Philology
Location

It can help to know where in the Roman Empire (or where in the Chinese multi-state system) a given work was written. Date and authorship questions are categories of popular interest, and so absorb much more scholarly attention, but space questions also have their role, if only in limiting the possibilities for date and authorship conjectures. A few examples of location indicators are given below.

Just as it is unlikely that a classical Chinese author will refer to himself (or to a living contemporary) in the third person, so it is unlikely that a text from Sung will refer to a town as being "in Sung;" the author will take Sung as the default presumption. The implied viewpoint of a text, and thus its place of composition, may sometimes be deduced from such negative indications. This may yield information about a text that is not available in any other way.

Most cultures have a prestige dialect (in pre-Imperial China, it was the dialect of Chi, for whose location see the map above). Most authors in that culture will tend to assimilate to that dialect, whatever may be their native propensity. The prestige dialect of a culture need not be that of its capital, or of its largest city. (For America, it is a midwestern dialect that most listeners perceive as neutral, not that of Washington or Boston or New York, and natives of Indiana or Ohio tend to be proportionately successful as radio announcers). This leads to dialect overlay situations, in which traces of an author's real dialect may appear only as occasional slips.

Places can be invented just like anything else, and utopian locales should not be solemnly accepted as real locales. The utopian use of real locales is another possible complication.

Contents

• Place References
  • Jwangdz
  • Mwodz
  • Southern Opera
• Dialect and Pseudodialect
  • The Chi Analects
  • Hu and Yw in Mwodz
  • The Rhymes of the Chu Tsz
  • Dream of the Red Chamber
• Imaginary Places
  • The Peach Blossom Fountain

 

Philology is Copyright © 2001- by E Bruce Brooks

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