And now we return to the topic of labelling. It is interesting how in previous readings, we looked at labelling other cultures based on geographic location. Then there is the musings of how the ancient Greek's labelled outsiders as barbarians, because the language of the outsiders consisted of many syllables such as "bar bar bar bar bar".
So we come to the Hinsch article, "Myth and the Construction of Foreign Ethnic Identity in Early and Medieval China" (2004), and how he remarks how the medieval Chinese people labelled outsiders in such a way that the labels both served as a derogatory means, as well as a means of distancing the Chinese, providing a more noble identity for themselves. Even deeper than labelling, we see how the mythology or tales of these outsiders serve to distance the Chinese from them, or relate to them. Take for example how Chinese farmers saw wolves as a negative force, and how the Chinese placed a negative label upon nomadic tribes that saw wolves as positive creatures in their mythology.

I've never before thought of the abstraction of language, how some cultures have a name for their language, others use a simple phrase to describe language like "our people" or "this" or "us". Interesting how in labelling language, the name of a language given by different peoples differ from each other. This raises a question, before wide identification of separate languages, would people introduce themselves to foreigners with a decided label for themselves, or would that label develop over time? Would you introduce yourself as being the "people from over there" or let other people name you?

On the topic of the silk road, this raises the question, how did these trade circles communicate? From this point in the course, I can only assume that certain silk traders would trade with more than one different languages from their own, but how would they learn that language? If you one day found yourself on another planet full of people who did not speak a word of your language, how would you go about learning their language, given the limitations of the syllables that your native tongue taught you to use, the syllables you are unable to pronounce, and the limitations of the brain to learn new languages after an approximate age of puberty? So maybe another planet isn't entirely accurate seeing how the people living across Eurasia all had some contact with each other through the ages, and probably have some minor relations in language, but the question still holds, how were distant people able to come together in a trusting agreement to trade, when there was a wide language barrier? How did they break that language barrier? We can complicate this thought further by knowing that many languages lacked a written form in the past, examples include the Germanic and Slavic, who only received a written language as a result of missionaries' desire to write a bible in their language when Christianity spread through Europe, the specific example I'm thinking about are Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, the creators of the Cyrillic alphabet.

Interestingly, we can assume that in trading goods with each other, these peoples along the silk road also traded nuances of each other's languages. Maybe traceable? We can only wait and find out.