[
    {
        "id": 205112,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1966",
        "page_number": 68,
        "title": "RAS-1966",
        "content_text": "SINO-WESTERN CONTACTS\n\n63\n\ntestify to their Oriental origin, such as the lute (from Arabic al-lūt, \"wood”), and even in our century we have witnessed the spread of Negro jazz over the whole world. A similar development took place in China, and there are many passages in Yüan literature where foreign music and musicians are mentioned.15 In this connection we should perhaps save from oblivion the name of one of these musicians from the Near East. We find her name in the Ch'ing-lou chi “Records from the Green Bowers\", an anonymous work dated 1364 which gives a list of the most popular courtesans under the Yüan, together with a description of their accomplishments. Among these ladies of easy virtue we find one solitary girl from the Western Regions mentioned among her many Chinese professional sisters. She was a Mohammedan girl by the name of Miliha (or Maliha) praised for her sweet and clear voice and her skill in singing. She was, alas, not beautiful, but we are told that she was a superb theatrical performer. The author of the book once made her acquaintance and was duly impressed by her acting.16\n\nThere must have been many influences from Near Eastern folklore that reached China under the Yüan. I shall quote here only two examples. A well-known Near Eastern folk-tale motif, that of the honest loser, the greedy finder and the Solomonic judge, can be traced both in European medieval and Chinese literature. It reached Europe via Spain through the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi of Toledo (thirteenth century A.D.), a work which contains many Arab stories and anecdotes that subsequently became immensely popular in the West. Boccaccio has not a few stories from the Disciplina Clericalis in his Decamerone and also at least one motif in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, that of the three caskets, comes from that source. The story of the loser, the finder and the judge can be found in European literature in many versions, the classical German version being J. P. Hebel's \"Der kluge Richter\". In China we find this story in a text dated 1360. Here the story is set in a typical Chinese environment and being given some additional touches typical of China. The most interesting feature is, however, that the Chinese text does not present the anecdote as a mere story but as a historical event. The clever judge to whom the final solution of the case is entrusted was a perfectly real person, a circuit prefect from Kiangsi Province. This shows the Chinese tendency to attach literary clichés and even,",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 205806,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1969",
        "page_number": 112,
        "title": "RAS-1969",
        "content_text": "106\n\nJOHN MCCOY\n\nCatullus or Boccaccio, and sometimes approaches Robert Burns' Merry Muses of Caledonia without a similar need to expunge words from the Chinese text.\n\nFrom the literary point of view, one of the problems of handling the Mountain Songs, and especially any attempt to translate them, is just the question of how to handle the double meanings which are so much the key to these verses and their enjoyment. Too many footnotes would kill a translation and too little by way of explanation would probably leave a lot of the allusions lost to modern readers. Some of this is of course already lost forever because we have no way to recover all of the secondary references so familiar to the original singers of these songs. Even some of the primary references are difficult and it will take considerable research to dig all of the meaning out of some of the obscure vocabulary. But the problems of handling the grammatical markers and functors of this dialect are solvable. In spite of the fact that some of these items are written with characters not to be found in most dictionaries and obviously made up to handle the unusual Wu dialect pronunciations of the time, we are still able to reconstruct probable phonetic approximations and to propose probable meanings on the basis of our knowledge of modern dialects. It is in this special area that the linguist is in a unique position to help the student of literature.\n\nIf this sort of popular poetry attracts interest, we will necessarily need the services of the dialect specialist to solve some of the problems of interpretation. The linguist will gain a great deal from the information the Mountain Songs give him on Ming Dynasty dialects. Then the linguist will in turn enrich Chinese literature studies by opening up a neglected field.\n\nAlthough their reasons are quite different, Western scholars are beginning to agree with Peking that we have neglected popular literature too long. It seems reasonable to predict that more departments will give some room to folk songs and poetry in Chinese literature courses if the genre can be made accessible to the average reader.\n\nFrom the linguist's point of view, an analysis of the rhyme patterns of the Mountain Songs, done much on the same plan as Karlgren's Ancient Chinese, would be very useful when we are ready to work out a reconstruction of proto-Wu. I have carded",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d",
        "rank": 0
    }
]