前言

The papers in this volume were selected from presentations at the Workshop on Chinese Translation of Indian Buddhist Scriptures and Studies on the Pronouns organized by Prof. Zhu Qingzhi and held at the Education University of Hong Kong, in December 2018. The workshop was funded by and also an achievement of the project “On the Motivations of Some Important Changes of Pronouns in the History of Chinese Language: From the Perspective of Influences of Buddhism and Buddhist Translation on Chinese” (RGC Reference 18600915, principal investigator: Prof. Zhu Qingzhi, co-investigator: Prof. Dong Xiufang), which is a continuation of a previously completed project conducted by Prof. Zhu Qingzhi: “Assessing the impact of Sanskrit on the Chinese language : Creating a database of Chinese Buddhist translations and their Sanskrit parallels to facilitate research in historical Chinese linguistics through contrastive analysis (HKIEd844710)”. There are three papers in this volume that were not presented at the workshop, but they are also the findings closely related to the project. All the papers in this volume were reviewed and revised seriously after the workshop.
The purpose of the project is to explore the impacts of the Chinese translation of Buddhist scriptures on the changes of Chinese pronouns. Since Buddhism was introduced to China in Han Dynasty, plenty of Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese successively. The long lasted and large-scale translation of Indian Buddhist scriptures into Chinese was also a process of profound language contact between Chinese and Sanskrit or other languages used in Buddhist scriptures, which affected the Chinese language and culture deeply. Exploring influences of Buddhist translation is very important to fully understand the changes occurred in the history of the Chinese language. Pronouns are special among word classes to some degree. They belong to a close-set in the language, having some features of lexical items as well as functional items. Generally speaking, pronouns have not been thoroughly studied comparing to other elements in the language. Particularly, the changes of pronouns in Chinese have not been studied from the perspective of language contact caused by translation of Buddhist scriptures, so it needs to be given more attention. The volume provides a new perspective on the changes of Chinese pronouns.
Some papers in this volume adopt the approach of Sanskrit-Chinese comparative collation, trying to find the relation between Buddhist translation and the motivations of changes of pronouns in the history of the Chinese language. In contrast, other papers mainly focus on internal factors to describe and explain some aspects of the changes of pronouns, while paying much attention to make use of evidence from translated Buddhist texts. There is also a paper that gives a summary of studies on Chinese translation of Buddhist scriptures and personal pronouns in Middle Chinese. All the papers shed new light on the studies of pronouns from the diachronic perspective. Copyright © 2020 中西書局.