On April 11, Professor Christoph Harbsmeier, a world-renowned Sinologist, gave an academic lecture at CFLC, drawing many faculty members and students.

Christoph Harbsmeier is Professor of Chinese at the University of Oslo. He also holds honorary professorships at eight Chinese higher-education institutions, including Peking University, Fudan University, and Wuhan University, Zhejiang University.

In his lectured titled “Are Some Languages Better than Others?”, Prof. Harbsmeier began with an introduction to the language views of prominent linguists Wilhelm von Humboldt and Edward Sapir. He then went on to introduce a language in Brazil which has no numerals and compare ancient Chinese with major European languages to illustrate the expression features of differentlanguages. Finally, he shared his insights into the role of language views in steering specific linguistic research in the case of translation and lingual corpus development.

Prof. Harbsmeier’s insightful lecture, delivered entirely in Chinese, riveted the attention of the audience and elicited applause from time to time. In the Q&A session following the lecture, he gave detailed answers to students’ questions.