Conference dates: October 28-29, 2006
Deadline for abstracts: May 31, 2006
Deadline for full papers: August 31, 2006
Location: Tainan
For more information, see 2006 Conference on Taiwanese Literature.
via Lomaji
Conference dates: October 28-29, 2006
Deadline for abstracts: May 31, 2006
Deadline for full papers: August 31, 2006
Location: Tainan
For more information, see 2006 Conference on Taiwanese Literature.
via Lomaji
Conference dates: September 9-10, 2006
location: Taipei
Deadline for proposals: May 31
Deadline for full papers: July 31
For more information, see 2006(???)??????????????.
via Lomaji
Danwei has picked up on a story of someone in China with the surname of Xiè being issued an air ticket under the name Jiě. The reason behind the mixup is that the character used for this woman’s name, 解, is most often pronounced “jie,” as in jiěfàng (liberate; emancipate), jiějué (solve; resolve; settle), liǎojiě (understand; comprehend; find out; acquaint oneself with), and jiěshì (expound; interpret; analyze). Thus, it is but one of the many Chinese characters that has more than one pronunciation.
When she and some of her relatives went to the travel agency to get the matter cleared up, however, an argument broke out. Before long, people from the travel agency were using poles to beat the family.
(Maybe not my strongest entry, but there was no way I was going to pass up a chance to post on a story titled “Is personal safety another argument for Chinese romanization?”)
sources:
Sorry for my lack of posts recently. My Internet connection at home has been out for more than a week. I’m writing this from work during my lunch break.
While reading Latin or the Empire of a Sign (title in the original French: Le Latin ou l’empire d’un signe XVIe-XXe Siècle), by Françoise Waquet, I came across mention of several proposals from the seventeenth century and later for the creation of “Latin towns.”
The originators of these projects started from a double observation: on the one hand the weakness of Latin after a long and difficult learning process; on the other, the speed with which a child suddenly immersed in a foreign environment learns to speak its language. In 1621 Antoine de Laval suggested that the King of France “create a Latin colony for Monseigneur the Dauphin his son and for all the princes, great lords, nobles and other children of good houses”: the exclusive use of Latin and the “pleasant” methods of instruction that would be adopted would guarantee rapid and perfect mastery of spoken Latin. Along similar lines, but more modest, was Jean Cécile Frey’s proposal for a Latin college which children would enter at the age of two; there, along with their masters and servants, they would use nothing but the Latin language in conversation and play. Thus at the age of five they would speak “more Latin, and in a more Attic fashion” than children who had spent ten painful years at school. Daniel Georg Morhof believed that it would take about twenty years to establish a Latin town where even the artisans would speak Latin; to get started all that would be needed were six or seven good Latinists, who would teach Latin to poor children of both sexes; these would then learn a profession; they in their turn would then teach Latin to their apprentices, and in this way a Latin society would take shape
Of course, nothing came of these proposals for Latin — or any of the others to follow for that language. The concept of language villages for English, though — that’s another story.
Another anecdote:
Gasparo Gozzi noted that at Padua, in the unanimous judgement of the professors, hardly a tenth of the students — perhaps thirty out of 300 — “had a middling understanding of the Latin language”. How could they follow lectures in an unintelligible language? “It is true,” Gozzi added, “that after such lectures, the students go to hear the explanation at a private school.”
I stumbled across this book while browsing in a bookstore and been having a lot of fun reading it, and not just because of the parallels between the situation with Latin and those of Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese) and Chinese characters. Highly recommended.
Guangming Ribao has a long piece this week on Zhou Youguang, one of the main people behind the creation of Hanyu Pinyin: Zhōu Yǒuguāng: bǎisuì xīngchén, wénhuá cànrán (周有光:百岁星辰 文华灿然, Guāngmíng Rìbào, April 23, 2006). This also has lots of photos.
For autobiographical material by him in English, see A devotion that goes beyond words, from the South China Morning Post in the late 1990s.
For a selection of writings by him, see The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts (中国语文的时代演进 Zhōngguó yǔwén de shídài yǎnjìn).
Aborigines from Kangke (寒溪) Village, who are a branch of northern Taiwan’s Atayal tribe, protested last week against the Council of Indigenous People’s tribal language examination policy, requesting that the Kangke dialect be included.
The Kangke dialect has long been different from other Atayal languages because it was influenced by the Japanese language during the period of Japanese occupation.
The council plans to begin tribal language examinations next year, yet the Kangke dialect is not listed as one of the official dialects of the Atayal tribe, said Fang Hsi-en (方喜恩), an indigenous rights activist. In the examination policy, the Kangke dialect is incorporated into the Squliq and the C’uli’ dialects.
Fang said that to pass the tribal language exams, students in Kangke Village must now study either the Squliq or the C’uli’ dialects using a romanized spelling system because the Kangke dialect is nothing like them.
The scores on the language exam (which has no writing, by the way) can have a real effect on people’s lives. Under an affirmative action program set up by the Ministry of Education, members of Taiwan’s tribes are entitled to have their high school and college entrance exam scores raised by 25 percent. Under a policy expected to be made effective next year, those who pass a tribal language exam would have an additional 10 percent added to their scores.
Fang said that the system was unfair for Kangke students because the council did not classify their dialect as an official one. He said the tribal language examination should not be linked with entrance exams scores in any way.
Lee Su-min (李淑敏), the head of the Parent-Teacher Association at Kangke Elementary School, said that such a classification also stunted the preservation of the dialect and the Kangke culture….
In response to the protests, Wang Chiui (汪秋一), the director of the Department of Education and Culture at the council, said that the tribal language examination policy is still being discussed with the education ministry.
But the goal of the language examination was to promote tribal language education, Wang said.
Wang reminded the protestors that the language exam was in fact oral and that he would request that the council include the Kangke dialect in the exam.
If included, a representative from the village will also be invited to be an oral examiner, he said.
I wish someone had asked some of the linguists at Academia Sinica about this. Just how different is Kangke from what is currently officially recognized as Atayal? What’s the extent of the influence of Japanese on the language? Is it just a matter of some loan words? How many?
sources:
The Taipei City Government has released the results of a Mandarin proficiency exam administered to 31,145 sixth-grade students.
According to the results, more than 40 percent of those tested are unable to use so-called radicals (bùshǒu, 部首) to find Chinese characters in dictionaries. This, of course, comes as no great surprise to me. Ah, for the wisdom of the alphabetical arrangement of the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary!
Furthermore, the Taipei Times reports that the person in charge of the testing, Datong Elementary School Principal Chen Qin-yin, said that although most students received good grades, the essay test revealed weaknesses in writing ability, including a limited use of adjectives.
Reading that sort of thing sets off all sorts of alarms in my head. First, adjectives are the junk food of writing. Even worse, though, I suspect that Chen is talking not about any ol’ adjectives but rather stock phrases either in or reminiscent of Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese). Larding a text with clichés is the sort of thing that passes for good writing here. And if, for example, students don’t throw in a zhi in the place of a de often enough their grades will suffer.
The language reforms springing from the May 4 movement have been tremendously important. But more than eighty years later the job still isn’t finished!
sources:
More from the colorful-superficiality school of education:
On March 30, Taipei City Mayor Ma Ying-jeou attended a teaching demonstration. The event features an indigenous language class for elementary school students.
The Mayor appeared at the occasion dressed in indigenous attire. He greeted the audience in Hakka, Taiwanese, and indigenous languages.
Mayor Ma noted that the variety in Taiwan’s indigenous culture is a blessing given by God. It has a positive effect upon the development of local society by making us more aware of the importance of diversity. However, it is not an easy task to preserve all of the indigenous languages. The Indigenous Peoples Commission promised to continue its effort in preserving these valuable treasures by committing more resources in the field of education.
Ma hopes that indigenous students will be able to learn simple greetings in their mother tongue, and even sing a song or two in that language. This will be a great help to preservation efforts.
(emphasis added)
Ahem.
And this is from Ma’s own Taipei City Hall, not a source with an axe to grind against him.
source: Mayor Speaks on Indigenous Language Education, Taipei City Government Web site, April 3, 2006, accessed April 21, 2006