Father Iakinf Bičurin’s theory of mental inflection in Chinese
KsenijaKoža
Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow
Summary
The article deals with the highly original idea of mental inflection [умственное словоизменение] in Chinese put
forward by the prominent nineteenth-century Russian sinologist Nikita (比丘林, Father Iakinf or Hyacinthus) Bičurin (1777–1853) in his Kitajskaja Grammatika (1835)
and other language-related works. The concept refers to the internal features of Chinese morphology which compensate for the
absence of common grammatical inflection. Fostered in an Humboldtian spirit, the theory established a link between covert
categories and their surface representations a century before functional syntax appeared on the linguistic stage.
Two decades have passed since Christoph Harbsmeier commented in Language and Logic in China that, “Only ten
years after Abel-Rémusat’s Elémens, the Russian missionary Nikita Yakovlevič Bičurin published his Kitajskaja
Grammatika (Peking, 1835, in which he develops the characteristic idea of umstvennoje slovoizmenenije or
‘mental inflection’. This work deserves careful comparison with its Western European contemporaries and has been sadly neglected by
Western sinologists” (Harbsmeier 1998: 18).
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