Okinawan
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news and discussions related to romanization
Archived Posts from this Category
Posted by site admin on 31 Aug 2006 | Tagged as: China, Chinese, Chinese characters, Classical Chinese, Dungan, Japan, Japanese, John DeFrancis, Korea, Korean, Mandarin, Okinawan, dialect, kanji, languages, linguistics, literacy, pinyin, psycholinguistics, romanization, writing systems
Most readers of Pinyin News will already know of John DeFrancis, editor of the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary and author of The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy and many other important works. (If you haven’t read The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy yet, order it now.)
In recognition of the 95th(!) birthday today of Professor DeFrancis, Sino-Platonic Papers is rereleasing Schriftfestschrift: Essays in Honor of John DeFrancis on His Eightieth Birthday. Previously, this important compilation, which runs more than 250 pages, was available only in a printed edition priced at US$35. The fifteenth-anniversary edition, however, is being released for free as a PDF (15 MB — so have a fast Internet connection, or a lot of patience).
I’d like to draw special attention to an article written in Pinyin: “Hanzi Bu Tebie Biaoyi,” by Zhang Liqing. (Zhang’s work also appears here on Pinyin Info, in her translations of The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts and of the amazing Comparing Chinese Characters and a Chinese Spelling Script — an evening conversation on the reform of Chinese characters.)
Feel free to print out a copy of the Schriftfestschrift for your own use or for inclusion in a library. Just don’t sell it.
The original publication contained several color photos. I’ll add those later. Also, the English tex is searchable to some degree, as I used OCR after scanning these pages; but the results weren’t perfect.
Here are the contents:
Happy birthday, John! And many happy returns!