Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia by Peter Francis Kornicki (review)

Abstract

The linguistic turn was a significant development in the early twentieth century. The essential characteristic was an intellectual reorientation toward the relations among language, language users, and the world. Early pioneers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and Ferdinand de Saussure, remain influential in specific academic fields. During nearly a century of reflection and study on language, mind, and society, however, critics, thinkers, and historians rarely ventured outside the scope of the Indo-European languages. Of course, there had been a long tradition of studying classical Chinese and Sanskrit in Europe, but Sinology and Indology belonged to old-fashioned philology, not to the modern linguistic turn. More recently, the postcolonial critic Sheldon I. Pollock has conceptualized Sanskrit as a cosmopolitan language amid South Asia’s wide diversity of spoken languages, and many scholars consider Pollock an exceptional critic of the Western canon. In any event, a genuinely global analysis of human experience should undoubtedly include East Asia, and the disjunction between the studies of Indo-European languages and the rest could not be more obvious. Peter Kornicki’s Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia, a systematic treatise that tackles the main textual tradition outside the system of Indo-European languages, is a welcome addition to contemporary efforts to engage with such theoretical issues. What defines the geographical scope of Kornicki’s book? The independent emergence of agriculture occurred in only nine locations in the prehistorical world. Of these nine, only four developed into large states in Eurasia.The earliest agriculture in Southwest Asia (the Fertile Crescent) arose around 8000 BCE. Within the east-west extension of Eurasia (as opposed to the vertical extension