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John DeFrancis (Bridgeport, Connecticut, August 31, 1911 – Honolulu, Hawai’i, January 2, 2009) was a renowned teacher and linguist of Chinese. He was also a socially committed and politically active individual who was unusually adventurous and gregarious. DeFrancis’s father was a laborer and his mother was illiterate, the memory of which later spurred him to sympathize with Chinese workers and peasants who could not read and write. DeFrancis’s career as a teacher and scholar of Chinese may be divided into four stages: student, teacher, researcher, and lexicogra…

“Digraphia” signifies a situation in which a single language is written with two scripts. Perhaps the best-known instance of digraphia in the world today is that of Hindī-Urdū, which is essentially one language, but is called Hindī when written in the Devanāgarī script and Urdū when written in the Perso-Arabic script. In Chinese, digraphia is referred to as shuāngwénzhì 雙文制. “Digraphia” is to be distinguished from “diglossia” ( shuāngyǔ zhì 雙語制), which is the concurrent use of two different languages within a single population. A good example of diglossia would b…

In addition to the masses of stories in the vast ocean of Buddhist literature that were translated into Chinese, narrative literature intended to propagate Buddhism was also composed in Chinese. In addition, Chinese popular literature was inspired by the forms, ideas, and images of Buddhist literature. The Buddhist doctrine of “skillful means” (Chn. fangbian [方便]; Skt. upāya) – adapting the level of discourse to the aptitude of the audience – encouraged the creation of narratives dealing with various aspects of Buddhist teaching.Indian Buddhist narratives had been translated…

(Sinkiang, Xinjiang), IRANIAN ELEMENTS IN. A version of this article is available in print Volume V, Fascicle 5, pp. 460-484 CHINESE TURKESTAN i. Geographical Overview The eastern portion of the Central Asian land mass (see central asia i. geography), between 70° and 100° E and 25° and 45° N, encompasses Chinese Turkestan, now Sinkiang (Xin-jiang) Uighur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China, with the Tarim basin and the high plateaus and mountains surrounding it (capital Urumchi [Wu-lu-mu-chi]); Tibet (ca…