New books!

[Gharial]

Just thought it would be good to start a thread to mention any reasonably recent books that we've become aware of. Here are two that I first came across only today:

 

1) The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=A3D7CwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

2) A Reference Grammar of Chinese (Cambridge University Press):

http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/asian-language-and-linguistics/reference-grammar-chinese?format=PB

[lechuan]

The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language

 

I was excited to see this until I saw the price. The Kindle version is $360 USD.

[Gharial]

With academic titles, the initial (hardback or hardback-derived) editions are always expensive. In paperback it'll hopefully be less than $70 (going by similar Routledge titles e.g. Malmkjaer's The Linguistics Encyclopedia).

[LinZhenPu]

Well the electronic version is $360. Which means the paperback version will be more than $360, and the hardback more still.

[akdn]

I have had a chance to consult these.

 

'A Reference Grammar of Chinese' (Huang and Shi, 2016) looks like a good, modern alternative to 'Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Grammar' (Li and Thompson, 1989). 

 

The encyclopedia is essentially an edited volume of literature reviews on selected topics, and thus a good source to identify key journal articles that report primary research findings. 

 

As well as being of general interest to the Chinese learner, they also have the potential to fill an important gap, i.e. as sources of information about Chinese language and linguistics that are recent and authoritative enough to be cited in university essays, dissertations and other academic research outputs. This is especially important when making claims that compare linguistic practices between Chinese and other languages (e.g. in translation and interpreting dissertations). It is easy for there to be a mismatch in the level of authority and academic rigour in the literature that students are able to cite when producing academic arguments that rely on establishing similarities and differences between Chinese and other languages. 

 

Regarding the costs, if you are affiliated in any way with an academic institution, consider recommending these to your library as institutional purchases.

[Gharial]

@LinZhenPu: I haven't seen many if any books that retain the hardback price for the e version once the paperback has been published. So I'm pretty sure the e-version price will come down and be tagged more to the paperback price when that becomes available. Let's hope, anyway!

[Gharial]

3) Analysis on the Ideographic Characteristics of Some English Morphemes (by Gao-ming Zhang & Hong Yang, pub. by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne 2014).

 

Just a few quick points about this book though:

 

- OK, it isn't that recent

- It's more about the nature supposedly of English than Chinese writing i.e. trying to apply (generally dubious) ideographic principles to English

- The fact that I've mentioned it here shouldn't in any way be taken as a recommmendation LOL (and you'll struggle to find any reviews, probably because any serious scholars wouldn't want to touch this one with a 100-foot bargepole).

 

This is actually one of the worst and silliest books I've ever seen - repetitive, badly written in general, poorly referenced (e.g. they keep saying 'the book' immediately followed by a number in square brackets despite accepted convention being that one simply gives the author and year along preferably with the relevant pages. And just to keep things inconsistent, these numbered references vary from chapter to chapter, and with no overall bibliography provided!), but most importantly with arguments that simply do. not. follow, not even from those few works they "cite" to "support" their weird thesis.

 

For example, have you ever heard of English letters being based on the four elements? Vaguely pictographic~rebus-like origins are one thing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script#Synopsis ), but the contrived, often byzantine, and ultimately inconsistent "logic" these authors are imposing, and long after any actual historical facts, is quite another. Tl:dr is that English is and always has been more phonetic than not, and students don't need all this fake superimposed "ideographic" detail ("ingenious" though it may seem to some) to learn English words. But hey, maybe the whole book is ultimately just an elaborate joke, poking fun at ideographic thinking by applying it to a language that is hardly the sino qua non of ideographicness?

 

I've attached a few screencaps, but those interested in reading further can with a little digging probably find this book free online (it certainly isn't worth the silly prices some booksellers are charging for it!).

 

 

 

[Gharial]

Things (albeit more Sino-Japanesey than just Chinesey) I learned or pondered this week:

1) There's apparently yet room for mnemonic pseudo etymologies despite the weight of piles of academic opinion: that is, Seeley's updating of Henshall still ultimately opts for things like 易 LIZARD'S BODY AND LEGS CHANGE EASILY IN THE SUN - HOW DIVINE! (even after alluding to 'more convincing' explanations from e.g. Gu, and Schuessler), or 美 A BEAUTIFUL FAT SHEEP (vs. e.g. https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/blogs/japanese/getting-radical-about-radicals ). Go figure. The work could really do with a radical rather than total-stroke index to supplement the readings index though!

2) The Third edition of Hadamitzky & Spahn's Kanji & Kana carries over the arguable to definite improvements of the Second's (that is, the imposition of the authors' 79-radical system to replace the First's 214 Kangxi radical indexing, versus the clearly useful addition in the readings index of bracketings to indicate incorrect overgeneralizations of and thus necessary redirects from certain On readings/shared phonetic components, e.g. BAI 倍 陪 培 賠 (部 BU) (剖 BŌ)), but (and call me old-fashioned) I think I preferred the fonts, typography, formatting, and overall general design of the earlier editions (useful though it is to have an updated listing of the currently somewhat expanded Jōyō kanji). ?

3) The Langenscheidt dictionaries (and Berlitz's Concise or Compact reprints of them) use a very similar stock of example sentences in their English to whatever foreign language sections if their Chinese and Japanese dictionaries are anything to go by. (My brother you see had wondered if they contained any reasonably useful phrasebook-level phrases like 'Excuse me, where's the...?' or 'Is there a...near here?' The short answer is no, they don't, though those wanting to know how to say things like 'Was she there?' (be), 'near the bank' (near), 'I used to work there' (there), and 'Where do you come from?' or 'the hotel where the Beatles stayed' or 'this is where I used to work' (where) won't be disappointed. Oh wait, there's also 'the nearest bus stop' at (near), that'd do at a pinch, though it would've been nice if it had been put into a full and reasonably polite question form. The relevant meaning for 'Excuse me' leads to Japanese  'Sumimasen', but the only example sentence on offer and in the J-E half is ' ~ , will you pass the salt?' (Sumimasen ga, shio o totte itadakemasu ka), while the Chinese dictionary leads to the somewhat more useful examples and plural of 请问几点了 and 请问贵姓). Mind you, this is the only Japanese dictionary (rather than actual kanji dictionary) I know of that has a kanji index by total stroke count for the then (2006) 1,945 Jōyō kanji (even if the On readings are unconventionally given in non-cap rather than capital letters, and the radical subsorting a little too rough and ready, e.g. 産 supposedly having 立 rather than 生 or possibly 亠 or even 厂 as its radical), so I suppose it shouldn't be sniffed at too strongly.

4) Do many kanji dictionaries apart from Halpern's do enough to highlight 'special'/apparent jukujikun (熟字訓) readings (i.e. ones not among the usual On or Kun readings, thus producing 'a compound word that can be thought of as a multi-character Kun reading', i.e. a native Japanese word written with more than one Chinese character, with the characters 'chosen for their semantic value only' (from the Glossary in Thenell's Kanji no Satori and pg60 of Rogers' Writing Systems respectively) for items like (お)土産 (o)miyage, souvenir gifts (=mi yage or miya ge? Native Japanese people may not even know the term jukujikun, and say it's ultimately of no consequence how the syllables there are divvied up i.e. they aren't really)? I guess this is another reason why kana rather than kanji often rules.

[Luxi]

Here's one of few textbooks for more advanced levels, published by Routledge in November 2018, 

Mastering Advanced Modern Chinese through the Classics.An Advanced Language and Culture Course.
By Shu-Ling Wu & Haiwang Yuan (both teachers at American universities)

 

It's organised as class workbook in 16 lessons each based on a short classical literature or poetry text covering quite a wide historical spread. It's not a 文言文 textbook, rather it attempts to link classical grammar and style to modern (rather literary) Chinese. Each lesson has plenty of practical exercises and presents topics for class discussion, so it seems good for class/group work, or for students working with a tutor. The Routledge page for this book (linked above) has the audio for download - quality is uneven but better than nothing. According to the publishers, there eventually will be a website for this book that will include answers to the exercises. 

 

The book is published also as a Kindle ebook, which allows a good preview using 'Look Inside' in Amazon, or downloading a sample (introduction and Lesson 1) to one's Kindle reader or app. I was disappointed to see that the vocabulary section at least in Lesson 1 is a practically useless graphic file. Text and explanation are normal typeset. The book is expensive, but the tree-book paperback is very good quality.

 

I am still working my way through Lesson 1, can't yet say how good (or not) it is but I am enjoying Lesson 1 and it inspired me to add a few more of the 'Odes' to figure out on my own. At first glance, the authors' grammar points and other explanations cover aspects of the language that are normally taken for granted in native textbooks, so it should fill a gap. It's also true that those aspects have a bearing on modern literary Chinese. 

 

 

[Luxi]

On 6/13/2016 at 10:06 AM, akdn said:

'A Reference Grammar of Chinese' (Huang and Shi, 2016) looks like a good, modern alternative to 'Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Grammar' (Li and Thompson, 1989). 

 

JNCBooks (Cambridge, UK) is selling the 'Reference Grammar' at £15.99 - it says 'marked' copies. I just got mine, it's not pristine but barely 'marked'. Like a book that was opened and looked at in a bookshop, but otherwise new. And £30 cheaper than the list price. Besides which, it looks like a very good book, densely packed with interesting, well written articles, each with examples in simplified characters and pinyin. If you like grammar, this seems a 'must have', and quite a bargain at that price.

(if you miss the bargain, check in eBay, I've see a listing come up in my search)

 

Edited to add: This Table of Contents pdf can help decide.

[realmayo]

On 5/19/2019 at 12:00 PM, Luxi said:

Here's one of few textbooks for more advanced levels, published by Routledge in November 2018,  

Mastering Advanced Modern Chinese through the Classics.An Advanced Language and Culture Course. 

 

Thank you for lightening my wallet by 30 quid.

[Gharial]

Perhaps I should start a thread titled 'Older books!', but will bung this one in here for now regardless.

 

While searching for something or other I came across the wiki page below and followed its first References link, to a browseable~downloadable copy of the 1945 Dictionary of Spoken Chinese (see wiki for details). Clicking then on the 'Download whole book' prepares a PDF that's 153MB in size. NB: A good way to browse for related works is to click on the 'View full catalogue record'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concise_Dictionary_of_Spoken_Chinese

> https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miun.asj7483.0001.001&view=1up&seq=1

[Gharial]

Another slight oldie but goodie: I got the Compact Nelson (a 1999 abridgement of the 1997 New Nelson J-E Character Dictionary, ed. John Haig) the other day as I had a spare tenner and fancied having an additional but more portable kanji dictionary than the otherwise excellent NTC/Kenkyusha New J-E Character Dictionary (and I didn't want to buy the Learner spin-off of that).

 

The Compact's a lovely little book whose outer-margin vertical listing (just like its parent New's) of all the relevant radicals per stroke-number section must've influenced the ABC Comprehensive and ECCE's design in that regard, but its not resupplying the head character or even a replacement tilde or swung dash in each subentry, and the subentries being listed by the stroke count of the thus "second" character in each compound rather than by overall alphabetical order (which makes jukujikun/"unpredictable" readings quite hard to spot) takes some getting used to compared to the clarity of certainly the NTC's entries. A compensating bonus however is how those jukujikun appear, (and) as more than one kanji in the readings index, there standing out. The roundabout to the swings however is that okurigana (inflectional endings to be written in hiragana) aren't bracketed in the readings index, only in the actual entries. Overall the Compact crams in more raw kanji and compounds than the NTC, but the NTC selects and presents its information better and has a number of unique features (Chinese forms and readings, guidance re. synonymous kanji~a thesaurus of sorts, semi-cursive and cursive forms in addition to the stroke-order breakdown in regular 楷书 , etc).

 

The main reason for posting about the Compact however regards the pros and cons of innovation in indexing. The incarnations of the Nelson prior to the New~Compact version used an innovative 'Radical Priority System' that apparently took much of the guesswork out of identifying which part of a character might be the traditionally "correct" radical by organizing the main body of the work according to said RPS (rather than Kangxi order), even if that meant no longer providing nor caring too much about historical precedent. The New~Compact's appendical guidelines on 'How to determine the radical of a character' still present the RPS's general principles (though it is no longer named as such), but the reorganization of the work along Kangxi rather than RPS lines obviously means that such guidelines will now only hold true most rather than all of the time (Hadamitzky & Spahn estimate that 'in the new edition these rules lead to finding a kanji on the first try less than 90% of the time' i.e. an often 10% blank/failure rate: https://www.hadamitzky.de/english/lp_how_to_determine.htm ), though the somewhat compensatory (yet admittedly lengthy~weighty, especially in the full-size New!) Universal Radical Index allows look-up via all possible means - intuitive RPS-like items, versus traditional, versus whatever the user wants to try really!

 

Personally I quite like the compromise the URI has struck (it sure beats H&S's "No radical" category LOL), but as the older Nelsons are a bit too dated, whatever advantages of the previous actual RPS organization is probably a bit of a moot point for most users nowadays; besides, Kangxi ordering is obviously the more widely used, so it'll pay to become more familiar with it (even if it's back to a case of If it ain't fixed, why not break it some. It's a shame the New~Compact didn't come up with a more logically-ordered supplementary chart like the ABC Comprehensive's and ECCE's CRC, Comprehensive Radical Chart, which puts all forms and variants in total stroke and 札 stroke-type order i.e.  一 丨 丿 丶 乙 , nonetheless the New~Compact's charts are pretty good/at least adequate. The URI could do though with repeating the outer-margin vertical listing of relevant radicals per stroke-number section, while the JIS code and Morohashi index numbers there give the URI a somewhat cluttered look). Anyway it's interesting to read some of the more polarized Amazon reviews of certainly the New (e.g. https://www.amazon.ca/gp/customer-reviews/R3MMPE1CMU9UJH/ versus https://www.amazon.ca/gp/customer-reviews/R2AN4JW63LWJFB/ ).