The Missionaries and New Chinese language at the turn of 20th Century: analyzing the two books by A. H. Mateer and E.Morgan

摘要

During the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th, Chinese language has been great transformed for meeting the very equirements of accommodating modern knowledge. These changes include the coming of oracle style as well as the rising of a great deal of new terms. Missionaries in China at that time were most sensitive to those language changes and had also made related records within their literatures. This paper takes two such books by those famous missionaries as analytical samples to view the language transformations and also the causes whatthe authors had perceived and recorded. By such analyzing, we may know that, students abroad are the importer of new style and new words, newspapers and periodicals had impulse it’s prevalence, translations from Japanese books as well as the borrowing of Japanese words had played an important role in the Chinese language transforming, new affixes had strengthened the word-build ability of Chinese language.