On Early Language Contact In East Asia And Europe

From the mid and late of the 16^th century to the beginning of the 17^th century, the Jesuit's studies of the Japanese language and the Chinese language, and, later at the beginning of the 19^th century, such Western people as Protestants' studies of the Korean language initialized the language contacts between Orient languages and European languages in succession. Those earlier language contacts between the European languages and the three Eastern Asian languages respectively, namely, Japanese, Chinese and Korean were the typical examples of language contacts. The former were based on Latin alphabet and the Christian culture, and took Latin as their common written language, while the latter stemmed from the Chinese character and Confucian and Buddhist culture, and took classic Chinese as their common written language. By studying these cases, we may get the answer to the such heated questions as " Is it possible to reconstruct the Language Babel viz., a common tongue of human being?" or "Will the cultural multiplicity vanish?" under the globalization and cyberization.In fact, before the European missionaries learned the three orient languages, Chinese, which was the common written language of the three, had already contacted with another western language— Sanskrit that also uses the alphabetic writing as its recording characters as European languages. The Buddhist monks who were engaged in the translation of Buddhist literature had got in touch with Chinese characters by means of the alphabetic writing, on the basis of which they created some approaches— Fanqie, Kana and Geyi to the morpheme, phoneme and meaning of the target language. These approaches laid a good foundation for the later coming European languages, such as Latin, Portuguese, and English, which also use alphabetic writing. Later, Jesuits as well as Protestants notated pronunciations of Chinese characters by Latin alphabets, semantically explained the Chinese words in Confucian and Buddhist cultures, and thus constructed a relatively complete analytic and cognitive system by the perspective of phonetic languages to get deep insight into Chinese characters that belongs to a quite different system of ideography and phonography. The alphabetic system is amazingly consistent with the systematic model of human beings' understanding of languages summarized by the modern cognitive linguists who believe that human beings' process of language information follows the progressive pattern from phonetic consciousness to lansign recognition, to syntax, and then to semantic interpretation. It was the missionaries' comparative scientific cognitive approach to the understanding of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, especially written Chinese, that greatly contributed to the development in phonology, exegetics and philology of the orient languages in discussion.In the last hundred years, the linguists and historians of the three countries have separately studied the origin of language contacts between their own language and European languages from the perspective of linguistics and history and have been getting great achievements. However, it is a pity that so far in their research works the scholars have not paid enough attention to the fact that their official documents at the time were written by classic Chinese, that the three countries shared the same cultural background—Confucianism and Buddhism, and that both Jesuits and Protestants explored East Asia as an entire area to missionize their doctrines. Thus, there lacks a general view of interaction between the European languages and the three languages and the interaction...