The Natures of Language in Ming China

I've been reading Nathan Vedal's excellent monograph The Cultures of Language in Ming China, whose title I deliberately misconstrue (as a low-commitment nod to recent anthropological theory) in the title of this blog. It's, in short, a must-read for everyone working on literature, history of ideas, comparative thought, "theory" of various traditions and inclinations, and…

Naming and Impropriety

For something that, according to some very serious philosophers, intimates the primal baptism that is the ἀρχή (beginning, principle) of language, proper names are a surprisingly slippery and contentious bunch. It was not too long ago when Dr. Elise Anderson pointed out the questionable transliteration in U.S. media of the name دىلنىگار ئىلھامجان Dilnigar Ilhamjan,…

On Not Speaking Mongolian

In the spirit of a talk Ien Ang gave in 1992, I've had this nagging feeling that my dissatisfaction with my not knowing Classical Mongolian goes beyond that proportionate to a practical inconvenience. But staying closer to Beatrice Bartlett than Ien Ang for now, this is a post about the practical inconvenience, prompted by another…

(n.) A Creature Unfit for Musicking

One of the classic pieces in the qin 琴 repertoire is "Pu'an zhou" 普安咒, or the "Pu'an Mantra" which, as François Picard has shown, is a corrupted form of the “Siddhāṃ Chapters” (Xitan zhang 悉曇章) used to teach Sanskrit letters and syllables in medieval Central and East Asia. In a number of early modern qin…