Last updated by kprzemek on 2019-11-06. Originally submitted by tomash on 2018-05-16.
WA Friday Lectures (now called WA Friday Lunch Talks) are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. They are usually held in room 316A on Fridays at 1:30 PM. Each talk is of 30 minutes (+ 10 minutes for discussion).
Chistopher Joby
Dutch as a contact language in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868)
Abstract: After providing a brief introduction to the history of the Dutch in Tokugawa Japan, I discuss the various language processes that resulted from contact between Dutch and other languages as a result of the Dutch presence in Japan. The first of these is language competition. As well as competing with Japanese, Dutch competed with Chinese and Portuguese. Another process was language contact and here I focus on the Dutch loanwords such as those for ‘beer’ and ‘milk’ appropriated by Japanese as a result of language contact.
Some individuals who knew Dutch were bilingual, with a knowledge of other languages such as Japanese, Portuguese and Latin. I consider when they used which language and why they used a given language in a particular social context. These bilinguals often switched between languages and so it will also be useful to consider their motivation for code switching from Dutch to another language.
A very important language process in this story is the translation of Dutch texts into Japanese. Here, I discuss what texts were translated, how they were translated, what the relationship between source and target text was, and the influence of this translation on Japanese syntax as well as on Japanese culture and society more broadly.
Finally, in the years following 1854, when Japan was forced to open up to other Western countries, there were a gradual shift away from Dutch to other European languages, which led to the recession of Dutch in Japan.
