Cross-Cultural Differences and International Exchange in the Naxi Language
This 2013 paper by Mu Chunyan (Lijiang Teachers College) surveys the 150-year history of international engagement with the Naxi language across three periods: an embryonic period (mid-19th–mid-20th c.) driven by missionaries, Dongba-manuscript collectors, explorers, and Gung Ho cooperative workers such as Joseph Rock and Peter Goullart; a developmental period (1980s–mid-1990s) of ethnological fieldwork by scholars such as C.F. McKhann and Yang Fuquan's collaboration with Sinologist K.L. Janert; and a new period (mid-1990s–present) in which the college formally enrolled international students and scholars like Alexis Michaud built spoken-corpus resources. It identifies three kinds of cross-cultural difficulty for learners — linguistic-cultural background (e.g., the Naxi "elopement marriage" custom, untranslatable by English equivalents), the language's own ethnic character (tone sandhi with no English intonational analogue), and ethnic psychology (e.g., Mosuo taboos around whistling after dark) — and proposes teaching strategies: mutual respect, embedding cultural background in lessons, immersive practice, and comparative cultural-background analysis.
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