Category Archives: China

reviews of books related to China and linguistics (2)

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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

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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.

Mandarin’s ‘four languages’

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Another back issue of Sino-Platonic Papers has been released: The Four Languages of “Mandarin”, by Robert M. Sanders of the University of Hawaii.

Here’s how it begins:

Many hours have been spent at scholarly meetings and many pages of academic writing have been expended discussing what is to be considered acceptable Mandarin. Very often these discussions degenerate into simplistic and narrow-minded statements such as “That’s not the way we say it in …!” or “We had better ask someone from Peking.” Objectively speaking, these disagreements on style reflect a less-than-rigorous definition of which type of Mandarin each party is referring to. Because there has been a failure by all concerned to define fully the linguistic and socio-linguistic parameters of their assumed language(s), Mandarin oranges are often unwittingly being compared with Mandarin apples. This paper is a preliminary attempt to articulate the fundamental differences distinguishing four major language types subsumed under the single English heading ‘Mandarin’. Though the Chinese terms putonghua/guoyu, guanhua, and difanghua help to accentuate the conceptual distinctions distinguishing our four types of Mandarin, it is arguable that even Chinese scholars are not immune from confusing one language with another.

Sanders goes on to indentify and discuss what he calls

  1. Idealized Mandarin
  2. Imperial Mandarin
  3. Geographical Mandarin
  4. Local Mandarin

The entire text is now online for free in both HTML and PDF (875 KB) formats.

Professor Sanders is also one of the associate editors of the excellent ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary.

possible Western cultural innovations in early China

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Here’s another just-released issue from the archives of Sino-Platonic Papers: Western Cultural Innovations in China, 1200 B.C. (July 1989), by Edward L. Shaughnessy of the University of Chicago.

It begins:

In a recent article on the history of the chariot in China, I attempted to show that a West Asian prototype was introduced to the Bronze Age Shang culture of the north China plain at about 1200 B.C. I used archaeological evidence, both artifactual and figured, to suggest that the route of transmission lay across the broad plains of Central Asia and the south Siberian steppe, passing finally through the grasslands and loess plateau of Mongolia, Ningxia and northern Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces, the area traditionally referred to as the Ordos. In the course of tracing this transmission of the chariot, I discovered several other innovations in the Shang culture of this time that seemed to be introduced from the same general direction. In this brief note I will simply mention, without attempting to provide complete substantiation, the most notable of these innovations, in the hope that this may stimulate consideration of the possibility that even in antiquity Chinese culture was greatly enriched through its contacts with the West.

The entire text is now online for free as a 790 KB PDF.

for the record: remarks by the premier of the PRC State Council

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Here’s the official word by PRC Premier Wēn Jiābǎo (温家宝/溫家寶) on what the PRC will do regarding education. I’m putting this here mainly for later reference.

We put education high on the development agenda. A total of 184 billion yuan was allocated by both central and local governments to fund rural compulsory education, enabling us to pay tuition and miscellaneous fees for the 52 million rural students receiving compulsory education throughout the western region and in some areas in the central region, provide free textbooks to 37.3 million students from poor families and grant living allowances to 7.8 million students staying in dormitories. Of the 410 targeted counties, 317 reached the goals of making nine-year compulsory education generally available and basically eliminating illiteracy among young and middle-aged adults. The proportion of the target population attaining these two goals in the western region increased to 96% from the 77% of 2003. The central government spent 9 billion yuan over the past three years building facilities for 7,651 rural boarding schools. Eight billion yuan was spent to develop modern primary and middle school distance education for rural areas. The project covers over 80% of the rural primary and middle schools in the central and western regions and enables over 100 million students to have access to high-quality education resources. New enrollment at secondary vocational schools totaled 7.41 million and total attendance reached 18.09 million. Total attendance at institutions of higher education reached 25 million and the gross enrollment ratio rose to 22%….

Education is the bedrock of China’s development, and fairness in education is an important form of social fairness. We need to make education a strategic priority and accelerate the development of all types of education at all levels. The overall goal is to expand the availability of compulsory education and consolidate progress already made, accelerate the development of vocational education and strive to improve the quality of higher education. This year, we will completely stop collecting tuition and miscellaneous fees from all rural students receiving compulsory education. This will ease the financial burden of 150 million rural households with children attending primary and middle schools. We will continue to provide free textbooks for poor rural students receiving compulsory education and living allowances for those staying in dormitories. We will improve the mechanism for ensuring continuing funding for rural compulsory education. This year’s government allocations for rural compulsory education total 223.5 billion yuan, up 39.5 billion yuan from last year. During implementation of the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, 10 billion yuan will be allocated from the central government budget to upgrade rural junior middle school facilities. Local governments should also make corresponding increases in funding in this area. In addition, we will continue working to solve the problems that students from poor urban families and children of rural migrant workers in cities have in receiving compulsory education. This year, we will ensure that the plan to make nine-year compulsory education generally available and basically eliminate illiteracy among young and middle-aged adults in the western region and the modern rural primary and middle school distance education project achieve their final objectives. We will work to ensure that all children are able to afford and attend school. We are definitely capable of reaching this goal. We need to attach more importance to developing vocational education, which is a major reform and historic task to truly make education available to all members of society. The focus of this effort will be on developing secondary vocational education and strengthening the vocational education and training network for urban and rural areas. We will deepen reform of the management of vocational education by setting up a mechanism that combines the participation of industry, enterprises and schools and promoting models of school operation that integrate work and study and enhance cooperation between schools and enterprises. We will accelerate reform of education and teaching in higher education with the focus on improving quality, keep the scale of enrollment relatively stable, increase efforts to develop leading disciplines and universities, make innovations in the model for producing capable personnel and improve the mix of capable personnel being produced in order to produce large numbers of outstanding personnel. We will support and standardize the development of non-publicly funded schools and improve conditions for non-government entities to run schools.

Source: Report on the Work of the Government delivered by Premier Wen Jiabao at the Fifth Session of the Tenth National People’s Congress on March 5, 2007, via Xinhua, March 16, 2007

‘dialect’ and ‘Chinese’ from a linguistic point of view

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Another back issue of Sino-Platonic Papers has been released, this one of particular relevance to the themes of this site: What Is a Chinese “Dialect/Topolect”? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms (1991), by Professor Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

Here is the abstract:

Words like fangyan, putonghua, Hanyu, Guoyu, and Zhongwen have been the source of considerable perplexity and dissension among students of Chinese language(s) in recent years. The controversies they engender are compounded enormously when attempts are made to render these terms into English and other Western languages. Unfortunate arguments have erupted, for example, over whether Taiwanese is a Chinese language or a Chinese dialect. In an attempt to bring some degree of clarity and harmony to the demonstrably international fields of Sino-Tibetan and Chinese linguistics, this article examines these and related terms from both historical and semantic perspectives. By being careful to understand precisely what these words have meant to whom and during which period of time, needlessly explosive situations may be defused and, an added benefit, perhaps the beginnings of a new classification scheme for Chinese language(s) may be achieved. As an initial step in the right direction, the author proposes the adoption of “topolect” as an exact, neutral translation of fangyan.

The entire text is now online as a 2.2 MB PDF: What Is a Chinese “Dialect/Topolect”? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms.

Strongly recommended.

illiteracy in China on the rise: PRC illiteracy eradication office head

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Gāo Xuéguì (高学贵 / 高學貴), the director of the illiteracy eradication office of the basic education department of China’s Ministry of Education, has acknowledged that illiteracy in China increased between 2000 and 2005, in large part because people are losing the literacy they were said to have acquired. Although the figures for literacy are still inflated, the admission is a refreshing bit of directness from a government not known for its willingness to release bad news about itself.

Here’s the full article:

The number of illiterates in China grew by more than 30 million between 2000 and 2005 despite its efforts to eradicate illiteracy, a senior official has said.

Though over 9.75 million adults learnt to read and write during this period, the number of illiterates in the country rose to 116 million, said Gao Xuegui, director of the illiteracy eradication office of the basic education department of the Ministry of Education.

The number of illiterates in China accounted for 11.3 percent of the world’s total in 2000, right after India, and 15.01 percent in 2005. That means many people who had come out of the illiteracy trap forgot what they learnt.

“The situation is worrying,” Gao said. “Illiteracy is not only a matter of education, but also has a great social impact.”

China defines literacy as the ability to read and write at least 1,500 Chinese characters.

“Given the increase in the number of illiterates, the country may not be able to meet its target of a 50-percent reduction in its illiterate population by 2015 as projected by UNESCO,” said China National Institute for Educational Research scholar Guo Hongxia.

A worrying factor, as Gao said, is the changing demography of illiterates in the country.

For instance, the western regions now have only about 40 million illiterates. In contrast, the central and eastern parts, which have a high population density, account for two-thirds of them, with 9.63 million being in Shandong alone.

A major reason for the rebound in the illiterate population is the changing perception of knowledge in the market economy. Farmers today can earn money by working as laborers, too. So they tend to ignore the nine-year compulsory education despite having access to it, Gao said.

Another factor that ironically contributed to the increase in the illiteracy rate is the success of the illiteracy eradication campaign of the previous years because that led many local governments to “eradicate” the departments in charge of the program itself, Gao said.

But despite the setback, the illiteracy eradication office is determined to fulfill its mission, for which it’s seeking 100 million-yuan ($12.9 million) this year.

The existing budget of 8 million yuan ($1.03 million), it says, is not enough because it allots a paltry 0.07 yuan (or less than 1 cent) to each illiterate person.

The extra money, the office says, will be used to build a team of illiteracy eradication professionals on government payroll and to offer subsidy to volunteers.

Projects to eradicate illiteracy among 80 million women and the ethnic minorities are already under way.

But some local governments haven’t shown a long-term commitment to the program, with a few even trying to bend the rules, said Wu Qing, honorary councilor of Beijing Cultural Development Centre for Rural Women, an NGO that helps with the literacy campaign.

source: Ghost of illiteracy returns to haunt country, China Daily, April 2, 2007

Why ‘Beijing’ was spelled ‘Peking’

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Sino-Platonic Papers has just released one of its popular back issues as a free PDF. This one, no. 19 (June 1990), deals with the common question of What’s up with that “Peking” spelling, anyway?

As Bosat Man explains in “Backhill / Peking / Beijing”:

The three main contributing factors to the discrepancy between Peking and Beijing are:

  1. a plethora of romanizations
  2. a welter of local pronunciations, and
  3. phonological change over time.

He then goes into detail, especially about the third point. The whole work is just six pages, single spaced. Here it is: “Backhill / Peking / Beijing” (1 MB PDF).