Comment on global Chinese corpus
汉语融合时代的语言研究与语料库
Cheng Hai Chew 周清海

Abstract 摘要
"The development of the modern Chinese language can be divided into two stages. The first stage, from 1949 to the reform and opening of China, is a stage of division. With the reform and opening of China, the modern Chinese language has entered into the stage of integration. The essential aspects, including the lexical and syntactic phenomena, of the Chinese language called “the National Language” before 1949 are still existent in the Chinese languages of various Chinese speech communities. However, because of social influences, the Chinese languages in various communities today have acquired different features. But not much attention has been paid to such variations and researches are few and far between. The Linguistic Variation of Chinese Speech Communities (LIVAC) Corpus initially developed by the Language Information Sciences Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong, has therefore attracted my special attention. This is a synchronous Chinese corpus. If properly and fully utilized, it can help to enhance the Chinese language teaching not just in Hong Kong, but also in other communities. The corpus can certainly play a more important role in the promotion of the Chinese language worldwide. The relevant institutes of Hong Kong and China should give it more support so that it can develop into a more comprehensive corpus of global relevance. The building of a corpus of the Chinese language at the divided stage and a separate one at the integration stage is of high significance and value. Our concern, however, should not be limited to the building of a corpus of modern Chinese language at the present time. I would argue that we should do more research on the Chinese language during the transitional period of pre-modern to the modern period which is lacking at the moment. Many new terms in modern Chinese language were in fact products of translations by western evangelists, rather than of Japanese origin. In order to change the worldview of the Chinese, western evangelists made great efforts to introduce to China western geographic knowledge as well as political idea. In such an attempt, they had to resort to coining some new terms in Chinese. In the past, because of the lack of a comprehensive picture, people had wrongly attributed many of these new coinages to the Japanese. In the study of early modern Chinese language, therefore, one must have a global perspective. The building of a corpus of early modern Chinese language will enable us to have a more comprehensive understanding of the Chinese language at the early modern stage.

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