Creation of a database of Chinese Buddhist translations and their Sanskrit parallels for Buddhist Chinese studies
漢梵佛典雙語標註語料庫的構建
Zhu Qingzhi 朱慶之; Chin-chuan Wan 萬金川; Qing Duan 段晴; Jihong Wang 王繼紅; Nan Jiang 姜南; Muyou Fan 范慕尤; Wei Huangfu 皇甫偉
Abstract 摘要
The Chinese translated texts of ancient Indian Buddhist scriptures and their original Sanskrit parallels are valuable materials for research on contact linguistics in ancient Chinese. The objective of such studies is to find out language elements and language phenomena in the Chinese translated texts which were related to the original Sanskrit texts and to uncover the impact of Indian Buddhism and its cultures upon the Chinese language. This study lays a foundation for the project Assessing the Impact of Sanskrit on Chinese: Creating a Comparative Corpus of the Original Sanskrit Texts and the Chinese Translated Texts of Buddhist Scriptures and Facilitating Research in Chinese Historical Linguistics Through Contrastive Analysis (GRF/HKIED 844710). It will adopt the research method of “Sanskrit-Chinese comparative collation” (a comparative analysis of the original Sanskrit texts and the Chinese translated texts) and do an exhaustive survey on the representative collections of Buddhist scriptures. From the perspective of a linguistic typological comparison between Sanskrit and Chinese, which are members of the Indo-European language family and of the Sino-Tibetan language family respectively, this study aims to find out all the lexical, semantic and grammatical elements in the Chinese translated texts which correspond to those in the ancient Indian parallel texts, and to explore all the special language phenomena in the translated Chinese texts because of the influence of the original Sanskrit texts. This study will also provide a basis for future research in tracing how these elements with foreign origins and Chinese forms have influenced the development of the Chinese language. The final goal of the research is to build an annotated comparative corpus of the original Sanskrit texts and the Chinese translated texts, with different versions of Chinese translations available. It will be a first attempt of the kind in this field. The Sanskrit-Chinese Comparative Corpus of Buddhist Scriptures (Phase I) will cover three collections: Vimalakīrtinirdeśasūtra, Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra and Abhidharmakośabhāṣya. On completion, it will have two million characters/words (Chinese texts counted by character and Sanskrit texts counted by word), about 6,000 to 8,000 pages. It will contain Chinese, Sanskrit as well as English language materials. Upon completion, it will be open to public for research purposes.
Chinese translation of Buddhist Sutra Buddhist Chinese Comparative Buddhist Sanskrit-Chinese Language database History of the Chinese Language
Keywords 關鍵詞
Chinese translation of Buddhist Sutra 漢譯佛經 Buddhist Chinese 佛教漢語 Comparative Buddhist Sanskrit-Chinese 梵漢對勘 Language database 語料庫 History of the Chinese Language 漢語史