汉文笔谈 ——一个以纸笔做缄默交谈的近古传意模式

Abstract

古代東亞雖言語不通,儒生卻可以文房四寶做緘默互談,此類記載千載以前已見之,是為"漢文筆談"。這種傳意模式可上溯隋唐,于清季尤盛極一時,文獻甚豐,甚至出現以此做跨文化越國界的多人會議,筆談者來自中日朝越,多為士大夫及外交官。話音聲波一瞬即逝,筆談墨寶卻可千載流傳。這種互動溝通以書寫為本,他方典籍似未嘗見之,希臘語、拉丁語亦然。漢文筆談曾于漢字文化圈中生氣勃勃,惟今已遭遺忘。文章先述這一社會語言學現象之歷史背景,后指出可按Brown和Yule（1983）對層見迭出之筆談語境分為"互動傳意""問訊傳意"兩類,亦會略述東西方學者對是課題之出版研究,最后提出漢文筆談沒落之因、今日僅見之殘存形式。 For well over a thousand years in Sinographic East Asia, despite a lack of a shared spoken language, scholars and literati of classical Chinese ( Sinitic ) could conduct “silent conversation” using brush, ink and paper. This mode of communication was known as “Sinitic brushtalk”. The earliest documented brushtalk interaction may be traced back to the Sui and Tang dynasties and it culminated in the late Qing dynasty, when there was no shortage of brushtalk artifacts being compiled and published for wider dissemination, including those adapted from transcultural and cross-border interaction contexts comparable to international conferences in the modern sense. Among the most prominent brushtalkers were scholar officials, courtiers and diplomats from today's China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Unlike oral communication which is ephemeral and lost without a trace as soon as speech is uttered, brushtalk artifacts are relatively more endurable; some were carefully preserved and passed on as historical records. Rarely reported or mentioned in Western literary works such as classical Greek and Latin, such a writing-mediated mode of communication appears to be unique to Sinographic East Asia. Indeed, being once a vibrant method for literati from different parts of Sinographic East Asia to conduct silent conversation, Sinitic brushtalk has been all but forgotten today. This article will first outline the historical background of this sociolinguistic phenomenon. Then, following Brown and Yules'( 1983 ) classic distinction between transactional and interactional communication in discourse analysis, we propose to classify four typical and recurrent brushtalk contexts using this conceptual dichotomy. Before closing, the article will briefly review Sinitic brushtalk research contributed by scholars in the East and the West, the main reason for the demise of Sinitic brushtalk as an interactive mode of face-to-face communication, plus some evidence of “pentalk” being occasionally practiced by literate users of Sinitic in contemporary society in the digital era．