Mechanisms of Contact-induced Linguistic Creations in Chinese Buddhist Translations

While it has long been noted that Chinese Buddhist translations contain many new lexical and syntactic elements that were created due to the contact between Indic and Chinese languages during the translation process, few attempts have been made to systematically explore the major mechanisms of such contact-induced creations. This paper examines six mechanisms of contact-induced lexical creations and three mechanisms of contact-induced syntactic creations in Chinese Buddhist translations. All of these mechanisms have parallels in non-Sinitic language contacts. The parallels demonstrate that Chinese Buddhist translations and non-Sinitic language contacts show striking similarities in the ways in which they brought about new lexical and syntactic elements.