L’étude du latin en Chine
L’herbe est-elle plus verte ailleurs ? – Étudier le latin en Chine
Entretien avec un doctorant chinois en histoire de l’Antiquité romaine à Paris IV, Yuwen Xinxiao, paru dans La Vie des Classiques, portail francophone des lettres classiques et de l’humanisme des éditions Les Belles Lettres.
Pourquoi avoir choisi d’étudier l’Antiquité romaine, spécialité peu commune en Chine, pourquoi le choix de poursuivre des études en France, quel est l’état actuel de l’enseignement du latin et du grec ancien en Chine, telles sont quelques unes des questions traitées au cours de cet entretien.
A new incarnation of Latin in China – Le renouveau du latin en Chine
Li, Yongyi. A new incarnation of Latin in China. The Amphora: A Publication of the Society for Classical Studies, 4 August 2014. URL: http://apaclassics.org/amphora/new-incarnation-of-latin-china-yongyi-li (Consulté le 8 juin 2015)
On a wintry day in 1996, I was thumbing through catalogues in a deserted corner of the library of Beijing Normal University when my attention was suddenly seized by some titles in a language strangely familiar. I could easily decipher them because of their resemblance to English words, and I knew the names of the authors as I had read them in translations. Latin! My instinct told me. I relayed this discovery to my teacher of Shakespearean plays, a BA in Classics who had just graduated from Oxford. The next morning saw us standing in front of a counter in the most secluded part of the library, after spiraling flights of gloomy stairs. A long silence ensued before the books were fetched from a bank ten stories above and presented before us. In a thrilled voice, my teacher began to read a Latin passage aloud to me. We had been the first in decades, the librarian told us, to borrow these books, and there were many more such books simply locked in some rooms, as no one had the expertise and the energy to catalogue them. I quickly found out, with the available catalogues, that the university had a substantially larger collection in Latin and Greek even than that of the National Library. Stunned, I tried to explain to myself this peculiarity. Then it dawned on me that most of these titles must have been acquisitions of Fu Jen Catholic University, out of which Beijing Normal University grew. At least five centuries ago, Italian missionaries, following Marco Polo’s footsteps, first brought that elegant language of Latin to Chinese scholars who were still writing in equally elegant classical Chinese. In the thirty years after 1949 when the Communist Party came to power, both languages were buried, the former suffering from the stigma of decadent bourgeois culture, the latter taken as a leftover of China’s monarchic past. Though I knew no Latin at the time, the very survival of these books was a miracle for me, considering especially the systematic demolition of ancient heritage in the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Motivated by a veneration for antiquity, I began to learn the language, although my efforts were continually interrupted by my other pursuits.
Lire aussi
- Leeb, Leopold. Latin study can help Chinese learn English. Repris de China Daily. Chinaculture.org, 28 January 2015. URL : http://www.chinaculture.org/2015-01/28/content_596502.htm (Consulté le 8 juin 2015)
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Monique Abud (9 juin 2015). L’étude du latin en Chine. ChinElectrodoc. Consulté le 21 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/mqpo
