Download or read book The Chinese Language written by John DeFrancis and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1986-03-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "DeFrancis's book is first rate. It entertains. It teaches. It demystifies. It counteracts popular ignorance as well as sophisticated (cocktail party) ignorance. Who could ask for anything more? There is no other book like it. ... It is one of a kind, a first, and I would not only buy it but I would recommend it to friends and colleagues, many of whom are visiting China now and are adding 'two-week-expert' ignorance to the two kinds that existed before. This is a book for everyone." --Joshua A. Fishman, research professor of social sciences, Yeshiva University, New York "Professor De Francis has produced a work of great effectiveness that should appeal to a wide-ranging audience. It is at once instructive and entertaining. While being delighted by the flair of his novel approach, the reader will also be led to ponder on some of the most fundamental problems concerning the relations between written languages and spoken languages. Specifically, he will be served a variety of information on the languages of East Asia, not as dry pedantic facts, but as appealing tidbits that whet the intellectual appetite. The expert will find much to reflect on in this book, for Professor DeFrancis takes nothing for granted." --William S.Y. Wang, professor of linguistics, University of California at Berkeley

Download or read book The Languages of China Before the Chinese written by Terrien de Lacouperie and published by . This book was released on 1887 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book China written by Tongdong Bai and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-11 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China is a rising economic and political power. But what is the message of this rise? Tongdong Bai addresses this increasingly pressing question by examining the rich history of political theories and practices from China's past, and showing how it impacts upon the present. Chinese political traditions are often viewed negatively as 'authoritarian' (in contrast with 'Western' democratic traditions), but the historical reality is much more complex and there is a need to understand the political values shaping China's rise. Going beyond this, Bai argues that the debates between China's two main political theories - Confucianism and Legalism - anticipate themes in modern political thought and hence offer valuable resources for thinking about contemporary political problems. Part of Zed's World Political Theories series, this groundbreaking work offers a remarkable insight into the political history and thought of a nation that is becoming increasingly powerful on the world stage.

Download or read book Language Policy in the People s Republic of China written by Minglang Zhou and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2004-08-27 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language matters in China. It is about power, identity, opportunities, and, above all, passion and nationalism. During the past five decades China’s language engineering projects transformed its linguistic landscape, affecting over one billion people’s lives, including both the majority and minority populations. The Han majority have been juggling between their home vernaculars and the official speech, Putonghua – a speech of no native speakers – and reading their way through a labyrinth of the traditional, simplified, and Pinyin (Roman) scripts. Moreover, the various minority groups have been struggling between their native languages and Chinese, maintaining the former for their heritages and identities and learning the latter for quality education and socioeconomic advancement. The contributors of this volume provide the first comprehensive scrutiny of this sweeping linguistic revolution from three unique perspectives. First, outside scholars critically question the parities between constitutional rights and actual practices and between policies and outcomes. Second, inside policy practitioners review their own project involvements and inside politics, pondering over missteps, undergoing soul-searching, and theorizing their personal experiences. Third, scholars of minority origin give inside views of policy implementations and challenges in their home communities. The volume sheds light on the complexity of language policy making and implementing as well as on the politics and ideology of language in contemporary China.

Download or read book A Study of the Bai Minjia Language Along Historical Lines written by Grace Claire Wiersma and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Kingdom of Characters Pulitzer Prize Finalist written by Jing Tsu and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.

Download or read book Li Bai Du Fu written by Zu-yan Chen and published by Cheng & Tsui. This book was released on 2008 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Chinese Grammar Made Easy written by Jianhua Bai and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese Grammar Made Easy presents instructors with innovative and classroom-tested techniques for teaching Chinese grammar. Its communicative, meaning-based approach helps teachers to engage students by bringing grammar into a practical, real-life context. As a reference for daily teaching, this book discusses 150 of the most fundamental and frequently used grammar points that students need to learn in order to communicate successfully. Each grammar point is accompanied by various learning activities to engage students and provide structured practice.

Download or read book An Anatomy of Chinese written by Perry Link and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-18 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Cultural Revolution, Mao exhorted the Chinese people to “smash the four olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Yet when the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square chanted “We want to see Chairman Mao,” they unknowingly used a classical rhythm that dates back to the Han period and is the very embodiment of the four olds. An Anatomy of Chinese reveals how rhythms, conceptual metaphors, and political language convey time-honored meanings of which Chinese speakers themselves may not be consciously aware, and contributes to the ongoing debate over whether language shapes thought, or vice versa. Perry Link’s inquiry into the workings of Chinese reveals convergences and divergences with English, most strikingly in the area of conceptual metaphor. Different spatial metaphors for consciousness, for instance, mean that English speakers wake up while speakers of Chinese wake across. Other underlying metaphors in the two languages are similar, lending support to theories that locate the origins of language in the brain. The distinction between daily-life language and official language has been unusually significant in contemporary China, and Link explores how ordinary citizens learn to play language games, artfully wielding officialese to advance their interests or defend themselves from others. Particularly provocative is Link’s consideration of how Indo-European languages, with their preference for abstract nouns, generate philosophical puzzles that Chinese, with its preference for verbs, avoids. The mind-body problem that has plagued Western culture may be fundamentally less problematic for speakers of Chinese.

Download or read book A STUDY OF THE SADU LANGUAGE written by BAI Bibo and published by American Academic Press. This book was released on 2016-01-06 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A STUDY OF THE SADU LANGUAGE provides linguists with intriguing data conducive to interlingual comparisons and particularly, to the study of Generative Linguistics that aims to discover Universal Grammar and Language Faculty of human kind. It offers readers a glimpse of China’s research in the field of ethnic minority languages and does good to linguistic exchanges between China and other countries. The Sadu language is a newly discovered yet seriously endangered one spoken by an ethnic group in China’s southwestern Yunnan Province. It has a small number of 1505 speakers who claim themselves to be Sadu though officially the group is taken as part of the Bai people. It differs not only from Bai, however, but also from the southern dialects of the Yiish branch spoken by the neighboring communities, such as Nisu, Nasu, and Shansu.

Download or read book Chinese Literature written by Dan Yao and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-09 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible, illustrated introduction takes the reader through the rich Chinese literary tradition from ancient times to the twentieth century, exploring poetry, drama, opera, novels, short stories, the modern media and the authors who created these cultural treasures.

Download or read book Ethnic History and Language Typology in Western China written by Nathan Loggins and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The following dissertation examines the language history of areas historically lying along the China-Tibet frontier, namely Amdo, Kham and the Dali region of northwest Yunnan. It draws from a wide and diverse literature related to descriptive and theoretical linguistics, ethnology of the many peoples in the region and historical scholarship concerning their settlement and encounters with the Chinese State and Han from roughly the Han era to the early 20th century. More specifically, this dissertation takes at its core three case studies on local languages: the Xining dialect of Chinese in Qinghai, the Daohua language of Yajiang County in western Sichuan, and the Bai language spoken by the Bai people in Dali. Besides being spoken in geographically adjacent regions, along the largely autonomous borders of the Chinese empire, these languages have in common that they draw a majority of their lexicon from Sinitic, and all have been variously described as creoles, mixed languages, or as varieties of Sinitic by different linguists examining their lexicons and grammatical structures. This study attempts to reconcile those differing viewpoints, while at the same time compiling the relevant descriptive information about each language’s historical, ethnic, and linguistic environment. All three are a product of their specific settings, and what gives each language its particular flavor is precisely the way it has incorporated non-Sinitic elements (or been constituted from them) into its phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical profile. Judging from the accumulated evidence, the conclusions here are that Xining appears to be one of several regional Sinitic varieties, restructured via contact by its multilingual setting, while Daohua appears more like a classic mixed language, and Bai a historically Tibeto-Burman language. More generally, this dissertation broadly examines several linguistic questions relevant to hypothesizing the origins, development and classification of each language, including those related to the formation of language areas, the typology of contact-based languages and their relationship to genetic language families, and issues of relative complexity in language contact settings. It also pursues historical questions concerning possible avenues for language contact to have occurred in Amdo, Kham and Dali, and how potential conclusions are complicated by historically shifting and fluid ethnic affiliations. To this end, drawing together a broad range of published sources, the text provides historical overviews, linguistic descriptions of over a dozen Sino-Tibetan and Altaic languages, and contextualized accounts of the focal languages in the case study chapters. In calling for more holistic treatments of language history couched in ethno-historical reality, the ultimate conclusions and analyses presented here bear on the nature and applicability of typological and genetic classification, the goals of historical linguistic methodology, and the implication for using linguistics in other disciplines, such as historical and ethnological studies.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of the World s Minorities written by Carl Skutsch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 3103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of minorities involves the difficult issues of rights, justice, equality, dignity, identity, autonomy, political liberties, and cultural freedoms. The A-Z Encyclopedia presents the facts, arguments, and areas of contention in over 560 entries in a clear, objective manner. For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Encyclopedia of the World's Minorities website.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics written by William S.-Y. Wang and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics offers a broad and comprehensive coverage of the entire field from a multi-disciplinary perspective. All chapters are contributed by leading scholars in their respective areas. This Handbook contains eight sections: history, languages and dialects, language contact, morphology, syntax, phonetics and phonology, socio-cultural aspects and neuro-psychological aspects. It provides not only a diachronic view of how languages evolve, but also a synchronic view of how languages in contact enrich each other by borrowing new words, calquing loan translation and even developing new syntactic structures. It also accompanies traditional linguistic studies of grammar and phonology with empirical evidence from psychology and neurocognitive sciences. In addition to research on the Chinese language and its major dialect groups, this handbook covers studies on sign languages and non-Chinese languages, such as the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan.

Download or read book Understanding Chinese Fantasy Genres written by Jeremy Bai and published by Jeremy Bai. This book was released on 2020-12-16 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you love Chinese fantasy? Do you want to understand it better? Maybe you're a longtime fan who would like a handy reference guide. Maybe you're new to the genre and don't have the time to watch hours of videos to catch up. Or maybe you're an aspiring writer hoping to create authentic cultivation or xianxia content. Regardless, this is the book for you. Here's why. I took some of the most popular videos in my Chinese Fantasy Novel FAQ YouTube series and put them into written form. 25 chapters, each packed with vital language and cultural information. I've also added examples from existing Chinese fantasy novel translations to make things more interesting, relevant, and understandable. Get it now! If you want to know exactly what content is inside, check out this complete chapter list: Chapter 1: The Industry and the Genres Chapter 2: Clans and Sects Chapter 3: Alcohol and “Wine” Chapter 4: Harems and Polygamy Chapter 5: Sworn Brotherhood Chapter 6: Courting Death Chapter 7: “Beat You to Death” Chapter 8: Forms of Address Among Family Members Chapter 9: Forms of Address in Sects and Other Organizations Chapter 10: “I, Your Father” Chapter 11: Confusion About Stars and Planets Chapter 12: Differences between Daoist Magics, Divine Abilities, and Magical Techniques Chapter 13: "Devils" and "Demons" Chapter 14: Clones Chapter 15: Spirit Stones Chapter 16: Qi Deviation, Fire Deviation, and Cultivation Deviation, etc.? Chapter 17: Nascent Souls Chapter 18: Breakthroughs and Bottlenecks Chapter 19: Why Immortals aren't "Immortal" Chapter 20: What is Cultivation? Chapter 21: The Ruthlessness and Brutality of the Cultivation World Chapter 22: What is the Jianghu? Chapter 23: Unheroic Heroes? Chapter 24: Unrealistic Sizes and Distances Chapter 25: Why Immortal Cultivators often don’t “act their age” Appendix 1: List of Chinese terms with pinyin Appendix 2: References

Download or read book The Chinese Language written by Daniel Kane and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chinese Language is a brief introduction to the main characteristics of Chinese, written to be accessible to beginning students as well as anyone with a general interest in Chinese language and culture. Not a language-learning title as such, The Chinese Language provides a demystifying overview of Chinese from a linguistic, historical and social perspective. Providing basic information such as where Chinese is spoken, the history and earliest written records, regional variations, and a description of the writing system, The Chinese Language provides an excellent starting point for anyone intrigued by the history and basics of Chinese language.

Download or read book High speed Rail An Analysis Of The Chinese Innovation System written by Bai Gao and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2020-12-21 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: High-speed railway system is interdisciplinary subject that covers infrastructure, mobile equipment, traction power supply, communication signal, operation and maintenance, and transportation organization. The purpose of this book is to give readers a basic understanding of the technology behind of China's high-speed rail network.In this book, the author mainly focusses on the innovations of products and processes, especially product innovation, which involves the selection of technology route, technology system and technology source. Therefore, the innovation in HST here refers to the selection of technology route, technology system and technology source, as well as, the new products developed and manufactured according to the selection. With the in-depth study, the author would like to provide outlook for development in this area in the next stage.