The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge.

"The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge" by Nathan Vedal explores the diverse modes of linguistic knowledge production in late imperial China, challenging the prevailing assumption that 'evidential learning' was the only approach to linguistics. Vedal traces the evolution of philology from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, highlighting the cosmological and interdisciplinary origins of the discipline in Ming China. The book delves into the intellectual and sociocultural aspects of philology, emphasizing the translingual nature of Chinese philology and its interactions with other languages such as Latin, Sanskrit, and Tibetan. Vedal's work not only enriches our understanding of linguistics and knowledge production in early modern China but also encourages a more integrated and global perspective on the subject. [Extracted from the article]