Inter-area/Border Crossing

Organized Panel Session

Early Vernacular Writing across Asia

This panel will explore examples of early vernacular writing as a pan-Asian phenomenon. We hope gain glimpses of particular moments when a people who are fluent in one language but literate in another are confronted with the uncanny feeling of seeing their spoken language written down and recited aloud in forms that were familiar only through their socialization into a transregional literary culture. Fundamentally, we seek to answer the following questions:

• How can we prepare histories of linguistic communities that go beyond literary productions to include the reception of texts outside the sphere of highly-literate elites?


• What are the political implications of the shift in the production and reception of public texts away from cosmopolitan languages to “languages of the land,” i.e., the vernaculars?


• How can we understand the idiosyncratic early attempts to transcribe vernacular languages? What do these idiosyncrasies say about who was writing these languages and why they were doing so?


• How do the processes of vernacularization differ in a primarily phonographic vs. logographic context?


• What are the genres in which the earliest forms of vernacular writing appear? What conclusions might be drawn from the different material forms in which these writings are preserved?

We seek to construct a history of Asian vernacular languages that is based not on the literary production of a few luminaries but rather on the contributions of a largely anonymous class of individuals who were among the first to write in languages that had hitherto only been spoken.

Organizer(s)

• WH

  Walter Hakala

  University at Buffalo, State University of New York

Paper Presenter(s)

• MB

  Marjorie Burge

  University of California, Berkeley
• DH

  David Holm

  National Chengchi University, Taiwan (Republic of China)
• NS

  Nathanael Shelley

  Barnard College, Columbia University

Papers:

• 11:15 AM - 1:00 PM

  Nothing to Write Home About: Early Urdu Epigraphy in Gujarat and the Deccan
• 11:15 AM - 1:00 PM

  Vernacularizing Sinographic Script in Silla and Japan
• 11:15 AM - 1:00 PM

  Vernacular Character Script Writing of the Tai-speaking Peoples in Southern China and Northern Vietnam
• 11:15 AM - 1:00 PM

  "The Multitude of Beings are Born Again and Again": Vernacular Prototypes from Ancient West Asia