Migrating Meanings

Migrating Meanings: Sharing Keywords in a Global World By James W. Underhill and Mariarosaria Gianninoto Headline Exploring the roots of four keywords for our times: Europe, the citizen, the individual, and the people Blurb With economic, political and cultural globalisation, our world is inseparable from the fates of other nations and peoples. But how far can we trust English to provide us with a reliable lingua franca to speak about our world. If our keywords reflect our cultures and form parts of specific cultural and historical narratives, they may well help trace the paths we take together into the future. This book seeks the roots of four keywords for our times: the people, the citizen, the individual, and Europe. By exploring these keywords in English and understanding stories related to 'equivalent keywords' in Chinese, German, French and Czech, this book helps us to understand how other languages are adapting to English words, and how their worldviews resist 'anglo-concepts' through their own traditions, stories and worldviews. Key Features - The English keywords are shown to be European concepts with roots in French and parallel traditions in German - Places keywords into their historical context, and shows how the existing Chinese words for people and person are transformed through contact with concepts of European origin - Establishes a complex model of political diversity for Europe's cultures and traditions - Adopts a combination of critical and analytical methods and corpus-based research - Goes beyond a cold analysis of concepts to scrutinize the keywords that move people and get them excited about individual rights, personal destinies and the role of the people James Underhill is Professor in Literature and Translation at the University of Rouen. Mariarosaria Gianninoto is Associate Professor of Chinese at the Université Grenoble Alpes.