21H.151 | Fall 2024 | Undergraduate

# Dynastic China

## One Course, Two Languages

Below, Prof. Tristan G. Brown describes the two-track nature of the class, which is conducted all in English for most of the students, but with added Chinese-language content for students minoring in Chinese.

The Chinese-language texts matter because they remind students that not everything was written in English, and not everything worth reading is in English. Even for students who are not working directly with those texts, their presence sends an important signal: humanities subjects are not easy. A student who has mastered multivariable calculus can still struggle with a Tang poem or a Qing edict. That humility matters.

At the same time, the students pursuing a Chinese minor add something irreplaceable. Because they work directly with the original texts, they notice details others cannot: a nuance of phrasing, an ambiguity in translation, a character that carries centuries of meaning. Those insights often surface in discussion board posts or on Slack.

One example I always enjoy comes when we trace the history of writing. I place Middle Egyptian, the written form of Egyptian used during the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2055–1650 BCE), and Chinese characters side by side. These systems developed independently, yet they share certain underlying logics. The Egyptian determinative 𓅪 (G37), a sparrow that frequently appears in words associated with weakness, misfortune, or other undesirable qualities, offers a comparison that students often find helpful when thinking about the dog radical (犭) in Chinese. The analogy is not perfect: the dog radical is primarily a taxonomic classifier, and Chinese characters often combine semantic and phonetic elements in ways that differ from Egyptian determinatives. But it is close enough that students who know Chinese characters can feel the structural logic of determinatives almost intuitively. At the same time, everyone else gets the pleasure of being a complete beginner, encountering hieroglyphic script for the first time. And we also talk about emojis and their history, which helps students see that humans have long used visual signs to carry meaning in compact, flexible ways. That, to me, is the two-track nature of the class working exactly as intended.

## Course Info

### Instructor

- Prof. Tristan G. Brown

### Departments

- History

### As Taught In

Fall 2024

### Level

Undergraduate

### Topics

- Humanities
  - History
    - Asian History
    - World History

### Learning Resource Types

This course includes the following types of learning materials.

Activity Assignments
Lecture Videos
Readings
Student Work
Written Assignments
Browse Resources
Browse Resources

The content of this course is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

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