(Reporter: Peng Yao) At 2:30 pm on April 23, 2020, Prof. Zhang Junfeng, Director and Doctoral Supervisor of the School of Foreign Languages, China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), was invited to deliver an academic lecture titled “Looking at Transliteration and Loanwords from the Essence of Languages” through a live streaming on Tencent Meeting. He Mingxia, Director of the school, Wu Changqing, Deputy Director of the school, all teachers, some students and some external teachers attended the lecture hosted by Associate Professor Xia Fangyun, Director of Postgraduate Teaching Department of the School of Foreign Languages.

Professor Zhang Junfeng talked about the transliteration and loanwords in intercultural exchanges from the essence of languages through taking one of his articles published by the Journal of Central China Normal University in October 2019 as an example. As the tool restricting information transmission and meaning inference, language is a set of customary social conventions, which reflect the cognition of language users to the outside world. It is the commonality of languages. Different languages use different means and methods to forcibly restrict different areas of semantics, forming the characteristics of different languages. In contrast to the essence of languages, transliteration and loanwords provide cognitive symbols for input languages through substituting the meanings with phonetic forms, namely the transplantation of signifiers to allow people to explore the meanings inferred. The vitality of transliterated words and loanwords is determined by not only the information transmission restriction requirements for “incommensurable” things and concepts of input languages, but also the coordination and compatibility of transliterated words and loanwords with information transmission restriction rules in terms of phonetics and ideograph.

Prof. Zhang’s lecture was very humorous, precise and inspiring. As soon as the lecture began, nearly 300 teachers and students signed up in the Tencent Meeting. During the lecture, the vivid examples provided by Prof. Zhang made the lecture so memorable. At the end of the lecture, the teachers and students, including those from other universities, actively interacted with Prof. Zhang through asking questions. Prof. Zhang also answered every question carefully and patiently. With the outstanding engagement of all teachers and students attending the lecture, they interacted and communicated successfully with each other, and benefited a lot from the online lecture.