Dr Hung-yi Chien1
1Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Translators in nineteenth century China usually believed the Chinese language possessed a natural tendency that favoured semantic translation over phonetic transcription in linguistic borrowing. Their belief was not universally held. The Chinese archives in Batavia (today’s Jakarta) demonstrate a different disposition in linguistic borrowing. The minutes of Chinese council meetings there contain loanwords from Dutch, Malay, and even Portuguese. They are mostly phonetic loans transcribed with Chinese characters according to their Southern Min pronunciations. However, the practice of phonetic borrowing seems to have ceased in the early twentieth century. In a glossary of legal terms published in 1931, semantic compounds dominate the list; many of them appear to be graphically borrowed from Japanese. To explain this discontinuity, this study proposes three hypotheses: 1) people speaking multiple languages may use phonetic borrowings as long as their audience shares the same linguistic capacity; 2) translations and graphic loanwords may prevail in cross-linguistic situations for purposes of mutual understanding; and 3) the modernisation of Chinese and Japanese created new translations that contributed to the replacement of phonetic loanwords in Southeast Asian Chinese communities. To prove the above hypotheses, this study will compare language contact situations involving Chinese writing and languages across East Asia.
Biography:
Hung-yi Chien obtained her doctoral degree from the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature, National Taiwan Normal University (2017). She is both a historian and linguist. As a linguist, she is particularly interested in language contacts and historical etymologies. As a historian, she is exploring the genealogy of Taiwan-related knowledge in Dutch books.