ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Ricci’s achievements in creating religious terminology, including the formation of shàng-dì上帝 (God) and its related terms, the concept of shèng 聖 (Christian) and its related terms, and challenges to the religious terminology coined by Ricci and the linguistic rationale behind their creation. Paraphrasing words, which are words created by drawing on Chinese’s own language resources while taking their meanings from another language, constitute the majority of the religious terms coined by Ricci and these have been successfully maintained in the modern Chinese vocabulary, thus demonstrating Ricci’s influence on the creation of new terms. This chapter also shows how Ricci’s Chinese writings, Jiāoyǒulùn (1595), Tiānzhǔ shíyì (1603), and Jīrén shípiān (1608), spread a large number of new religious terms into modern Chinese due to Ricci’s insightful creation of paraphrasing words and his deep understanding of Chinese culture. The suitability of the paraphrasing words coined by Ricci comes from Ricci’s grasp of the essential characteristics of the Chinese language – namely, that the Chinese lexicon consists of Chinese characters and that Chinese characters are based on ideographs. Because of his understanding, Ricci was able to make full use of the Chinese language (the most important carrier of Chinese culture) in order to subtly spread foreign religious terms.
