“The echo of the stone/ where I carved the [Buddha’s] honorable footprints/ reaches the Heaven, […]”. This book presents the transcription, translation, and analysis of Chinese (753 AD) and Japanese inscriptions (end of the 8th century AD) found on two stones now in the possession of the Yakushiji temple in Nara. All these inscriptions praise the footprints of Buddha, and more exactly their carvings in the stone. The language of the Japanese inscription, which consists of twenty-one poems, reflects the contemporary dialect of Nara. Its writing system shows a quite unique trait,...

Have you ever wondered what is really happening to minority languages of Northeast Asia and which efforts are being taken both by “westerners” and local people to preserve and promote them? Would you like to discover, uncover, and tackle deep linguistic questions of such small but highly important languages such as Khamnigan Mongol, Wutun, Sartul-Buryat, Tofan and Sakhalin Ainu, just to mention a few? Would you like to know how simple smart phone apps can help communities to preserve, love and use their native language? This book, containing a rich selection of contributions on various...

What shapes and magnitude can language loss have in East Asian endangered languages? How does it differ with regards to the languages' historical development and sociolinguistic environment? This book surveys a number of minority and, in most cases, endangered languages spoken in China, Japan, Taiwan, and Russia which all face, or have faced in their recent history, loss of language features. The contributions in this publication present you with different cases of obsolescence attested throughout East Asia and highlight how this process, though often leading back to common causes, is in fact...