Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919

Benjamin Elman, Ph.D. (1980), University of Pennsylvania, is Gordon Wu '58 Professor of Chinese Studies at Princeton University. His publications include On Their Own Terms: Science in China 1550-1900 (Harvard, 2005), A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (Harvard, 2006), Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China (Harvard, 2013).

• 1. Introduction: Languages in East and South Asia, 1000–1919 - Benjamin A. Elman2. The Vernacularization of Buddhist Texts: From the Tangut Empire to Japan - Peter Kornicki3. The Sounds of Our Country: Interpreters, Linguistic Knowledge, and the Politics of Language in Early Chosŏn Korea - Wang Sixiang4. Rebooting the Vernacular in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam - John D. Phan5. Mediating the Literary Classics: Commentary and Translation in Premodern Japan - Haruo Shirane6. The Languages of Medical Knowledge in Tokugawa Japan - Daniel Trambaiolo7. The Manchu Script and Information Management: Some Aspects of Qing China’s Great Encounter with Alphabetic Literacy - Mårten Söderblom Saarela8. Unintended Consequences of Classical Literacies for the Early Modern Chinese Civil Examinations - Benjamin A. Elman9. Competing “Languages”: “Sound” in the Orthographic Reforms of Early Meiji Japan - Atsuko Ueda10. Writing and Speech: Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China - Shang Wei ContributorsIndex