Al Gore just isn’t letting go of the crisis/opportunity myth. He even went so far as to include it in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, as Benjamin Zimmer notes in his latest post on Language Log (Trope-watch, Oslo edition).
Further reading: Pinyin News stories mentioning Al Gore.
A Japanese man who says he invented the technology behind the context-based conversion of a sentence written solely in kana into one in both kanji and kana, as well as another related technology, filed suit against Toshiba on December 7, seeking some US$2.3 million in compensation from his former employer.
Shinya Amano, a professor at Shonan Institute of Technology, said in a written complaint that although the firm received patents for the technologies in conjunction with him and three others and paid him tens of thousands of yen annually in remuneration, he actually developed the technologies alone.
Amano is claiming 10 percent of an estimated ¥2.6 billion in profit Toshiba made in 1996 and 1997 — much higher than the roughly ¥230,000 he was actually awarded for the work over the two-year span.
His claim is believed valid, taking into account the statute of limitations and the terms of the patents.
“This is not about the sum of the money — I filed the suit for my honor,” Amano said in a press conference after bringing the case to the Tokyo District Court.
“Japan is a technology-oriented country, but engineers are treated too lightly here,” he said.
Toshiba said through its public relations office that it believes it paid Amano fair compensation in line with company policy. The company declined to comment on the lawsuit before receiving the complaint in writing.
Amano claims that he invented the technology that converts a sentence composed of kana alone into a sentence composed of both kanji and kana by assessing its context, and another technology needed to prioritize kanji previously used in such conversions.
Using theories of artificial intelligence, the two technologies developed in 1977 and 1978 are still used today in most Japanese word-processing software, he said.
source: Word-processor inventor sues Toshiba over redress, Kyodo News, via Japan Times, December 9, 2007
A bill that would make the teaching of Mandarin compulsory in all schools in Panama has passed the first of three readings in the Panamanian National Assembly.
In looking for details on this, I found a document on the Panamanian National Assembly’s Web site from September 5, 2005: Que Establece la Enseñanza Obligatoria del Idioma Mandarín, en los Centros Educativos Oficiales y Particulares del Primer y Segundo Nivel de Enseñanza y Se Dictan Otras Disposiciones (PDF).
If that represents the draft that was passed yesterday, here is a quote that may provide important information:
El Ministerio de Educación establecerá la carga horaria necesaria, que garantice el aprendizaje efectivo del idioma desde los primeros niveles de enseñanza, lo cual implica que el estudiante que culmina el bachillerato pueda comunicarse verbalmente y por escrito en mandarín. (emphasis added)
So this isn’t just for spoken Mandarin. Students who gain a bachillerato would be expected to be able to not only speak but also write Mandarin. (Can someone help clarify just what level a bachillerato represents?)
As much as I would like for more people around the world to learn Mandarin, it’s necessary to be blunt here: If the legislators and educators of Panama expect all of that country’s students to achieve literacy in Mandarin through Chinese characters, they are not only living in a fantasy world but also setting up what will certainly be a monumental and expensive failure. If this means, as it probably does, literacy in Chinese characters, the students of Panama have a whole world of frustration waiting for them.
Certainly some students will succeed. But the percent who do will never make it into double digits. Moreover, requiring Mandarin for everyone is not practical but a massive overestimation of the need for Panamanians to be able to communicate in Mandarin. I do not say that is how things ought to be, just that that is how they are … and how they will remain for many years to come. From a practical point of view, which is what legislators ought to be taking when imposing universal requirements, having a high level of English matters much, much more than having a high level of Mandarin, though certainly programs need to be widely available to provide students with the choice to learn Mandarin.
For another approach to the question of achieving literacy in Mandarin, let’s look at the case of Singapore. The majority of those in the city-state are ethnic Chinese, many of whom are native speakers of various Sinitic languages. There’s no shortage of money for education; and there’s no shortage of Mandarin classes or teachers. Official statistics there state that in the year 2000:
If nearly 20 percent of Singapore’s literate ethnic Chinese population is not literate in Mandarin, and less than 1 percent of the literate ethnic Malay and Indian populations is literate in Mandarin, what chance does Panama think it has of having this succeed with its own decidedly non-Chinese population?
Note: It’s going to be a little tricky to figure out the details of some of Panama’s plan because references to “China” may well be to Taiwan, which Panama recognizes as the Republic of China. So sometimes “China” will mean China (PRC), and sometimes “China” will mean Taiwan (ROC). Expect confusion in news stories about this.
additional sources:
Pinyin Info has long made available a selection from Peter S. Du Ponceau’s groundbreaking work on the nature of Chinese characters.
Google Print now offers the complete text of this book: A dissertation on the nature and character of the Chinese system of writing. (Also available as a 14.3 MB PDF.) This was first published in 1838; and if more people had paid attention to it the ideographic myth might well have perished then instead of flourishing to continue to plague us today.
Here is a fuller version of the title:
A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing, in a Letter to John Vaughan, esq … To which are Subjoined, a Vocabulary of the Cochinchinese Language by Father Joseph Morrone, R.C. Missionary at Saigon, … And a Cochinchinese and Latin Dictionary, in Use Among the R.C. Missions in Cochinchina.
Du Ponceau also did important work on some Native American languages and served as president of the American Philosophical Society for seventeen years. That organization continues its tradition of inducting distinguished members (MS Word document).
Alternate versions of Du Ponceau’s name: Peter Stephen DuPonceau and Pierre-Etienne Du Ponceau.
I don’t bother with typos much, but this street sign stood out enough that I wanted to share it with everyone. I took this photo last weekend in Jiaoxi, Yilan County, a town on Taiwan’s east coast that is known for its hot springs (wēnquán). (Nice hiking there, too.) Taiwan’s official signage used to be rife with just this sort of sloppiness; the situation has improved somewhat this decade.
This should be “Tangwei St.” (Tāngwéi Jiē), not “Tng-wi Rd.”
I don’t know how old that sign is. Perhaps it dates from the MPS2 era. I saw only a few more street signs in Jiaoxi, and they were in Tongyong Pinyin, such as this one for what in Hanyu Pinyin would be Wēnquán Lù (Wenquan Road /溫泉路)
The strokes in the roman letters are a bit too thin for this sort of use.
One of the myths about Chinese characters is that for each character there is One True Way and One True Way Only for it to be written, with a specific number of specific strokes in a certain specific and invariable order. Generally speaking, characters are indeed taught with standard stroke orders with certain numbers of strokes (the patterns help make it less difficult to remember how characters are written) — but these can vary from place to place, though the characters may look the same. Moreover, people often write characters in their own fashion, though they may not always be aware of this.
Michael Kaplan of Microsoft recently examined the stroke data from standards bodies in China for all 70,195 “ideographs” [sic] in Unicode 5.0 and compared it against “the 54,195 ideographs for which stroke count data was provided by Taiwan standards bodies” to see how how much of a difference there was in the stroke counts for the characters that both sides provided data for.
(I’m a bit surprised the two sides have compiled such extensive lists, and I’d love to see them. But that’s another matter.)
He found that 9,768 of these characters (18 percent) have different stroke counts between the two standards, with 9,045 characters differing by 1 stroke, 675 characters by 2 strokes, 44 characters by 3 strokes, 2 characters by 4 strokes, 1 character by 5 strokes, and 1 character by 6 strokes.
Note: This is about stroke counts of matching characters, not about differing stroke counts for traditional and “simplified” characters — e.g., not 國 (11 strokes) vs 国 (8 strokes).
So, is this a case of chabuduoism, or of truly differing standards? The answer is not yet fully clear; but be sure to read Kaplan’s post and the comments there.
sources and additional info:
I’ve just stumbled across a book-length series of interviews with Y.R. Chao (Zhao Yuanren / Zhào Yuánrèn / 趙元任 / 赵元任). Even better: The complete text is available for free on the Web!
China Scholars Series: Chinese linguist, phonologist, composer and author, Yuen Ren Chao. An Interview Conducted by Rosemany Levenson, with an introduction by Mary Haas.
Wow. This is absolutely fabulous. The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, deserves praise for this. Other works of interest to readers of Pinyin News are also available; but more about those later, in separate posts.
In case any readers are not familiar with Chao (1892-1982), he was the finest linguist ever to come out of China. He was also a supporter of romanization; he was even the lead creator of an ingenious if somewhat complicated romanization system for Mandarin: Gwoyeu Romatzyh. But there’s no way a few short sentences could do justice to the depth and breadth of Chao’s learning. To get a better idea of the man, read the introduction to the work linked to above — and then read the rest!
Enjoy!
Further reading: Y.R. Chao’s translation into Gwoyeu Romatzyh of the Humpty Dumpty section of Through the Looking-Glass, with Hanyu Pinyin and English
Sino-Platonic Papers is rereleasing a much more recent issue this week. This issue, no. 102 from March 2000, is by two university professors of Mandarin Chinese who advocate a “penless” approach for beginning students of Mandarin: i.e., students should use specially designed software on computers to write characters and not bother at first with learning to write characters by hand.
Here is the abstract:
In view of the fact that hand-writing Chinese characters is the most frustrating factor in Chinese language learning, we propose in this article a fairly radical approach that could bring a fundamental change into Chinese language teaching. Our suggestion is abolishing the requirement for writing Chinese characters by hand at the beginning of Chinese language learning process, and utilizing Chinese word-processing software instead to help the students
- bypass the difficulties entailed by character hand-writing,
- achieve an early development of writing skill, and
- reach a comprehensive improvement of their language competence.
In this article, we have offered our assessment on the following three aspects:
- The degree to which character hand-writing constitutes a major obstacle to early Chinese language learning;
- The benefits of using Chinese word-processing software in acquisition of Chinese language skills;
- The side effects from adopting this approach and the possibilities of their overcoming.
We believe this proposal addresses one of the most pressing issues in today’s Chinese language teaching, and should generate fruitful discussions among Chinese language teachers, as well as general interest in the field of foreign language teaching.
The full article is here: Penless Chinese Character Reproduction, by Theresa Jen and Ping Xu. This is a quick-loading HTML file.
The “penless” approach also has a website: Penless Chinese Language Learning: A Computer-Assisted Approach. Has anyone tried the software available there?