Liyao Chen (he/him/his)

Liyao Chen is a graduate student in the field of Chinese linguistics in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature. He received his bachelor and master degrees in the field of Chinese history, studying the political history of the Han Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty respectively with a focus on their imperial clansmen system. Given his long-time passion for language learning, he is currently pursuing study and research in East Asian historical linguistics. He is especially interested in the history of writing in East Asia, the transmission, adaptation, and development of Sinitic writing in different languages and cultures, and Sino-Xenic readings of Sinitic characters in those languages. He is currently examining the cases of both conventional and unconventional uses of Sinitic characters in writing vernacular languages and texts and focusing on the cases of "playful writing" (gisho) in the Japanese poetry collection Man’yōshū. In addition, he is also interested in the phenomenon known as "reading by gloss" (Japanese kundoku / Korean hundok) and relevant glossed materials and texts to see the interlinguistic and intercultural contact in pre-modern East Asia. From a broad and theoretical perspective, he would like to explore issues related to the so-called "Sinographic Cosmopolis" bound by a shared writing system.