The academic seminar on "Missionary Sinology and Changes in Modern Chinese Languages" and "The 13th Annual Meeting of the World Scholarly Association for the History of Chinese Language Teaching" were held at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) online due to COVID-19.
This seminar was jointly sponsored on October 15-16 by the Department of Chinese Language and Literature in the Faculty of Arts of HKBU and the World Scholarly Association for the History of Chinese Language Teaching which held its annual meeting in Hong Kong for the first time. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at HKBU.
This symposium aimed to promote the development of the international education history of the Chinese language, and the research on the history of contact and exchange between Chinese and foreign languages. More than 80 scholars and graduate students from all over the world were invited to share related academic research on the field of Chinese language education.
The specific topics of the symposium were: the research on the historical documents of Mandarin Chinese and Chinese dialects spoken by missionaries; the academic fusion of the East and the West and the history of pinyin (phonetic transcript) in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, the history of vocabulary exchange, the history of concepts, the history of the development of Mandarin, the history of Chinese language education, and the history of grammar.
The topics also included the academic fusion of the East and the West and stylistic theory, translation theory, language contact, modern science, and language in the late Qing and the Republic of China, the academic fusion of the East and the West and the transformation of the concept of the history of Chinese studies in modern East Asia, and the development of contemporary international Chinese language education from a multicultural perspective.
With the opening ceremony kicking off on the morning of October 15, keynote speeches and group reports of the seminar were given till the next afternoon, with a discussion session after each speech and report.
- Translated by Abigail Wu
