http://pinyin.info/news news and discussions related to romanization Thu, 15 May 2008 08:30:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Chris recently wrote and asked for a list of texts in Pinyin. This site, of course, has at least a few things in Pinyin. Unfortunately, however, they can be a bit difficult to find. So having a list is indeed a good idea. Here are some readings in Hanyu Pinyin: ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/online-texts-in-hanyu-pinyin/ Sino-Platonic Papers has rereleased for free its fifth volume of reviews, mainly of books about China and its history and languages (11.6 MB PDF). Even if you have no particular interest in the specific works reviewed, I recommend at least browsing through this and all of the other volumes of ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/book-reviews-vol-5/ Google is reporting that in December 2007 Unicode became the most frequently used encoding on Web pages. Just last December there was an interesting milestone on the web. For the first time, we found that Unicode was the most frequent encoding found on web pages, overtaking both ASCII and Western ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/unicode-tops-other-encodings-on-web-pages-google/ Language Documentation & Conservation, a refereed, open-access journal sponsored by the National Foreign Language Resource Center and published online by the University of Hawai‘i Press, has released its first online book: Documenting and Revitalizing Austronesian Languages, edited by D. Victoria Rau and Margaret Florey. Half of the chapters in the ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/documenting-and-revitalizing-austronesian-languages-free-online-book/ Dr. Ovid Tzeng (Zēng Zhìlǎng / 曾志朗 ) will be returning to government as a minister without portfolio in the Cabinet of the incoming administration of Ma Ying-jeou. Tzeng has done important work in psycholinguistics and is known to support Taiwan's adoption of Hanyu Pinyin. Indeed, this support was one ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/hanyu-pinyin-backer-to-return-to-taiwans-cabinet/ The new work I promised on Li Yang and his Crazy English method has finally been published and is available for free on the Web: A Survey of Li Yang Crazy English (2.6 MB PDF), by Amber R. Woodward. For a little more on this, see Victor Mair's recent post ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/major-paper-on-crazy-english-released/ A couple of days ago I promised a "long, critical study of Crazy English" will be released soon. It's still in preparation. But you can now read a study from a couple of years ago by Amber Woodward, the same author who wrote the forthcoming piece. The 2006 study is ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/more-crazy-english/ If the Chen Shui-bian administration had bothered to do much of anything really useful to promote Taiwanese, especially as a written language, then we probably wouldn't be faced with crap like this. President-elect Ma Ying-jeou met last week with Chen Fang-ming (陳芳明), the chairman of the Graduate Institute of Taiwanese ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/president-elect-ma-favors-hanzi-only-writing-of-taiwanese-report/ The latest issue (April 28, 2008) of the New Yorker has an article on the China's Crazy English (Fēngkuáng Yīngyǔ / 疯狂英语) method: Crazy English: The national scramble to learn a new language before the Olympics, by Evan Osnos. Li Yang Crazy English (as it is properly known, after Li ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/crazy-english-in-the-new-yorker/ This week's rerelease from Sino-Platonic Papers is Tattooed Faces And Stilt Houses: Who Were The Ancient Yue? (1.6 MB PDF), by Heather Peters. Here's the introduction: Recent archeological evidence excavated at Hemudu, a site in northern Zhejiang Province south of Shanghai (Zhejiang Provincial Museum 1978), suggests that were we to step ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/the-ancient-yue/ Nciku, a Web site that bills itself as "more than a dictionary," has a nifty feature that allows users to find Chinese characters by drawing them with a mouse. As you draw, possible character matches will appear in the box to the right of your drawing, with the results refined ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/find-chinese-characters-online-by-drawing-them-with-your-mouse/ Just out from the archives of Sino-Platonic Papers is The Development of Complexity in Prehistoric Northern China, by Sarah M. Nelson of the University of Denver. This deals with Hongshan culture (Hóngshān wénhuà / 紅山文化 / 红山文化), a neolithic culture that flourished in what is now northeastern China more than ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/hongshan-culture-spp/ High-ranking Kyrgyz officials are now reportedly saying that having Kyrgyzstan switch from the Cyrillic to the Roman alphabet would cost more money than the country can afford for the project at present. A later switch has not been ruled out. sources: Kyrgyzstan will not shift to Latin alphabet, Kazakhstan Today, ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/kyrgyzstan-wont-switch-to-roman-alphabet-yet-report/ This week's rerelease from Sino-Platonic Papers is The Prestige of Writing: 文, Letter, Picture, Image, Ideography, by Haun Saussy, who is currently a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Yale. This work contains a memorable, wry disclaimer: WARNING. The following section contains passages from the writings of Ernest Fenollosa ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/ideography/ It seems like a good time for something related to Tibet. The newest rerelease from Sino-Platonic Papers comprises 900 sample sentences in romanized Tibetan and English, the Tibetan being specifically Kham Tibetan. From the introduction: The reader is undoubtedly aware that written Tibetan radically differs from what is spoken and that there ... http://pinyin.info/news/2008/tibetan-english-sample-sentences/