主講人：柳雨青（Yuqing Liu）/英國愛丁堡大學亞洲研究系助理教授

演講摘要：
皮欽語大約於18世紀出現在中國珠江三角洲一帶，是一種由英語、粵語、葡萄牙語、馬來語、官話、閩南語等各種中外語言混合而成的通用語。19世紀中葉，第一次鴉片戰爭後，大批粵籍商人與勞工相繼赴滬謀生，此一語言遂隨之擴散至長江三角洲地區。我的報告將探討貿易中產生的日用詞典、民歌、以及商人、文士的詩歌創作，追溯這一貿易語言在文學中的聲音再現。我將分析這些創作如同調動漢字之語義、視覺與語音諸維度，使詩中皮欽語的表達形式構建出多層次的意義結構。皮欽語的引入因此開啟了廣闊的詮釋向度，使得各種讀法互相交織彼此並立。此外，這些詩歌多以竹枝詞的形式書寫，然而有別於傳統竹枝詞將異域語言收編馴化的書寫，這些詩歌呈現相反的聲音想象：皮欽語的介入使本土的景觀異域化，從而將貿易中心的廣東與上海呈現為眾聲喧嘩、語言駁雜的聲景空間。

Pidgin English first appeared in China along the Pearl River Delta as a lingua franca composed of a mixture of Chinese and European languages as early as the 18th century. This language spread to the Yangtze River delta in the mid 19th century when an increasing number of Cantonese merchants and workers travelled to Shanghai to seek opportunities after the First Opium War. This talk traces the sounds of pidgin in through analysis of dictionaries, folksongs, and poetry that emerged in the port cities of Guangzhou and Shanghai. I explore how pidgin was incorporated into classical Chinese poetry and how it reflected and shaped the literary soundscape of nineteenth-century China. I argue that pidgin English created a polyphonic space in which sinographs and European words, literary language and local tongues, and classical images and contemporary anecdotes intertwine to generate diverse and at times contradictory meanings. Through an innovative collocation of the sinographic, literal, and phonetic features of Chinese characters, the pidgin words and expressions craft in these poems a multilayered structure of meanings based on the semantic, visual, and phonetic values of the sinographs. The usage of pidgin, therefore, opens up a wide array of interpretative possibilities. Unlike traditional bamboo branch lyrics in which foreign words are transcribed and incorporated to domesticate strangeness and consolidate the imperial order, these pidgin poems have an inverse effect: their use of pidgin English alienates the native, the conventional, and the familiar landscape/soundscape.