Translation And The Formation Of Modern Chinese Grammatical Terminology(1823-1924)

Since the publication of Ma’s Grammar(Ma Shi Wen Tong)in 1898 and The New Chinese Grammar(Xin Zhu Guo Yu Wen Fa)in 1924,most of the attention in the academic world has been paid to how the Chinese language has borrowed grammatical frameworks from Latin and English,but little attention has been paid to the extent to which the formation of modern Chinese grammatical terminology has been influenced by translation.Modern Chinese grammatical terminology has been gradually formed by translators and scholars from China,Western countries and Japan based on translations of grammatical works by their predecessors.This study attempts to answer two questions:1.How did modern Chinese grammatical terminology and concepts come into being?2.What are the characteristics of the evolution of modem Chinese grammatical terminology,and what impact has translation had on them?This study synthesizes the concept of "translation culture" in translation history and the theory of "conceptual system" in terminology and proposes to examine the diachronic and synchronic paths of the formation of modern Chinese grammatical terminology from the evolution of names and concepts.Specifically,this study utilizes the quantitative and qualitative,comparative and observational,descriptive and explanatory research methods.Taking seven translated English grammar books,six English-Chinese and EnglishJapanese bilingual dictionaries,and nine Chinese grammar works between 1823 and 1924 as the research materials,170 modern Chinese grammatical terms are sorted out.The study examines the time of,the reasons for,the process of,and the results of the formation of modern Chinese grammatical terminology,and explores the relationship between translation and the formation of modern Chinese grammatical terminology.The findings are:1.109(64%)of the 170 modern Chinese grammatical terms and 135(79%)of the concepts of the terms had been fully formed by 1924,among which 65 terms and 105 concepts were named by translators and the largest proportion of them were translated by Chinese translators(45%and 53%),which is different from the situation that the terms of other disciplines at that time were mostly translated by Western and Japanese scholars;the terms by Chinese scholars also accounted for the largest proportion of original terms(37 terms),but most of them were hyponyms of the translated terms.2.The relationship between translation and the formation of the 170 modern Chinese grammatical terms has the distinctive characteristics of diachronic evolution and synchronic individual creation.Diachronic evolution consists of the formation of terms,which includes the borrowing of classical words or the combination of Chinese morphemes to translate foreign concepts(form-borrowing)and the formation of the concepts,which are based on ancient concepts but narrowed or expanded in modern times or the absorption of Western grammar ideas with the absence of ancient concepts(semantic changes).Synchronic individual creation refers to individual translators who sought new grammar concepts from traditional Chinese and absorbed and improved the translations of their predecessors and scholars who absorbed and spread new grammatical ideas and terminology from previous Western,Japanese,and Chinese scholars;3.The influence of translation on modern Chinese grammatical terminology can be divided into linguistic and cognitive influences.The former refers to the revelation of Chinese neologisms,most of which are constructed in the form of "root+suffix" in the additional morphology,bringing about a terminology set with a sense of "conceptual system"(with the classifiers "ci","yu",and "ju" in Chinese).The latter refers to the fact that with the help of translations of English grammatical works and reflections on Western grammar,writers of Chinese grammar have structured a part of the Chinese grammatical system by introducing grammatical concepts and systems which are not found in traditional Chinese,such as "parts of speech","syntactic constituent",and "simple sentence and complex sentence".This study reveals that modern Chinese grammatical terminology,during its formation in modern times,has a unique developmental pattern and evolutionary characteristics different from those of other disciplines,as well as its contribution to the construction of the Chinese grammatical system.