Traditional Chinese Linguistics in Service of the Undergraduate Chinese Curriculum

(如何把文字學與方言學應用在中文課程上)

David Prager Branner (茶米)

University of Maryland, College Park (美國馬裏蘭州立大學)

It is accepted that literary Chinese has much greater relevance to the study of modern Chinese than Latin does to the study of modern European languages. But it is less well known that many forms of traditional linguistic analysis remain similarly useful for understanding the structure and diversity of Chinese and its writing system.

The isolating typology of the language and the defectiveness of the script have allowed written Chinese to remain immensely conservative, which is one of the things that most confounds the Western undergraduate student about it. Traditional Chinese linguistic learning evolved in order to explain the structure of the script, educated usage, and the phonological foundation that underlies a substantial part of dialect variation. It happens that these are some of the very areas where our students encounter the greatest difficulties.

This paper describes ways to incorporate traditional native linguistics into the undergraduate Chinese major so as to provide students with hands-on training in various linguistic skills. In the American Chinese major today it is more common to offer linguistics in the form of a “History of the Chinese Language” class, but such a curriculum, while it addresses the important question of the cultural history of language, rarely leaves students with command of practical techniques. We should be training our students so that they can learn how to study Chinese writing and usage effectively without a teacher’s supervision, and how to come to terms with non-standard varieties (especially of Mandarin).

For those students who wish to serve as the language professionals that are now in ever greater demand in government and industry, the tools for achieving independence in language study should be part of their basic education.