Category Archives: dictionary

reviews of books related to China and linguistics (2)

Posted on by
Reply

Sino-Platonic Papers has just released online its second compilation of book reviews. Here are the books discussed. (Note: The links below do not lead to the reviews but to other material. Use the link above.)

Invited Reviews

  • William A. Boltz, “The Typological Analysis of the Chinese Script.” A review article of John DeFrancis, Visible Speech, the Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems.
  • Paul Varley and Kumakura Isao, eds., Tea in Japan: Essays on the History of Chanoyu. Reviewed by William R. LaFleur .
  • Vladimir N. Basilov, ed., Nomads of Eurasia. Reviewed by David A. Utz.

Reviews by the Editor

  • “Philosophy and Language.” A review article of Françcois Jullien, Procès ou Création: Une introduction a la pensée des lettrés chinois.

Language and Linguistics

  • W. South Coblin, A Handbook of Eastern Han Sound Glosses.
  • Weldon South Coblin. A Sinologist’s Handlist of Sino-Tibetan Lexical Comparisons.
  • ZHOU Zhenhe and YOU Rujie. Fangyan yu Zhongguo Wenhua [Topolects and Chinese Culture].
  • CHOU Fa-kao. Papers in Chinese Linguistics and Epigraphy.
  • ZENG Zifan. Guangzhouhua Putonghua Duibi Qutan [Interesting Parallels between Cantonese and Mandarin].
  • Luciana Bressan. La Determinazione delle Norme Ortografiche del Pinyin.
  • JIANG Shaoyu and XU Changhua, tr. Zhongguoyu Lishi Wenfa [A Historical Grammar of Modern Chinese] by OTA Tatsuo.
  • McMahon, et al. Expository Writing in Chinese.
  • P. C. T’ung and D. E. Pollard. Colloquial Chinese.
  • Li Sijing, Hanyu “er” Yin Shih Yanjiu [Studies on the History of the “er” Sound in Sinitic].
  • Maurice Coyaud, Les langues dans le monde chinois.
  • Patricia Herbert and Anthony Milner, eds., South-East Asia: Languages and Literatures; A Select Guide.
  • Andrew Large, The Artificial Language Movement.
  • Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Hunan Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind.
  • Vitaly Shevoroshkin, ed., Reconstructing Languages and Cultures.
  • Jan Wind, et al., eds., Studies in Language Origins.

Short Notices

  • A. Kondratov, Sounds and Signs.
  • Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life.
  • Pitfalls of the Tetragraphic Script.

Lexicography and Lexicology

  • MIN Jiaji, et al., comp., Hanyu Xinci Cidian [A Dictionary of New Sinitic Terms]
  • LYU Caizhen, et al., comp., Xiandai Hanyu Nanci Cidian [A Dictionary of Difficult Terms in Modern Sinitic].
  • Tom McArthur, Worlds of Reference: Lexicography, learning and language from the clay tablet to the computer.

A Bouquet of Pekingese Lexicons

  • JIN Shoushen, comp., Beijinghua Yuhui [Pekingese Vocabulary].
  • SONG Xiaocai and MA Xinhua, comp., Beijinghua Ciyu Lishi [Pekingese Expressions with Examples and Explanations] .
  • SONG Xiaocai and MA Xinhua, comp., Beijinghua Yuci Huishi [Pekingese Words and Phrases with Explanations] .
  • FU Min and GAO Aijun, comp., Beijinghua Ciyu (Dialectical Words and Phrases in Beijing).

A Bibliographical Trilogy

  • Paul Fu-mien Yang, comp., Chinese Linguistics: A Selected and Classified Bibliography.
  • Paul Fu-mien Yang, comp., Chinese Dialectology: A Selected and Classified Bibliography.
  • Paul Fu-mien Yang, comp., Chinese Lexicology and Lexicography: A Selected and Classified Bibliography.

Orality and Literacy

  • Jack Goody. The interface between the written and the oral.
  • Jack Goody. The logic of writing and the organization of society.
  • Deborah Tannen, ed., Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy.

Society and Culture

  • Scott Simmie and Bob Nixon, Tiananmen Square.
  • Thomas H. C. Lee, Government Education and Examinations in Sung China.
  • ZHANG Zhishan, tr. and ed., Zhongguo zhi Xing [Record of a Journey to China].
  • LIN Wushu, Monijiao ji Qi Dongjian [Manichaeism and Its Eastward Expansion].
  • E. N. Anderson, The Food of China.
  • K. C. Chang, ed., Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives.
  • Jacques Gemet, China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures.
  • D. E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology.

Short Notice

  • Roben Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe.

In Memoriam
Chang-chen HSU
August 6, 1957 – June 27, 1989

  • Hsu Chang-chen, ed., and tr., Yin-tu hsien-tai hsiao-shuo hsüan [A Selection of Contemporary Indian Fiction].
  • Hsu Chang-chen, T’o-fu tzu-huiyen-chiu (Mastering TOEFL Vocabulary).
  • Hsu Chang-chen, Tsui-chung-yao-te i pai ke Ying-wen tzu-shou tzu-ken (100 English Prefixes and Word Roots).
  • Hsu Chang-chen, Fa-wen tzu-hui chieh-koufen-hsi — tzu-shou yü tzu-ken (Les préfixes et les racines de la langue française).
  • Hsu Chang-chen, comp. and tr., Hsi-yü yü Fo-chiao wen-shih lun-chi (Collection of Articles on Studies of Central Asia, India, and Buddhism).

This is SPP no. 14, from December 1989. The entire text is now online as a 7.3 MB PDF.

See my earlier post for the contents of the first SPP volume of reviews and a link to the full volume.

reviews of books related to China and linguistics

Posted on by
2

Sino-Platonic Papers has just released online its first compilation of book reviews. Here is a list of the books discussed. (Note: The links below do not lead to the reviews but to other material.)

Invited Reviews

  • J. Marshall Unger, The Fifth Generation Fallacy. Reviewed by Wm. C. Hannas
  • Rejoinder by J. Marshall Unger
  • Hashimoto Mantaro, Suzuki Takao, and Yamada Hisao. A Decision for the Chinese Nations — Toward the Future of Kanji (Kanji minzoku no ketsudan — Kanji no mirai ni mukete). Reviewed by Wm. C. Hannas
  • S. Robert Ramsey. The Languages of China. Reviewed by Wm. C. Hannas
  • James H. Cole, Shaohsing. Reviewed by Mark A. Allee
  • Henry Hung-Yeh Tiee, A Reference Grammar of Chinese Sentences. Reviewed by Jerome L. Packard

Reviews by the Editor

  • David Pollack, The Fracture of Meaning
  • Jerry Norman, Chinese
  • N. H. Leon, Character Indexes of Modern Chinese
  • Shiu-ying Hu, comp., An Enumeration of Chinese Materia Medico
  • Donald M. Ayers, English Words from Latin and Greek Elements
  • Chen Gang, comp., A Dictionary of Peking Colloquialisms (Beijing Fangyan Cidian)
  • Dominic Cheung, ed. and tr., The Isle Full of Noises
  • Jonathan Chaves, ed. and tr., The Columbia Book of Later Chinese Poetry
  • Philip R. Bilancia, Dictionary of Chinese Law and Government
  • Charles O. Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China
  • Robert K. Logan, The Alphabet Effect
  • Liu Zhengtan, Gao Mingkai, et al., comp., A Dictionary of Loan Words and Hybrid Words in Chinese (Hanyu Wailai Cidian)
  • The Mandarin Daily Dictionary of Loan Words (Guoyu Ribao Wailaiyu Cidian)
  • Shao Xiantu, Zhou Dingguo, et al., comp., A Dictionary of the Origins of Foreign Place Names (Waiguo Diming Yuyuan Cidian)
  • Tsung-tung Chang, Metaphysik, Erkenntnis und Praktische Philosophie um Chuang-Tzu
  • Irene Bloom, trans, ed., and intro., Knowledge Painfully Acquired: The K’un-chih chi of Lo Ch’in-shun
  • Research Institute for Language Pedagogy of the Peking College of Languages, comp., Frequency Dictionary of Words in Modern Chinese (Xiandai Hanyu Pinlyu Cidian)
  • Liu Yuan, chief compiler, Word List of Modern Mandarin (Xianhi Hanyu Cibiao)
  • The Editing Group of A New English-Chinese Dictionary, comp., A New English-Chinese Dictionary
  • BBC External Business and Development Group, Everyday Mandarin

This is SPP no. 8, from February 1988. The entire text is now online as a 4.2 MB PDF.

Truku dictionary released

Posted on by
1

What is reportedly Taiwan’s first dictionary of language of the Truku (Tàilǔgé 太魯閣) tribe was released yesterday. The Truku are also known as the Sediq. They live mainly in Xiulin, Hualian County, site of the Taroko Gorge, one of Taiwan’s most scenic areas, which takes its name from the tribe (or perhaps vice versa).

The work is based in part on a lexicon compiled in the 1950s, when a pastor at a local church began to translate the Bible into Truku. Six pastors at a local church have been working on the dictionary since 1999.

Words in Truku are created by adding prefix, postfix and midfix to root words. A root word can develop into as many as 40 words, Jiru [Haruq, one of the authors of the dictionary,] explained.

Midfix is added into the middle of a root word by separating the root word.

Taking an example from the dictionary, hakawis a root word meaning “bridge” in Truku, hmhakaw becomes “bridge-building”, mhakaw is a bridge builder, shakaw is the reason to build a bridge and hkagan is the location where the bridge is built.

“Verb tenses and different parts of speech are also constructed by adding prefixes, postfixes or midfixes to a rood word,” Iyuq [Ciyang, another of the authors of the dictionary,] said.

Until recently, the Truku were seen as being part of the Atayal tribe.

sources:

ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese — just released!

Posted on by
1

image of the cover of the 'ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese'The University of Hawai`i Press has just released another title in its excellent ABC Chinese Dictionary Series: the ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese, by Axel Schuessler.

Here is the publisher’s blurb:

This is the first genuine etymological dictionary of Old Chinese written in any language. As such, it constitutes a milestone in research on the evolution of the Sinitic language group. Whereas previous studies have emphasized the structure of the Chinese characters, this pathbreaking dictionary places primary emphasis on the sounds and meanings of Sinitic roots. Based on more than three decades of intensive investigation in primary and secondary sources, this completely new dictionary places Old Chinese squarely within the Sino-Tibetan language family (including close consideration of numerous Tiberto-Burman languages), while paying due regard to other language families such as Austroasiatic, Miao-Yao (Hmong-Mien), and Kam-Tai.

Designed for use by nonspecialists and specialists alike, the dictionary is highly accessible, being arranged in alphabetical order and possessed of numerous innovative lexicographical features. Each entry offers one or more possible etymologies as well as reconstructed pronunciations and other relevant data. Words that are morphologically related are grouped together into “word families” that attempt to make explicit the derivational or other etymological processes that relate them. The dictionary is preceded by a substantive and significant introduction that outlines the author’s views on the linguistic position of Chinese within Asia and details the phonological and morphological properties, to the degree they are known, of the earliest stages of the Chinese language and its ancestor. This introduction, because it both summarizes and synthesizes earlier work and makes several original contributions, functions as a useful reference work all on its own.

The work is 678 pages long and retails for US$62.
ISBN: 978-0-8248-2975-9

Lonely Planet switches back to Hanyu Pinyin for Mandarin phrasebook

Posted on by
3

cover of the 6th edition of the Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebookFor the latest (sixth) edition of its Mandarin phrasebook, Lonely Planet has abandoned its disastrous experiment with its own irregular and downright awful romanization system for Mandarin and switched back to full and exclusive use of Hanyu Pinyin.

No one should even think about buying the fifth edition, which is the one with the weird romanization. Another caveat: The covers for the Pinyin-less fifth edition and the Pinyin-using sixth edition have the exact same illustration; the only difference is in the background color. The fifth edition has a red background, while the sixth (shown here) has a greenish background.

Here’s a more or less random example of the romanization in the fifth edition. The book gives “jèr shìr shér·mer jùn” for what should be written “Zhè shì shénme zhàn?” (“What station is this?”) in Hanyu Pinyin. So in addition to having weird romanization, the fifth edition fails to put a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence and fails to include punctuation at the end. I see this sort of thing a lot and am puzzled by the practice. Capital letters at the beginning of a sentence and punctuation at the end — that’s not too much to ask, is it?

Moreover, sometimes the romanization does not match the Chinese characters! In the example above, for instance, the sentence in Chinese characters should read “这是什么站?” But instead it is written “这是哪个站?”, which would be “Zhè shì nǎge zhàn?” in Hanyu Pinyin. In this case, the two sentences mean basically the same thing. But on the very next page (p. 58) for the question “Do I need to change?” it gives “sēw·yào líng·chyén ma” (Pinyin: Xūyào língqián ma?).

This is a real howler. Somehow those responsible for writing the book managed to mix up two of the meanings of “change” in English. So the phrasebook will have unwary travelers asking not “Do I need to change trains to reach my destination?” but “Do I need coins?” A Chinese person hearing this would probably just answer “no” and ponder how very strange foreigners are to think they might specifically need coins on a train. So woe to the trusting Lonely Planet customer who needs to change trains! Admittedly, foreigners ending up in the wrong part of China as a result of such sloppiness may not have happened too often, since the given romanization is so weird that foreigners could probably not make themselves understood with it and had to point to the Chinese characters. At least the characters manage to give the correct question, Xūyào dǎochē ma? (需要倒车吗?), instead of Xūyào língqián ma? (需要零钱吗?). But that’s hardly enough to make up for such errors.

There are many more errors in the fifth edition. I certainly hope they have been corrected in the sixth; but I didn’t have time the other day in the bookstore to check for sure. If any readers of Pinyin News have a copy of the sixth edition, please let me know; I’d like to check if the Lonely Planet’s hovercraft is still full of eels.

Now that at least the weird romanization has been banished in favor of Hanyu Pinyin (would that Taiwan take that lesson to heart!), it would be good if Lonely Planet could get some other things right, like correcting the misinformation about Mandarin not being a real language but a “dialect.” Some of the word parsing is also incorrect. And the Mandarin-English dictionary should be available in alphabetical order, too, not just stroke order.

some common character slips

Posted on by
Reply

image of '公义广告' with an editor's red pen correcting 义 to 益; the 'correction' is in the originalJoel of Danwei posts on a “public-service announcement” (gongyi guanggao), of sorts, that tells people “Every Chinese person should respect Chinese characters and use Chinese characters properly.” The problem, as the ad puts it, is that “there are a multitude of non-standard uses of Chinese characters in society; mistaken and variant characters are relatively common, harming the elegance and purity of Chinese characters.”

References, especially when written in so-called simplified characters, to the “elegance and purity” of Chinese characters might strike some as lacking in historical perspective if not as downright ironic. Compare, for example, the following:

義 (traditional) and 义 (simplified)

廣 (traditional) and 广 (simplified)

But, that aside, the ad contains an interesting list of 100 instances of commonly miswritten characters. (Whether all of these are really wrong would make a good subject for another post.)

This ad is, as Joel notes, a roundabout way of touting the Xiandai Hanyu cidian (现代汉语词典), which is one of if not the most popular dictionary in China. The fifth edition was issued last year.

Lü Shuxiang (呂叔湘 / 吕叔湘) (1904-1998), the editor in chief of the first edition of this dictionary, was a strong advocate of romanization, as can be seen in his excellent essay Comparing Chinese Characters and a Chinese Spelling Script — an evening conversation on the reform of Chinese characters (漢字和拼音字的 比較 —-漢字改革一 夕談 / 汉字和拼音字的 比较 —-汉字改革一 夕谈). (The English translation of this was made especially for Pinyin Info by Zhang Liqing, one of the associate editors of the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary.)

source: Characters in the public interest, Danwei, December 13, 2006

Tao (Yami) language materials

Posted on by
Reply

Providence University of Taizhong County, Taiwan, has put online a site about the language of the Tao (Yami) people of Taiwan’s Orchid Island (Lanyu). It contains complete the text of a 690-page book on the language. It offers readings in Tao (romanized) with not only interlinear English and Chinese characters but also audio files.

The sample sentences range from the mundane to the unexpected, such as Ji na ni’oya o nitomolok sia ori, ta isáray na jia. (“He wasn’t angry at the person who poked his buttocks, but instead he thanked him.”)

This site, which has interfaces in both English and Mandarin, is a terrific resource. Check it out.

source: Women compile dictionary and grammar text for Yami language, Taipei Times, October 23, 2006

early British article on Chinese characters

Posted on by
4

Matt at No-sword tells of the welcome news that many back issues of the journals of the Royal Society are now online. What makes this particularly interesting is that the Royal Society has been publishing these since at least 1665.

So I dug around and found “Some Observations, and Conjectures concerning the Chinese Characters,” which dates from the late 1600s. It was published in an issue of Philosophical Transactions that contains not one but two articles by Edmond Halley. Wow.

The article on Chinese characters, however, is in many places opaque — not that that’s really a big surprise considering this was written more than 300 years ago. The author is intrigued by the notion of a universal artificial language. He concludes, “Now as by such a Language the Character might be made Effable without Musical Tones or Difficult Aspirations, so had we Dictionarys of the Signification of the Characters, we might as soon learn the Chinese Character, as we can Latine, or any other Language to be learnt by Book, and not by Speaking.”

This appears to be an early example of several myths about Chinese characters, such as the ideographic myth, which was first debunked in the West about 150 years later by Peter DuPonceau.

The author also tells of what he believes is the “true design” of the Yi Ching (Yìj?ng ??):

both the Chinese and European Commentators assert it to be a Conjuring Book, or a Book to tell Fortunes by, and to be made use of by the Chinese for that purpose; whereas by the small Specimen I have seen of it, I conceive it to contain the whole Ground, Rule or Grammer, of their Character, Language and Philosophy, and that by the understanding of it, the Foundation and Rule of their Language and Character, may be without much difficulty Deciphered and Understood.

I don’t think that particular line of thought got very far.

The article concludes with an illustration that mainly features numbers in Chinese characters. What makes this particularly interesting, at least for me, is the addition of romanization. I have rotated the image counter-clockwise to make it easier to read the romanization. Note especially the use of the letter x. (Click the image to see it slightly enlarged.)

click for slightly larger image, mostly of numbers in Chinese characters and romanization

sources and further readings: