Articles

This article deals with publications in the magazine “New Youth” under the heading “Poetry”, which existed from 1915 to 1923. “New Youth” was one of the most important journals in China in the first decades of the 20th century. “New Youth” was the first magazine that published the most important journalistic articles and works of fiction that shaped new Chinese culture and literature after the “May 4th movement”. This article focuses on the poems that were first published in “New Youth” magazine. The substantive and formal features of the literary works are examined not only within the framework of the magazine’s policy in general, but also in the context of the ideas of the “Poetry” column authors as to what the shape of new poetry should be. Creative experiments on the pages of “New Youth” led to the emergence of new poetic genres (vers libre, prose poetry) and the rapid evolution of the themes of new poetry.

The article focuses on the main features of the socio-political life of the Emirate of Diriyah in the period preceding the emergence of the First Saudi State. The basis of the study is formed by a number of recently published Najdi chronicles of the 17th and 18th centuries. The new scientific material made it possible to reconstruct the mentioned historical period and analyze it comprehensively. The results of the study show that by the time the First Saudi State was founded in 1744, Diriyah was only a small agricultural settlement in Southern Najd. Its political and economic influence was undermined both by difficult natural conditions and constant political upheavals.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the epistolary novel of the Thai king Rama VI Vajiravudh – the prolific writer who stood at the origins of modern literature of Siam / Thailand. The author correlates the private life of the protagonist with the current political and social changes. Vajiravudh considers the reforms carried out in the kingdom to be a fact of his life. In his novel he shows how the turmoil – sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic – that took place in Thai society at the beginning of the 20th century, influenced the life of an individual. The main problem of the novel is the incompatibility of the cultural codes of the West and the East, Siam in particular. This is precisely the reason for the tragedy of the main hero. The author sees the only way to solve the problem and achieve a harmonious human existence in an era of change – it is the dialogue of cultures and the synthesis of the new European and traditional Thai within the worldview of an individual.

The paper examines the poetic image of a sparrow in the poems by Shinkichi Takahashi against the background of Zen Buddhism, which the poet practiced throughout his life. Though most scholars still discuss his poems in the context of Japanese Dadaism, the author shifts the interpretation of his legacy to Zen imagery and Zen philosophy. A great number of essays and notes published by Shinkichi Takahashi that remain almost unknown outside Japan may help us to expand our horizon in understanding his poetic images and render him a unique and profound poet that influenced the following literary tradition of Japan. The poet’s exceptional consistency and lifelong devotion to the image once created by him provides us a rare opportunity to study the transformation of his self-concept throughout his entire life. One of the main objectives of the article is also the question of delimiting the ideological message of European Dadaism with its subsequent interpretation in Japan in the context of the poet’s work. The paper attempts to establish what brings Shinkichi Takahashi’s dada closer to the elements of Zen philosophy, and what distances him, thus, from European Dadaism.

The mechanism of the conceptual metaphor is similar to the mechanism of the functioning of the language. Accurate understanding of a language is associated with many factors: speaker, listener, linguistic means, word semantics, context, and others. All these elements complement each other, in the process of interaction they form a single whole, thereby forming a single communicative community. The study of the mechanism of metaphor cannot do without describing the concepts associated with metaphor: a cognitive subject, an object of a metaphor, an arbitrary component of a metaphor, a metaphorical basis and context. The need to clarify the above concepts is due to the fact that the metaphorical meaning is the result of the actions of several parties.

The article studies the images of the ascetic and the king in the literary Sanskrit jātaka. Based on the two “Jātaka-mālās” by Arya Śūra and Haribhaṭṭa (III–IV and IV–V centuries AD respectively) we observe the ambiguity of the image of the king, who can be both righteous and guilty of bad deeds. As well as the image of the ascetic who undergoes transformations in literary jātakas. We have shown that, like the king, the ascetic can be portrayed both as the embodiment of the Buddhist ideal of non-possession, self-restraint and renunciation, and as the antagonist of the hero, sometimes portrayed as a villain. The connection between the archaic image of the gift-granting ascetic and the synthetic image of the pratyekabuddha is traced: he functionally replaces the brahmanical forest ascetic capable of granting boons. It is shown that the assessment of a character does not depend on his status, but on his attitude to bodhisattva in a particular jātaka. The idealized image of both king and ascetic appears as just one of many versions of the same ideal image of a bodhisattva. Buddhist authors adapt for their own purposes the traditional images of the king and ascetic, emphasizing in them only those motives and associated plot moves that correspond to their ideology and creative intention.

This article is devoted to the work of Bus’hak Shirazi, whose poetic heritage had not been studied in detail before, but was only mentioned in review works on the history of medieval Persian literature. A collection of his works, published in 1302 AH (1924), was kept in the library of the University of Toronto and became available to the author of this work in the form of a PDF copy. In modern Iran, the book has not been reprinted and is a bibliographic rarity. Bus’hak created his works within the framework of the poetic practice of “nazira-navisi” (response writing) to the reference works of his predecessors and the well-known works of his contemporaries. “Answers” were composed according to special rules, and the tradition as a whole, starting from the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries, played an important role in the literary life of medieval Iran. Within the framework of this work, several ghazals of Bus’hak Shirazi were studied, which are part of his “Divan of Foods”, and a comparative analysis was carried out with the works he parodied (sample ghazals of Saadi and Hafiz) in order to identify the peculiarities of Bus’hak’s parody style. The study demonstrates that Bus’hak’s parody work is another component of the mosaic of the literary life of that time, without which its picture cannot be considered complete.

The paper provides a critical analysis of the interpretation of Shinkichi Takahashi (1901–1987) early intellectual views. Using the example of essays and samples of early poetry works, the unambiguous involvement of the poet’s work with the Zen philosophy is disputed. The “rebellious” spirit of Dada poetry, although it has common features with the ideas of Zen nihilism generally accepted in the academic circles, has a slightly different nature and properties. The deliberately provocative creative method of the poet of the early period is not probably the result of a conscious intellectual choice, but a derivative of a difficult biography and personality traits. Perhaps the early works and the image of the poet himself was largely mythologized by his immediate circles, and the poet himself, in numerous essays and notes, subsequently treated his early “verses” and painful spiritual searches very critically.

The paper deals with some syntactic features of the denominative verbs 㶇 – huáng (*wāŋ) – ‘locust’ / ‘to suffer from locust’, ⯛ – yì (*wek) – ‘epidemic’ / ‘to suffer from an epidemic’, 䴧 – léi (*rhwəj) – ‘thunder’ (like a natural disaster) / ‘to thunder’. The article also proposes a primary classification of situations when there is a need to form a denominative verb. The lexemes are analyzed on the basis of the text corpus of the ancient Chinese period XI BC. – V AD. The nouns 㶇 – huáng (*wāŋ) – ‘locust’, ⯛ – yì (*wek) – ‘epidemic’, 䴧 – léi (*rhwəj) – ‘thunder’ (as natural disaster) in the position of the predicate are not frequent, the percentage does not exceed 20%. For the first time appear in the pre-Han texts (5th century BC). There is a probability of some morphological process (the so-called latent morphology, phonetic-grammatical alternation within one word, not reflected in the writing), involved in the formation of denominatives, such as the reconstructed denominative suffix -s (䚃 – dǎo (*lhu̅́) meaning ‘path’, but dào (*lhu̅ʔ-s) means ‘to lead, to indicate’). Nevertheless, due to the lack of reliable information, this theory also needs further research. In fact, the denominatives 㶇 – huáng (*wāŋ) – ‘to suffer from locusts’, ⯛ – yì (*wek) – ‘to suffer from an epidemic’, 䴧 – léi (*rhwəj) – ‘to thunder’ are formed unmarked, neither phonetically nor morphologically, are intransitive monovalent verbs with similar semantic features.

The article is related to the collection of the hadith qudsi that is the most popular one in Russia — the “40 Hadith Qudsi”. Its authorship is erroneously attributed to Ali Fikri Yavuz who had just translated the text from Arabic into Turkish. The purpose of the given article is a detailed analysis of this collection, in addition to the identification of its original author and the study of the used sources. The research presented in the article is purely textological and also includes the comparison of the examined collection to the other compilations of the hadith qudsi. Moreover, the article comprises the analysis of the rhymed prose represented in the Yavuz collection. The main issue that the author raises may be formulated as follows: may the examined collection be just a compendium of the hadith qudsi or is it an independent literary work?

In the folklore and literature all over the world, there is a range of plots, motifs, and images based on understanding the non-obvious processes associated with the redistribution of property, and assumptions about the randomness or regularity of such redistribution. This includes all sorts of stories about the search for treasures, the notion that treasures can search for the owner proactively, and money can run away from the owners; images of animals/guardians or incarnations of treasures. Abundant material in this regard is provided by medieval Chinese “records of anomalies”. When analyzing stories about treasures contained in collections composed in the 3rd–7th centuries, a group of tales mentioning a golden bull on a golden chain, usually existing underwater or underground, attracts attention. Unlike other varieties of animal treasures, the golden bull itself is inaccessible to treasure hunters. Chinese researchers had suggested that these reports might have influenced the image of the Wuzhiqi monster in Li Gongzuo’s short story “The Ancient Canon of Mountains and Rivers”. References to the golden bull as the embodiment of wealth are not uncommon in fairy tales recorded in the PRC in the 20th century; at the same time, in a modern folk tale, this image is predictably interpreted differently than in medieval mythological stories. The article attempts to determine the basic features of some plots concerning the golden bull as the embodiment of a treasure in the early medieval Chinese prose.

The paper is dedicated to problems of formation and development of the opposition ‘masculine – feminine’ all the way along the evolution of culture and languages of the ancient and contemporary India. For ancient period of the Indian culture, represented by the phase of Vedas and by the later stage of Brāhmaṇas, the Vedic language and Early Sanskrit were correspondingly the two most important and functionally specified versions of one common language, namely, of the Ancient Indo-Aryan. The Vedic variant of the latter is manifested in texts of Vedas, first of all in Rgveda, while Sanskrit finds its earliest representation in Brāhmaṇas, the prosaic commentaries on Vedas. It was inside those two language versions and groups of texts that the universal theory of mithuná as a system of twin objects filling up the existing universe, was elaborated. In each and every one of mithuná pairs, the participants were internally connected by ritually and sexually important gender-asymmetrical dichotomy of ‘masculine – feminine’. The first, “masculine”, component of this latter opposition was the bearer of the dominant role, while the second was always functioning as a recessive one. This system of mithuná, mirroring the sexual ties between people or anthropomorphic creatures of different genders (specially between gods), was originally active mostly with the animate nouns, but later on, at the epoch of Brāhmaṇas, it has also spread through processes of metaphorization onto the great massive of inanimate substantives. Its role became relevant for the constituents of different linguistic levels – such as, e.g., syllabic structure of lexemes, the set of the typical features of word-classes, the grammatical categories of the word-forms, the associations of nouns with different functional styles, etc. – the concrete samples of the structures of those types are in detail analyzed in the paper. Methodologically the paper is based on combination of the philological method with standard mechanisms of investigating the dead language semantics and also with certain elements of structural linguistics approach. It is also demonstrated in the paper that for contemporary speakers of the New Indo-Aryan languages any ritualistic or cultural values implicated by the ancient concept of mithuná have practically stopped to exist, but the central opposition of ‘masculine – feminine’ and the additional dichotomies like ‘greater – less’ or ‘even – odd’ together with formal means of expressing the corresponding meanings also have been rudimentarily preserved in New Indo-Aryan.

Taiwan’s uniqueness in geographical position, and political-economic situation contributes to its special status in the Chinese-speaking world. As one of the most important transport hubs located between the Eurasian continent and the Pacific Ocean, for centuries Taiwan has been the focal point of attention of the European and Asian countries. Since the 17th century, European maritime powers (the Dutch, then the Spaniards) occupied the southern and northern parts of the island. In the second half of the 17th century, with the strengthening of East Asian states’ role, Taiwan was under control of general Zheng Chenggong of Ming Dynasty, and his descendants. Subsequently, the island was governed by Qing Dynasty, imperial Japan and the government of the Republic of China. Constant change of power over the past five centuries has contributed to the formation of a unique linguistic system in Taiwan, and the influence of the cultures of the indigenous Austronesian peoples, European and Japanese colonialists, and immigrants from Southeast Asia has contributed to the special cultural identity of its population. Taiwan has come a long way from autocracy to democracy. During the reign of five political forces, the multi-component model of the language policy, taking into account the interests of immigrants from Mainland China and aborigines of Taiwan, was repeatedly replaced by a single-component one (in the center of which there were alternately Japanese and Chinese languages). In the modern period, there is a pluralistic language policy focused on the harmonious co-functioning of the languages of the peoples on the island. This article attempts to examine the dynamics of the language policy of various political forces that ruled in Taiwan since the 16th century, and to analyze the process of the formation of the so-called “Taiwanese identity”.

In recent years, many Russian students have chosen Taiwan as a place to study Chinese. During the pandemic, Taiwan, much earlier than Mainland China, opened its borders to foreign students, including Russian students and undergraduates. But it should not be forgotten that the Chinese language on the mainland and in Taiwan is different: the mainlanders speak Putonghua, the Taiwanese speak Guoyu. The differences concern not only writing systems (traditional and simplified characters), phonetic notation systems (Pinyin and Zhuyin), vocabulary, grammar, but also punctuation. This is primarily due to the fact that governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait have been pursuing different language policies since 1949. During this time, punctuation on the mainland and on the island has also undergone changes. This article explains the difference between punctuation marks in mainland China and Taiwan in detail, thereby introducing students and teachers of the Chinese language to the features of Guoyu. The authors retrospectively consider the policy of the mainland and the island in relation to punctuation, and also analyze those features of punctuation that are necessary to know in order to avoid mistakes or misunderstanding of what is written with examples. The article describes the differences between Mainland China and Taiwan in the use of quotation marks, smart quotation marks, brackets, and raises the issue of quotation formatting. In addition, the problem of different arrangement of punctuation marks on the line is touched upon. This article will be useful to anyone who studies or teaches Chinese, as well as to those who write scientific papers and works in Chinese.

This paper is aimed at analyzing the grammaticalization of unaccusative/unergative opposition in Hindi. The main diagnostic construction which serves to explicate the opposition of unaccusative vs. unergative verbs is passive construction. It will be shown that unaccusative and unergative verbs do not form homogenous classes and may be divided into three groups on the basis of their syntactic and semantic properties. The first class includes initially unaccusative verbs with valency on involitional (animate or inanimate) subjects: girnā ‘fall’. The unaccusative verbs with valency on animate subjects may acquire volitional meaning in special contexts or through metaphorical shifts: marnā ‘die of covid – die for the Motherland’. The second class is made up of initially unergative verbs with agentive animate subjects: bhāgnā ‘run’. Many verbs of this class may also have valency on inanimate subjects. In such cases they acquire involitional meaning: uṭhnā ‘rise’ (about a man – clouds, smoke). The third class consists of verbs that have valency either on volitional (animate) subject or on involitional (animate or inanimate) subject: milnā ‘meet’ (meet with somebody deliberately vs. unexpectedly; be received about money, etc.). Passive transformation in all the three classes is possible only when the verb has volitional meaning. Causative construction can also be used in order to distinguish between unergative and unaccusative verbs: only non-accusative verbs can form causatives with valency on involitional causer. The paper also discusses compound verbs formed by combining the main and the light components. Our analysis of the compatibility of non-accusative and non-ergative verbs in compounds brings to the conclusion that the non-ergative or non-accusative semantics of verbal combinations is always determined by meaning of the main, but not of the light verb.