28.11.2024Syriac and Iranic Influences on Chinese Jingjiao Documents

The language of Chinese Jingjiao (景教) texts exemplifies the rich transcultural interactions along the Silk Road. On the one hand, these texts reflect influences from other literary traditions such as Syriac, Sogdian, Middle Persian. On the other hand, Jingjiao translators adopted existing Buddhist Chinese terminology to translate Christian concepts and employed phono-semantic matching to transcribe proper names. Drawing examples from literary sources and inscriptions found in China, the paper will examine Chinese Jingjiao documents as products of linguistic and cultural exchange contact between Chinese and languages on the Silk Road.