On March 15, professor Chen Baoya, who is a professor from Chinese department of Peking University and the director of Research Center for Chinese Linguistics, had visited the School of Humanities to give a special lecture. The theme of this lecture is“The Tea-Horse Road: a bond of language and culture in expedition”. The lecture was hosted by professor Zhou Junxun, and teachers and students from linguistic study had attended as well.
First of all, professor Zhou had showed a warm welcome to professor Chen and offered a brief introduction to professor Chen’s research achievements in historical linguistics. Professor Chen had shared his experience of retracing to Tea-Horse Road with other five scholars in 1900s by presented some pictures and introduced the original of the name of Tea-Horse Road. Professor Chen had defined the features of Tea-Horse Road from four levels: drinking tea, tasting tea, loving tea and being addicted to tea. Professor Chen also mentioned that there are two necessary conditions in the existence and rise of the Tea-Horse Road: expedition and people’s addiction to tea. By analyzing some transformations of the salt road, the Silk Road and other ancient roads in human history, professor Chen thought that the Tea-Horse Road had activated the ancient commercial road so it was the lifeline of expedition culture. Then, professor Chen had showed some geographical linguistics evidences that the Tea-Horse Road had extended to the world. He considered the Tea-Horse Road as a critical area to human language and culture contact. On the basis of its rise, a variety of sophisticated contacts had sprung up in networks, which had offered an important stage to the research of language contact. The problems about language force had been discussed as well at the point.
As the lecture drew to a close, professor Chen had interacted with teachers and students about language contact and force. We had not only achieved knowledge, but also been deeply touched for the courage and the pursuit to learning as a scholar in this lecture.
