An Example Of The Relationship Between The Translation Of Buddhist Scriptures And The Evolution Of Chinese

The introduction of Buddhism into China has brought profound influence on Chinese language and culture.Buddhist scripture were translated from An Shigao in the Eastern Han Dynasty to the heyday of Buddhist development in the Wei,Jin and Southern and Northern Dynasties,so Buddhist scripture were developed and expanded in the Wei,Jin and Six dynasties,leaving a large number of Buddhist literature translated which is not only of value in the field of religion and philosophy,but also very important in the field of linguistics,because the process of Buddhist scripture translation is accompanied by the language contact between Sanskrit and Chinese,which not only produces a large number of Buddhist words,but also has an impact on the vocabulary and grammar of Chinese.This paper illustrates the relationship between The translation of Buddhist scriptures and the evolution of Chinese language from three aspects of content words,function words and construction by using the methods of mutual annotations between Sanskrit and Chinese texts.Content words take"Fanfu(??)"as an example,function words take"Ran(?)"as an example,and construction takes cognate object construction as an example.In addition to the introduction and conclusion,this paper has three chapters.The introduction introduces the main status quo of domestic and foreign research of Chinese Buddhist language research,and puts forward the research object,ideas of this paper,as well as the research methods and materials used.The first chapter discusses the usage and origin of"Fanfu(??)"to express the meaning of"Bao'en(??)"in the Medieval translation of Buddhist scriptures,and demonstrates the existence of this usage through the internal logic of The Chinese translation of Buddhist scriptures.Combined with the process of the extension of the meaning of"hui,da,bao,fan and fu(?,?,?,?,?)"and the combination of two words into a two-syllable compound,this paper explains the origin of"Fanfu(??)"in the meaning of"Bao'en(??)".We believe that the development of the this not only conforms to the laws of Chinese vocabulary development,but also depends on the linguistic innovation of translators.The second chapter mainly discusses the usage of the correlative adverb of"Ran(?)"in the Medieval translation of Buddhist scriptures,which complements the preceding text and is equivalent to"You(?)"and"Qie(?)",which has the function of topic transition marker in pragmatics,and often appears in the same syntactic environment as the cohesive elements of"You(?)"and"Fuyou(??)".This paper demonstrates the existence of this usage through the internal logic of The Chinese translation of Buddhist scriptures,the different Chinese translation of the same scriptures and the methods of mutual annotations between Sanskrit and Chinese texts,and holds that the correlative adverb"Ran(?)"is derived from the period of the translation of Buddhist scriptures,and is the result of the transplantation of the associative adverbs from the Sanskrit text“api tu khalu punar”.The third chapter explains the development of Chinese cognate object constructions in ancient and middle Chinese,and makes up the gap of this research.It holds that ancient Chinese have cognate object constructions,but the number of cognate object structure is small because of Chinese's tendency to avoid repetition and its semantic redundancy.Based on the diachronic description of the cognate object constructions and the methods of mutual annotations between Sanskrit and Chinese texts,we find that the influence of buddhist sutra translation is reflected in two aspects: firstly,the translator imitative the original text with the same verb and noun translation,providing two syntactic positions.Secondly,the existence of modifiers in the original text makes it necessary to split monophonic words into disylphonic words or phrases in translation before adding modifiers in the middle.Under the influence of internal and external factors,there are many cognate object constructions in ancient Chinese Buddhist scriptures.The reason why there are still few cognate object constructions in Chinese despite the large number of that in buddhist scriptures and Sanskrit texts in the middle ages may be related to the underdeveloped morphology of Chinese besides the tendency of "avoiding repetition".The conclusion summarizes the main conclusions of the thesis.