The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge by Nathan Vedal

Nathan Vedal's The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge is a brilliant and stimulating book. It is an examination of Ming philology, which has been dismissed by Qing philologists (and other later scholars) as amateurish and disorganized. The eighteenth-century editors of the Siku quanshu were perplexed as to how best to categorize the work of these scholars; it did not fit their categories (p. 216). Vedal writes in his introduction: "Rather than evaluating Ming philosophical thinkers according to present day standards, I aim to describe the logic and motivations underlying their methods of learning" (p. 8).

The logic and motivations underlying the methods of learning for these scholars is indeed fascinating. They were fundamentally interested in sound, not simply as one aspect of language, but as a mechanism that connected the human world to the world of nature. One of the themes that engages Vedal throughout the book is the interaction of the natural world (which he refers to as the world of self-so, translating the Chinese ziran 自然) and the human world, specifically the world of speech and music, sounds created by human intervention.

Ming scholars were intensely interested in exploring the capacity of the Chinese writing system to record sound, and they were aware that there were sounds that could not be captured by the writing system. Vedal explores some of the more interesting attempts to do so in his chapter 2. Scholars knew that the logographic system used to write Chinese was not the only way of writing. Although expertise in Sanskrit may have been rare, scholars were aware of what Vedal calls the "phonographic nature" of the system used to write Sanskrit. And of course, the Jesuit presence in the sixteenth century made some scholars aware of the nature of European writing systems. Most important for late Ming and Qing thinking about language notation, however, may have been the Manchus, whose script was phonographic. Although there were no attempts to force ordinary Chinese people to learn Manchu, it was nonetheless declared the state language (Guoyu 国语), which ushered in "a heightened sense of the utility of phonographic writing" (p. 71). However, Vedal points out that Chinese scholars never assumed that a phonographic writing system was superior to a logographic writing system (as some western scholars have done) (p. 71).

Ming scholars were very aware of regional variations in pronunciation, which Vedal refers to as topolects. Regional variations interested and perplexed them. The ways in which the universal human capacity to speak manifested itself in different languages was an interesting puzzle. Fang Yizhi (1611–1671) posited that all infants spoke the same universal language (the key terms in that language being "wa wa 哇哇"), but as they grew older they learned from their parents and their surroundings the particulars of the local topolect. This raised the question of how to think about and analyze the universality of sound if the parameters of speech were locally constructed. The answer they found to the question was cosmology, which gave scholars a way of "abstractly discussing sound without reference to time, space, or text" (p. 27). Sound was the product of the movement of qi 气 (primal force) and number was a fundamental property of sound (p. 24).

But while the puzzle of why there are variations of speech might be solved in some ways by a cosmological approach to language, the real-world differences in how people of the Ming spoke remained. Li Yu (1610–1680) observed, "It is often the case that an official speaks and his clerk does not understand, or that a commoner comes to dispute an injustice and the official does not comprehend, bringing about mistaken floggings and the reversal of rewards and punishments. How could one say that the injury sound can cause people is not trivial?" (p. 129). The potential problems variations in pronunciation produced were acutely noticed by opera composers and aficionados, to the degree that opera scholars were in some senses at the forefront of Ming philology. This problem became more acute with the popularization of Kun opera (which began as a southern regional opera) in the sixteenth century. As Vedal tells us, "Ming opera editors and connoisseurs saw language standardization as an essential part of their occupation" (p. 109). The always quotable Li Yu put the issue of an audience's inability to follow plot subtleties in a nutshell: "The more people who understand (the words), the more people are laughing" (p. 130). As Vedal notes in his conclusion to the chapter on opera, "The popularity of opera as an elite art gave rise to fundamental questions about the Chinese language and the potential for a universal standard" (p. 135).

But Ming scholars were not simply aware of regional variations in speech; they were aware of changes in pronunciation over time. The classical texts of Confucianism were meant to be chanted; if one could chant them in the pronunciation that the ancients used, one would be able to approach more closely the wisdom of the ancients. Zhao Yiguang (1559–1625) may have been exaggerating when he wrote, "Whenever the ancients opened their mouths and spoke, it rhymed" (p. 152), but reconstructing the rhythms and rhymes of ancient texts was a key project of a number of men of the Ming era. Changes in pronunciation had long been visible to scholars: poems pronounced using contemporary pronunciations did not always follow the rhyme schemes that the poet was known to have used. It may interest the Anglophone reader of Shakespeare's sonnet 31 that "alone" and "gone" rhymed in Shakespeare's day though they no longer rhyme in most iterations of American English, but that difference is not a matter of great import. The changes in Chinese pronunciation were of great import to Ming scholars. The rhymes and rhythms of the classics were essential not just to a chanter's aesthetic appreciation of them but also to their essential meaning. Wang Shizhen (1526–1590), among others, implied "a perceived link between the process of uttering the text with efficacious pronunciation and a deeper understanding" of the texts themselves (p. 145).

Before I conclude, I'd like to introduce another text. It may seem a sideline, but I'd suggest it's a part of what Vedal calls "the tightly knit fusion of language-related fields, which had allowed scholars of opera, music, cosmology, and language to find mutual benefit in each other's work" (p. 184). This book is Niall Atkinson's The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016). Atkinson is interested in the whole range of sound; he is not primarily concerned with speech—he is interested in the full panoply of noise. What Atkinson and Vedal have in common is a concern with sound, whose ephemeral nature has made it hard for historians to study. We know that the past was not silent, but we do not quite know how it sounded. One of the things that Nathan Vedal's book has done is to restore the sound of the Ming school room, where the examination system may have mandated that all schoolboys chant the same texts, but they did not all chant them with the same pronunciations.

The larger question which engages Vedal is the ways in which knowledge is constructed and disciplines develop. The Ming scholars he studies do not fit into a tidy box called "philology" that either eighteenth-century Kaozheng scholars or twenty-first-century philologists would have recognized. But in an epilogue, he shows the ways in which the particular concerns of language reform articulated in the late Ming era resonate with nineteenth- and twentieth-century attempts at language reform.

The Culture of Language in Ming China would be useful in upper level classes in Chinese history or literature. It should be required reading for anyone who works in early modern China. And one hopes that it might find a readership in a community of linguists whose primary area of interest lies outside the Sinosphere.