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EBookClubs

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Book The Chinese Language

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

Book Languages  Scripts  and Chinese Texts in East Asia

Download or read book Languages Scripts and Chinese Texts in East Asia written by Peter Francis Kornicki and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia is a wide-ranging study of vernacularization in East Asia--not only China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, but also societies that no longer exist, such as the Tangut and Khitan empires. Peter Kornicki takes the reader from the early centuries of the common era, when the Chinese script was the only form of writing and Chinese Buddhist, Confucian, and medical texts spread throughout East Asia, through the centuries when vernacular scripts evolved, right up to the end of the nineteenth century when nationalism created new roles for vernacular languages and vernacular scripts. Through an examination of oral approaches to Chinese texts, it shows how highly-valued Chinese texts came to be read through the prism of the vernaculars and ultimately to be translated. This long process has some parallels with vernacularization in Europe, but a crucial difference is that literary Chinese was, unlike Latin, not a spoken language. As a consequence, people who spoke different East Asian vernaculars had no means of communicating in speech, but they could communicate silently by means of written conversation in literary Chinese; a further consequence is that within each society Chinese texts assumed vernacular garb: in classes and lectures, Chinese texts were read and declaimed in the vernaculars. What happened in the nineteenth century and why are there still so many different scripts in East Asia? How and why were Chinese texts dethroned, and what replaced them? These are some of the questions addressed in Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia.

Book The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization written by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 1013 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying a wide range of languages and approaches, this Handbook is an essential resource for all those interested in language standards and standard languages. It not only explores the standardization of national European languages, it also offers fresh insights on the standardization of minoritized, indigenous and stateless languages.

Book Language Change in East Asia

Download or read book Language Change in East Asia written by T. E. McAuley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book adopts a wide focus on the range of East Asian languages, in both their pre-modern and modern forms, within the specific topic area of language change. It contains sections on dialect studies, contact linguistics, socio-linguistics and syntax/phonology and deals with all three major languages of East Asia: Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Individual chapters cover pre-Sino-Japanese phonology, nominalizers in Chinese, Japanese and Korean; Japanese loanwords in Taiwan Mandarin; changes in Korean honorifics; the tense and aspect system of Japanese; and language policy in Japan. The book will be of interest to linguists working on East Asian languages, and will be of value to a range of general linguists working in comparative or historical linguistics, socio-linguistics, language typology and language contact.

Book East Asian Sign Linguistics

Download or read book East Asian Sign Linguistics written by Kazumi Matsuoka and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-12-05 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is one of the first references of linguistic research of sign languages in East Asia (including China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). The book includes the basic descriptions of aspects of Chinese (Shanghai, Tianjin) sign language, Hong Kong Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language, Korean Sign Language, Taiwanese Sign Language, and Tibetan Sign Language. Table of contents Introduction Kazumi Matsuoka, Onno Crasborn and Marie Coppola Part 1: Manuals: Numerals, classifiers, modal verbs Historical relationships between numeral signs in Japanese Sign Language, South Korean Sign Language and Taiwan Sign Language Keiko Sagara Phonological processes in complex word formation in Shanghai Sign Language Shengyun Gu Classifiers and gender in Korean Sign Language Ki-Hyun Nam and Kang-Suk Byu Causative alternation in Tianjin Sign Language Jia He and Gladys Tan Epistemic modal verbs and negation in Japanese Sign Language Kazumi Matsuoka, Uiko Yano and Kazumi Maegawa Part 2: Non-manuals and space The Korean Sign Language (KSL) corpus and its first application on a study about mouth actions Sung-Eun Hong, Seong Ok Won, Hyunhwa Lee, Kang-Suk Byun and Eun-Young Lee Negative polar questions in Hong Kong Sign Language Felix Sze and Helen Le Analyzing head nod expressions by L2 learners of Japanese Sign Language: A comparison with native Japanese Sign Language signers Natsuko Shimotani Composite utterances in Taiwan Sign Language Shiou-fen Su Time and timelines in Tibetan Sign Language (TSL) interactions in Lhasa Theresia Hofer

Book Asia s Orthographic Dilemma

Download or read book Asia s Orthographic Dilemma written by William C. Hannas and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1997-06-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the advent of computers and the rise of East Asian economies, the complicated character-based writing systems of East Asia have reached a stage of crisis that may be described as truly millennial in scope and implications. In what is perhaps the most wide-ranging critique of the sinographic script ever written, William C. Hannas assesses the usefulness of Chinese character-based writing in East Asia today.

Book Script Effects as the Hidden Drive of the Mind  Cognition  and Culture

Download or read book Script Effects as the Hidden Drive of the Mind Cognition and Culture written by Hye K. Pae and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-14 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access volume reveals the hidden power of the script we read in and how it shapes and drives our minds, ways of thinking, and cultures. Expanding on the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (i.e., the idea that language affects the way we think), this volume proposes the “Script Relativity Hypothesis” (i.e., the idea that the script in which we read affects the way we think) by offering a unique perspective on the effect of script (alphabets, morphosyllabaries, or multi-scripts) on our attention, perception, and problem-solving. Once we become literate, fundamental changes occur in our brain circuitry to accommodate the new demand for resources. The powerful effects of literacy have been demonstrated by research on literate versus illiterate individuals, as well as cross-scriptal transfer, indicating that literate brain networks function differently, depending on the script being read. This book identifies the locus of differences between the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, and between the East and the West, as the neural underpinnings of literacy. To support the “Script Relativity Hypothesis”, it reviews a vast corpus of empirical studies, including anthropological accounts of human civilization, social psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, applied linguistics, second language studies, and cross-cultural communication. It also discusses the impact of reading from screens in the digital age, as well as the impact of bi-script or multi-script use, which is a growing trend around the globe. As a result, our minds, ways of thinking, and cultures are now growing closer together, not farther apart.

Book Ideography and Chinese Language Theory

Download or read book Ideography and Chinese Language Theory written by Timothy Michael O’Neill and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and showcases the long history of Chinese theories of language. 'Ideography' as such assumes extra-linguistic, trans-historical, universal 'ideas' which are an outgrowth of Platonism and thus unique to European history. Classical Chinese discourse assumes that language (and writing) is an arbitrary artifact invented by sages for specific reasons at specific times in history. Language by this definition is an ever-changing technology amenable to historical manipulation; language is not the House of Being, but rather a historically embedded social construct that encodes quotidian human intentions and nothing more. These are incommensurate epistemes, each with its own cultural milieu and historical context. By comparing these two traditions, this study historicizes and decolonializes popular notions about Chinese characters, exposing the Eurocentrism inherent in all theories of ideography. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory will be of significant interest to historians, sinologists, theorists, and scholars in other branches of the humanities.

Book Writing and Literacy in Chinese  Korean and Japanese

Download or read book Writing and Literacy in Chinese Korean and Japanese written by Insup Taylor and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese, Japanese, South (and North) Koreans in East Asia have a long, intertwined and distinguished cultural history and have achieved, or are in the process of achieving, spectacular economic success. Together, these three peoples make up one quarter of the world population.They use a variety of unique and fascinating writing systems: logographic Chinese characters of ancient origin, as well as phonetic systems of syllabaries and alphabets. The book describes, often in comparison with English, how the Chinese, Korean and Japanese writing systems originated and developed; how each relates to its spoken language; how it is learned or taught; how it can be computerized; and how it relates to the past and present literacy, education, and culture of its users.Intimately familiar with the three East Asian cultures, Insup Taylor with the assistance of Martin Taylor, has written an accessible and highly readable book. Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese is intended for academic readers (students in East Asian Studies, linguistics, education, psychology) as well as for the general public (parents, business, government). Readers of the book will learn about the interrelated cultural histories of China, Korea and Japan, but mainly about the various writing systems, some exotic, some familar, some simple, some complex, but all fascinating.

Book The Languages of East and Southeast Asia

Download or read book The Languages of East and Southeast Asia written by Cliff Goddard and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-07-14 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces readers to the remarkable linguistic diversity of East and Southeast Asia. It contains wide-ranging and accessible discussions of every important aspect of the languages of the region, including word origins, cultural key words, tones and sounds, language families and typology, key syntactic structures, writing systems, and communicative styles. Students of linguistics will welcome the book's treatments of celebrated East Asian features such as classifiers, serial verb constructions, tones, topic-prominence, and honorifics. It shows students of particular Asian languages how their language fits structurally and culturally into the regional language mosaic. With its exercises, solutions, glossary, and many fascinating cases and insights, the book is an ideal introduction to descriptive and field linguistics. Cliff Goddard writes with great clarity and an eye for interesting examples. His book will appeal to all those with a serious interest in the languages and cultures of the region.

Book The Way of the Linguist

Download or read book The Way of the Linguist written by Steve Kaufmann and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2005-11 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Way of The Linguist, A language learning odyssey. It is now a cliché that the world is a smaller place. We think nothing of jumping on a plane to travel to another country or continent. The most exotic locations are now destinations for mass tourism. Small business people are dealing across frontiers and language barriers like never before. The Internet brings different languages and cultures to our finger-tips. English, the hybrid language of an island at the western extremity of Europe seems to have an unrivalled position as an international medium of communication. But historically periods of cultural and economic domination have never lasted forever. Do we not lose something by relying on the wide spread use of English rather than discovering other languages and cultures? As citizens of this shrunken world, would we not be better off if we were able to speak a few languages other than our own? The answer is obviously yes. Certainly Steve Kaufmann thinks so, and in his busy life as a diplomat and businessman he managed to learn to speak nine languages fluently and observe first hand some of the dominant cultures of Europe and Asia. Why do not more people do the same? In his book The Way of The Linguist, A language learning odyssey, Steve offers some answers. Steve feels anyone can learn a language if they want to. He points out some of the obstacles that hold people back. Drawing on his adventures in Europe and Asia, as a student and businessman, he describes the rewards that come from knowing languages. He relates his evolution as a language learner, abroad and back in his native Canada and explains the kind of attitude that will enable others to achieve second language fluency. Many people have taken on the challenge of language learning but have been frustrated by their lack of success. This book offers detailed advice on the kind of study practices that will achieve language breakthroughs. Steve has developed a language learning system available online at: www.thelinguist.com.

Book International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science

Download or read book International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science written by John Feather and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2003 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eagerly awaited new edition, has been fully revised and updated to take full account of the many and radical changes which have taken place since the Encyclopedia was originally conceived.

Book The History of the Book in East Asia

Download or read book The History of the Book in East Asia written by Cynthia Brokaw and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-14 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the book in East Asia is closely linked to problems of language and script, problems which have also had a profound impact on the technology of printing and on the social and intellectual impact of print in this area. This volume contains key readings on the history of printed books and manuscripts in China, Korea and Japan and includes an introduction which provides an overview of the history of the book in East Asia and sets the readings in their context.

Book Vernacular Chinese Character Manuscripts from East and Southeast Asia

Download or read book Vernacular Chinese Character Manuscripts from East and Southeast Asia written by David Holm and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-07-22 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Reading acquisition of chinese as a second foreign language

Download or read book Reading acquisition of chinese as a second foreign language written by Linjun Zhang and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-07-12 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book East Asian Pragmatics

Download or read book East Asian Pragmatics written by Xinren Chen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-26 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the innovative and exciting work done by East Asian pragmaticians on their languages, past and present alike, is written and published in local languages. As a result, research published in and about a particular East Asian language has been largely unavailable to those who do not speak the language. The contributors seek to present a comprehensive survey of existing outputs of pragmatics research on three major East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean). The survey concentrates on a number of core pragmatic topics such as speech acts, deixis, discourse markers, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and face/(im)politeness. To complement and compare with the picture of research work published in the local languages, the volume also includes a survey of internationally published, English-mediated articles and books studying the regional languages or contrasting them with other languages. A rivetting discourse on pragmatics research, it will be a valuable read for students and scholars alike.