Western scholarship.
Quite naturally, there have been debates over what term(s) should be used to describe the various written languages in the Sinosphere that originated with classical Chinese but then evolved in distinctly different ways according to differing political, social, and cultural environments. We have arbitrarily chosen “literary Sinitic” for the purposes of this introduction, but some of our authors prefer other terms, ranging from “Sinographic writing” to various hyphenated expressions not only Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, and Sino-Vietnamese as mentioned (see note 34 to this introduction) but also “Sino-form” and “East Asian-criture.”50 One objection to the use of “literary Sinitic” has been that the word “literary” “strongly suggests a belletristic register,” which does not apply to many Sinitic texts.51 But to us, it has no such connotations; rather, it simply refers to various kinds of writing that involve the predominant use of Chinese characters.
Other debates have to do with specific linguistic phenomena. When, for instance, do differences in “dialects” become differences in “languages”? How exactly should the term “vernacular” be understood? Some scholars use this term to refer to non-Chinese writing systems, like the kana syllabary, hangŭl, and nôm, which developed in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, respectively, long after classical Chinese had been introduced and widely employed by scholars. Others use “vernacular” to refer to colloquial versions of Sinographic texts that expressed “plain speech” (白話文) as opposed to texts employing “refined words” (文言文), a long-standing but somewhat problematic distinction in the history of Chinese literature.52
Periodization presents additional difficulties. Although many scholars of East Asia use dynastic and/or reign titles to designate periods, usually marking them by Western dates as well, political, social, economic, and cultural changes seldom correspond exactly with dynasties and reigns,