Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

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.¹ In any event, a genuinely global analysis of human experience...