There is much to like about this hefty, handsomely produced volume. The first thing is the title, which reflects the author's intelligent decision to focus on: 1. Three distinct but related, linguistic phenomena, viz., languages, scripts, and texts, 2. Recognizing the plurality of the languages in question, 3. Placing them in their proper areal context. These guiding principles ensure that the book, though extensive in scope, is tightly organized and lucidly presented.
Another aspect of this monograph that pleases me is Peter Kornicki's use of “Sinitic” to identify the common language that bound together the literary cultures of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Large chunks of the presentation have to do with the vernacular, which is a quite different matter from Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS/CC). The author's treatment of the complex relationship between the literary and the vernacular is both sensitive and sophisticated.
Kornicki is one of the leading figures among a small, but growing, group of researchers (also including Ross King and Wiebke Denecke) who study the East Asian sinographic sphere as an integral whole. The illuminating results of this new approach are abundantly evident in the volume under review.
Particularly noteworthy is the author's emphasis on Dunhuang, a key point on the Silk Road that lay at the western end of the Gansu/Hexi Corridor, where an enormous cache of invaluable manuscripts was discovered around the turn of the twentieth century. Not only does Kornicki place Dunhuang first in his geographical survey of places that are important in his narrative of the development of writing in East Asia, he highlights it above all other locales with a huge star marked by a long, bold, black arrow and large lettering that is situated in what is now Guangdong (Canton) Province in Southeast China! Whether intentionally or not, Dunhuang thus becomes the most conspicuous feature on the map of the whole of East Asia, even though it is actually located in the remote northwestern reaches of the Chinese empire.
Kornicki's opposition to Sinocentrism, which I warmly applaud, is evident in many ways. One that is conspicuous is his decision to refer to the “Jurchen state” and the “Khitan state” rather than the customary “Jin Dynasty” and “Liao Dynasty”.
Although this is a book about “Chinese” texts, the author's geographical purview gives pride of place to peoples, polities, and cultures that surrounded – and helped to demarcate and define – the East Asian Heartland and Extended East Asian Heartland (for which see Victor H. Mair, “The north[west]ern peoples and the recurrent origins of the ‘Chinese’ state”, in Joshua A. Fogel (ed.), The Teleology of the Modern Nation-State: Japan and China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 48–84, 205–17), namely Dunhuang, Jurchen, Khitan, Koguryŏ, Manchuria, Paekche, Parhae, Ryūkyū, Silla, Tangut, and Uyghur.
The geographical range and chronological scope of this volume are vast, including all of East Asia and its adjoining lands, and from the early centuries of the common era to the nineteenth century. Because of his broad vision, which few scholars can hope to match, Kornicki is able to discern patterns of development that might have escaped other researchers: the impact of religions (especially Buddhism) and medieval knowledge that transcended borders, and the impact of politics and ideologies that generated nations and propelled them to expand and interact.
Basically, this book is the story of the encounter of East Asian cultures with Chinese writing, their adoption and adaptation of it for their own purposes, and their longlasting attempts to get out from under the heavy weight of Literary Sinitic to forge their own writing systems and literary traditions. This involved liberal use of glosses and other types of vernacularization. The emergence of the East Asian vernaculars from their common LS/CC background was a slow, gradual process, but much more difficult than and different from how it was in West Eurasia and South Asia. Here, Kornicki says (p. 1) something profound that all researchers need to take to heart:
unlike Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, and Quranic Arabic, the language of the Chinese textual tradition was not and never had been a spoken language. Even in China itself there were no native speakers of literary Chinese, the language in which the earliest texts were written. Oral communication therefore absolutely required the use of one vernacular or another, both within China and elsewhere.
After the invention of the Phoenician consonantary and the Greek alphabet, the path to the eventual appearance of the written vernaculars in West Eurasia and South Asia was clear. The creation of the written vernaculars in East Asia was much more challenging because they were immersed in and constrained by the logographic or morphosyllabic Sinographs. Kornicki meticulously documents this prolonged process with each of the languages covered in the book.
Vernacularization seems to be a global phenomenon. Though East Asia was far away from the distant centres of civilization in West Eurasia, it could not avoid the inevitable trend towards writing in the vernacular, a transformation that is still going on to this day, albeit with some backsliding into the literary/classical from time to time – such is the power of Sinographic and Sinoform script after more than three millennia of use in various portions of East Asia and surrounding lands. Thus Kornicki ends his book empirically the same way he began it methodologically, viz., with an anti-Sinocentric orientation.
The last item in the book, just before a dense 62-page bibliography and a detailed 16-page index, is Fig. C. 1, which shows the opening page of the Abbreviated History of all the Nations (Manguk yaksa) (1896). It is in Korean, but has a conspicuous number of Sinographs. Using the vernacular to convey knowledge about the world was a new approach based on Western disciplines, instead of on “Sinocentric conceptions of the world”. The same trajectory, from Sinocentric to global, continues to this day.
