posted by Robert_garfinkle on November 9, 2011 | 3 comments
Hello everyone, my name is Robert Garfinkle. I'm a 22 year old college graduate from Nevada in the U.S. I live here in Chengdu, currently working as a teacher. That being said I am not pursuing my passion. I love the Chinese language and am proud to say that I have in the past year of partial study memorized about 1800 characters and somewhere between 3000-4000 words. All I really want to do is study 甲骨文, Oracle Bone script. I spend my weekends doing research and as of yet I have not had a ton of success, ancient Chinese is an enigma unto itself. I hereby petition you, the most respectable forum about Chinese language on the internets to tell me of any scholarship opportunities or grants for research in this field. Thank you for your time, Please respond or send me a PMRobert Garfinkle 巫博远
@Robert_garfinkle,
Hmmm.... I don't know of any scholarships specifically for studying oracle script. As an American, you might have a very good shot at something in Taiwan (http://english.moe.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=11981&CtNode=10632&mp=2). I'm not sure how those work out for studying classical Chinese, but it used to be fairly easy for US citizens to get support through the program.
Otherwise, your best chances for funding might simply be doing post-graduate work. There are universities like USC which have good East Asian programs which tend to be less competitive generally so good candidates with Chinese proficiency stand out and can usually get funding. MA students don't usually get much support across the US, but doctoral candidates can usually line up full support and it's often possible to do a concurrent MA, so that if you drop out after a year or two or decide not to finish your Ph.D. you'll still walk out of the program with an MA. And once you're in a graduate program it is usually easier to get FLAS support, etc.
The two people I'd try to get in touch with are John Cikoski (http://gkarin.com/cikoski/) and Richard Sears (http://www.chineseetymology.org/why_study.aspx). I'm sure they'd both have much better advice. Good luck.
Hi Robert,When I was studying at 北大 years ago, I took a course in 文字学 through the undergraduate Chinese department, and we spent a while covering 甲骨文 before moving into other forms of Chinese script. You might want to check out classes at nearby universities to see if there's anything similar, and to ask professors if you can sit in on the classes. It won't be a scholarship program, but might be a good way of getting a grounding in oracle script and subsequent stages of written Chinese to build on later.There are plenty of reference materials out there if self-study is more your speed. Your local Xinhua bookstore likely sells one or two 字源 dictionaries, and if you have any stores that specialize in calligraphy in the area, there's a decent chance that one or more of them will sell a reference book with multiple seal/bronze/oracle forms of characters for seal carvers. Our textbook at Beida was 《文字学概要》 by Qiu Xigui (http://book.douban.com/subject/1201835/), which is the best intro to the subject that I've seen.Regarding scholarships: I don't know of anything specifically focused on oracle script or classical Chinese, but the PRC government offers scholarships for foreigners interested in studying more or less any aspect of Chinese. I haven't looked very closely at what's out there for a few years, but my sense is that there are even more scholarship funds out there at the moment than there were a few years ago. If you're interested, I can put you in touch with a friend of mine who's currently studying at 北大 on a government scholarship.