Speaker: Jonathan Puntervold (Gothenburg)

Title: In search of equivalence, in search of difference: Japanese linguistic historiography 1895-1945

 

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https://lu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/OGFB24MOR3i7gmF-1tOeVQ

 

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Abstract

When modern linguistics was established as a university discipline in late nineteenth-century Japan, it was initially based on European theory, specifically historical-comparative philology. Yet whilst this newly imported "science of language" held great promise, it also left the first generation of university-trained linguists with a thorny question of scholarly identity: How should they relate this new academic discipline to the work of Japan's native philological tradition, which dated back several centuries and had produced significant research results of its own?

In this presentation, I explore the origins of modern Japanese linguistic historiography by examining how successive generations of Japanese linguists attempted to make sense of their country's intellectual past against the backdrop of "scientific" Western linguistics. Comparing historiographical writings by scholars such as Ueda Mannen (1867-1937), Yamada Yoshio (1875-1958) and Tokieda Motoki (1900-1967), I demonstrate how the meaning of past scholarship was continually reinterpreted and renegotiated as different scholars sought to legitimise and reinforce their own visions for the modern discipline. In so doing, I show the history of language study in Japan as an ideologically loaded, contested space in which not only different understandings of language, but also different understandings of Japanese identity competed to define the meaning and direction of the modern discipline.