The Chinese View Of Calvin Wilson Mateer, A Modern American Missionary To China

Calvin Wilson Mateer was an American missionary to China at the end of nineteenthCentury.His education activities had drawn wide attention by scholars,but his Chinese view andthe book A Course of Mandarin Lessions based on Idiom which writted for missionaries to learnChinese were barely discussed.The article is going to take A Course of Mandarin Lessions basedon Idiom as an example to research Calvin Wilson Mateer’s Chinese view.The writer will studythe part of speech,word-building,syntax and corpus based on the analysis and description of the200text in order to comprehensively show Calvin Wilson Mateer’s Chinese view and reveal hiscontribution in researching Chinese grammer and disseminating Chinese Mandarin.The paper is divided into five parts:The first chapter is an introduction,introducing the selection significance,research status andresearch plan.Calvin Wilson Mateer was one of the most influential missionaries to China.Heopened school,complied textbooks and paid great attention to develop education.Especially thebook A Course of Mandarin Lessions based on Idiom greatly promoted the spread of ChineseMandarin.The author will show Calvin Wilson Mateer’s Chinese view through the research ofthe textbook.The second chapter is the brief introduction of Calvin Wilson Mateer and A Course ofMandarin Lessions based on Idiom,mainly introducing Calvin Wilson Mateer’s lifestory,background of writing the textbook and the edition,style and content of A Course ofMandarin Lessions based on Idiom.Calvin Wilson Mateer was intent on spreading Christianity.Inorder to better exchange ideas with Chinese,he worked hard to learn Chinese.In order to let moremissionaries to study Chinese,he writed A Course of Mandarin Lessions based on Idiom.Thebook collects phrases and sentences which were usually used in daily life.Each lesson introducesa grammar point,which is convenient for learner to study.The third chapter is the research of A Course of Mandarin Lessions based on Idiom,which isthe main part of the paper,mainly discussing the part of speech,word-building, syntax and theusage of corpus.Calvin Wilson Mateer’s opinion about the speech of Chinese was basically thesame with the speech of modern Chinese.The author will mainly introduce the typicalspeech,such as pronoun and classifier.Chinese is lack of morphological changes,but it doesn’tmean entirely without morphological changes.Calvin Wilson Mateer realised this point.He described the affix and the reduplication in detail.He introduced a variety of syntacticalstructures in Chinese.The author selects three more representative syntactical structures toresearch,namely the verb-complement structure,the disposal structure and the passive form.Dueto the strongly colloquial style and serving for the spread of Christianity,in the part of usingcorpus,The author will analyze the differences between the southern dialect words and thenorthern dialect words,the proverbs and the religious terms.Especially in the part of the proverb,the author collects the idioms,the proverbs and the chinese allegories in the text.Thus,CalvinWilson Mateer’s Chinese view can be showed from the above study.For some differences frommodern Chinese,the auther are all illustrated.In the rest part,the author compares A Course of Mandarin Lessions based on Idiom with AGrammar of the Chinese Language in order to reveal its uniqueness.Robert Morrison was one ofthe earliest missionaries to China.A Grammar of the Chinese Language is a book aboutChinese grammar.The author will roughly compare the two books in the content and layout,theopinion of speech and the usage of corpus.The last part is epilogue.The author summarizes Calvin Wilson Mateer’s Chinese view andpoints out the achievements and shortcomings of A Course of Mandarin Lessions based on Idiom.Calvin Wilson Mateer’s Chinese view is not limited to the four aspects that discussed in the thirdchapter,but also embodies the cognition of Chinese character,syllable and the spelling.Thetextbook helps to diffusing the Chinese Mandarin.The book also has important historicalvalue,for collecting many words and sentences in Shandong dialect.The book also exists someshortcomings.In short,Calvin Wilson Mateer’s Chinese view was correct in general.It is worthstudying.