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What is cultural semantics? How to define and analyze it in the lexicon of modern Chinese?
This book outlines the development and research results of cultural semantic theory, and then proposes the distinction between two types of cultural semantics at the synchronic level: conceptual gap items and items with a cultural meaning. It provides criteria for identifying these items by using detailed examples from theory and application. Finally, the two types of cultural semantics are applied to the case of modern Chinese. The criteria proposed for determining the Chinese cultural semantics apply not only to this, but also to other languages. Therefore, this book offers an operational basis for further studies of cultural semantics in academia.
Was plurilingualism the exception or the norm in traditional Eurasian scholarship? This volume presents a selection of primary sources—in many cases translated into English for the first time—with introductions that provide fascinating historical materials for challenging notions of the ways in which traditional Eurasian scholars dealt with plurilingualism and monolingualism. Comparative in approach, global in scope, and historical in orientation, it engages with the growing discussion of plurilingualism and focuses on fundamental scholarly practices in various premodern and early modern societies—Chinese, Indian, Mesopotamian, Jewish, Islamic, Ancient Greek, and Roman—asking how these were conceived by the agents themselves. The volume will be an indispensable resource for courses on these subjects and on the history of scholarship and reflection on language throughout the world.
Changing Concepts of xin 信 from Traditional to Modern Chinese
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What does the Chinese term xin 信 mean? How does it relate to the concept of faith in a Western sense? How far does it still denote “being trustworthy” in its ancient Confucian sense? When did major shifts occur in its long history of semantics that allowed later Christian missionaries to use the term regularly as a translation for the concept of believing in gods or God?

This volume offers a broad picture of the semantic history of this Chinese term, throwing light on its semantic multi-layeredness shaped by changing discursive contexts, interactions between various ideological milieus, and transcultural encounters.
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What can the languages spoken today tell us about the history of their speakers? This question is crucial in insular Southeast Asia and New Guinea, where thousands of languages are spoken, but written historical records and archaeological evidence is yet lacking in most regions. While the region has a long history of contact through trade, marriage exchanges, and cultural-political dominance, detailed linguistic studies of the effects of such contacts remain limited.
This volume investigates how loanwords can prove past contact events, taking into consideration ten different regions located in the Philippines, Eastern Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and New Guinea. Each chapter studies borrowing across the borders of language families, and discusses implications for the social history of the speech communities.
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What shapes and magnitude can language loss have in East Asian endangered languages? How does it differ with regards to the languages' historical development and sociolinguistic environment? This book surveys a number of minority and, in most cases, endangered languages spoken in China, Japan, Taiwan, and Russia which all face, or have faced in their recent history, loss of language features. The contributions in this publication present you with different cases of obsolescence attested throughout East Asia and highlight how this process, though often leading back to common causes, is in fact a multifaceted reality with diverse repercussions on grammar and linguistic vitality.
In A Dictionary of Early Middle Turkic Hendrik Boeschoten describes the lexical material contained in works written in different varieties of Eastern Turkic in and around the fourteenth century, e.g. before the classical age of Chaghatay Turkic; late Karakhanid, Khwarezmian Turkic, Golden Horde Turkic, Mamluk Turkic, and early Azeri. As the existing, previously published dictionaries are now antiquated and hardly cover this period (most relevant works were not yet known at their time of writing), A Dictionary of Early Middle Turkic is a most welcome addition to the field.
Have you ever wondered what is really happening to minority languages of Northeast Asia and which efforts are being taken both by “westerners” and local people to preserve and promote them?
Would you like to discover, uncover, and tackle deep linguistic questions of such small but highly important languages such as Khamnigan Mongol, Wutun, Sartul-Buryat, Tofan and Sakhalin Ainu, just to mention a few? Would you like to know how simple smart phone apps can help communities to preserve, love and use their native language?
This book, containing a rich selection of contributions on various aspects of language endangerment, emic and etic approaches at language preservation, and contact-linguistics, is an important contribution to the Unesco's Indigenous Languages Decade, which has right now started (2022-2032).
Grammatical Sketches of Japanese Dialects and Ryukyuan Languages