The first international symposium on Attested Middle Chinese in Early Foreign Transcriptions and Loanwords, organized by Christopher I. Beckwith (Indiana University Hamilton Lugar School), Andrew Shimunek (Woosong University), and Andrea Adam Moore (Indiana University Europe Gateway) was held at the Indiana University Europe Gateway in Berlin, Germany, on May 20-22, 2022. The project was supported by a grant from Indiana University’s New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Program.
The three-day event brought together world-renowned scholars from China, Germany, Israel, Japan, Korea, Poland, Turkey, the U.K., and the U.S. to engage in lively, productive, and egalitarian discussions on the following topics related to the actually attested Middle Chinese language:
• The Earliest Transcriptions of Middle Chinese – Christopher I. Beckwith (Indiana University)
• Middle Chinese Loanwords in Serbi-Mongolic and Tungusic, and Middle Chinese Transcriptions of Serbi-Mongolic – Andrew Shimunek (Woosong University)
• Problems of Transcription and Interpretation of Chinese Glosses and Texts in the Sogdo-Uyghur Script – Abdurishid Yakup (Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences)
• The Onset Consonants of Chinese Loans in Old Turkic – Marcel Erdal (Goethe University) and Gulnisa Jamal (independent scholar)
• Chinese into Arabic during the ‘Abbāsid Age – Anya H. King (University of Southern Indiana)
• Middle Chinese Loanwords in Bactrian – Nicholas Sims-Williams (University of London)
• The Phonology of Middle Chinese Loanwords in Late Tocharian B – Ronald Kim (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań)
• Two Sino-Uigur Technical Terms in the Old Uigur Secular Texts – Dai Matsui (Osaka University)
• Middle Chinese Loanwords in Old Uyghur – Jens Wilkens (Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Göttingen)
