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Abstract Chinese Buddhist translations are an outstanding source of information on Middle Chinese. In the last three decades, Buddhist Chinese has increasingly gained the attention of historical linguists interested in the linguistic peculiarities of the Chinese sutras. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain the unusual grammatical features occurring in Buddhist translations, which have been described either as vernacular elements surfacing in the language of the translations or as the product of grammatical interference with the Indic source-texts. This paper aims to provide a concise theoretical framework for the phenomenon of grammatical interference through Chinese Buddhist translations, arguing that the vernacular hypothesis appears to be more tenable.
Francesco Barchi (Fri,) studied this question.