Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia.

• Author: Oh, Young Kyun

Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia. By PETER FRANCIS KORNICKI. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018. Pp. xxx + 393. $97.50.

Every once in a while, we encounter a work that synthesizes the field with an insight that points to new marks for the discipline and its related intellectual endeavors and has the power to change the way we look at what we know. Languages. Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia is the second such work by this author, following his The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (1998). With characteristic clarity and sound logic, Kornicki recounts the processes of how and to what degree written Sinitic became vernacularized in the East Asian sphere.

As the author states in the conclusion (p. 297), there are three obvious reasons for the existence of a work such as this: Sinitic has flourished outside of China for nearly two thousand years; it lived alongside local vernaculars rather than replacing them until the twentieth century; and the societies that engaged with Sinitic did so to different degrees and in very different ways. Indeed, in Part I (Orientation) Kornicki provides the most substantial discussion thus far of the significance of East Asian vernacularization. He weaves his discussion from three different strands. He introduces the problems of script, orality, material texts, and the migration of texts in East Asia; he lays out a detailed survey of the techniques for reading and translating Chinese texts that led up to the development of their vernacular versions; and finally, he focuses on Buddhist, Confucian, and other widely circulating texts that are exemplary of the processes of vernacularization. By doing so, he fixes a series of methods through which we can sort out the multitude of issues involved in the vernacularization of Sinitic in East Asia. A work as comprehensive as this cannot cover all details, but Kornicki successfully creates a general framework capable of encompassing all aspects and contexts necessary to investigate Sinitic literacy and its shifts in pan-East Asian history. All of his insights and observations are substantiated with bibliographical and historical evidence that is measured against current scholarship in multiple languages. This is where the author's expertise makes this book even more valuable and indispensable.

The East Asia that this book explores--often referred to more conceptually than precisely as the Sinosphere--comprises not only the usual members Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, but also the historical Ryukyu Kingdom and the Jurchen, Khitan, Mongol, and Tangut empires through centuries. These communities, at one time, all shared Sinitic literary culture, and employed one or more of these three options: writing Sinitic with Sinitic, writing vernacular with Sinitic, or creating vernacular scripts in place of Sinitic. What we see in the coexistence of written Sinitic and spoken vernaculars is a continuing process of localizing Sinitic, which in turn reveals two resulting phenomena: a clear division of the written and the oral dimensions; and the absence of translation of local vernaculars into a common Sinitic that could be exchanged between cultures. Thus, a "Sinitic Republic of Letters" never happened (p. 52), because Sinitic never became a spoken language, not to mention the limited...