問我anything with OneEye

[OneEye]

I wouldn't say we're friends. We have a mutual friend or two, and I spoke with Kaiser very briefly a few days ago about our project, but that's about all. But I'm pretty sure there others on this forum who know him pretty well.

You might try Quora though — he's pretty active there. I've seen people post questions addressed to him personally there, and he's answered.

[Angelina]

Upvote! I'm bad with touchscreens.

Sure, Quora is a good idea. Thanks.

[Demonic_Duck]

Not sure if this is more appropriate for the Outlier thread or here, but the question stems from a different resource, so I'll post it here.

 

My teacher recommended me http://vividict.com/, and it looks like much of the information there contradicts the stuff in the demo version of your dictionary and blog posts Outlier have put out. Equally, in addition to generally being less complete, a lot of of the explanations on the well-known English-language site http://www.chineseetymology.org/ also contradict your explanations.

 

Given that the whole idea of the Outlier stuff and what sets it apart is that it's based on cutting edge paleographical research, I have two questions:

• As with any science, the accepted wisdom in paleography is liable to change. To what extent would you imagine the information that will be included in the first full release version of the Outlier dictionary will be liable to change based on further research? By this, I mean only stuff that is presented without caveats, i.e. "blah blah blah is the case", rather than "some paleographers believe that..." or "it is unknown whether..."
• Are there any resources similar to vividict.com or chineseetymology.org publically available on the internet right now that you estimate to be particularly well-researched? What's the best layman's go-to source at the moment for this kind of stuff?

[Bigdumogre]

As a newer member of this site and a newbie at mandarin can you give us a little back info about yourself?

[wibr]

@Bigdumogre http://www.outlier-linguistics.com/our-team/john/

[Bigdumogre]

Thanks

That's pretty damn impressive. Great to see someone do so much in that time frame. Shows hard work pays off

[OneEye]

 

As with any science, the accepted wisdom in paleography is liable to change. To what extent would you imagine the information that will be included in the first full release version of the Outlier dictionary will be liable to change based on further research? By this, I mean only stuff that is presented without caveats, i.e. "blah blah blah is the case", rather than "some paleographers believe that..." or "it is unknown whether..."

 

Well...it's possible that some of our un-caveated claims will be overturned by future discoveries, of course. Just four decades ago, I'm sure they thought they had it figured out. But the sheer volume of stuff being dug up (literally — excavated Warring States-era bamboo strips have proven to be some of the most important materials for this stuff) means we're probably starting to close in on something resembling the truth. Scholars differ over how to interpret this information, of course, but most of what's in our dictionary represents the dominant scholarly opinion right now. Anything that changes is likely to be fairly insignificant details. 

 

A very well-known professor remarked to me that the Baxter-Sagart reconstruction was useless because "they keep changing it." That was a real turnoff to me, because it's much more accurate to say "they keep revising it based on the latest understanding of the evidence." I was extremely impressed with Dr. Baxter when I met him, just a week later. He had invited experts in palaeography from China and Japan to his department as visiting scholars for a year to discuss palaeographic issues with him (he's a phonologist) in order to sharpen his understanding of the material. He has a very rigorous, hard science-influenced approach to his field that's really lacking in the humanities, and he's very humble. "Dr. so-and-so thinks you're wrong about X." His response? "Well, I could be."

 

 

Are there any resources similar to vividict.com or chineseetymology.org publically available on the internet right now that you estimate to be particularly well-researched? What's the best layman's go-to source at the moment for this kind of stuff?

 

It's in Chinese, but 漢語多功能字庫 is quite good. 小學堂 at Academia Sinica is useful too, not so much for their analyses (which are sparse and not especially good) as for the sheer number of ancient characters forms, amount of phonological data, and the fact that they provide page numbers for some very good reference books so you can look up a given scholar's take on a character.