Author: Hoai Nhan Nguyen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chinese language
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description

Author: Wendy Ayres-Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108640079
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1013

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Book Description
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.

Author: Yaron Matras
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 311019919X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
The book contains 30 descriptive chapters dealing with a specific language contact situation. The chapters follow a uniform organisation format, being the narrative version of a standard comprehensive questionnaire previously distributed to all authors. The questionnaire targets systematically the possibility of contact influence / grammatical borrowing in a full range of categories. The uniform structure facilitates a comparison among the chapters and the languages covered. The introduction describes the setup of the questionnaire and the methodology of the approach, along with a survey of the difficulties of sampling in contact linguistics. Two evaluative chapters, each authored by one of the co-editors, draws general conclusions from the volume as a whole (one in relation to borrowed grammatical categories and meaningful hierarchies, the other in relation to the distribution of Matter and Pattern replication).

Author: Terrien de Lacouperie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description

Author: John DeFrancis
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824810689
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
"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

Author: Alice Vittrant
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110402130
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 798

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Book Description
This book lies at the crossroads of areal typology, language contact and genetic affiliation. Concerned with mainland Southeast Asia in particular, the various grammatical sketches lay emphasis on characteristics shared by unrelated languages.

Author: William C. Hannas
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824818920
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
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.

Author: Peter Francis Kornicki
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198797826
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
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.

Author: Martin Haspelmath
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110218437
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1104

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Book Description
"This landmark publication in comparative linguistics is the first comprehensive work to address the general issue of what kinds of words tend to be borrowed from other languages. The authors have assembled a unique database of over 70,000 words from 40 languages from around the world, 18,000 of which are loanwords. This database allows the authors to make empirically founded generalizations about general tendencies of word exchange among languages." --Book Jacket.

Author: Antoine Khai Nguyen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781090693686
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
Ancient Chinese zodiac's origin was still unknown to this day. Beside the emperor Jade legend for children, we do not know much about it. It was told that the Chinese zodiac was spread from China to other Asian countries, therefore many zodiac variations exist today. Was there any reason why the Rabbit sign was replaced by the Cat sign, the Pig became the Boar? the Sheep could be the Goat and vice versa? Why was the majestic Dragon belittled to the same level of all other earthly animals? Were these zodiac animals chosen randomly? Did their position in the zodiac have a meaning at all? And finally did the original inventor(s) of the Chinese zodiac ever intend to leave a coded message for his/their fellow humans? You will be surprised that the new evidence will show that they did. The message embedded in the ancient Chinese zodiac was so artfully scripted that no one could unmask it until this day. How could it be? the zodiac was so old and how could it be hidden for thousands of years? It turns out that it is a common phenomenon after all. The Egyptian hieroglyphs were finally decoded just a century ago when a French scholar named Jean-François Champollion discovered the Rosetta stone that contained three translations of a same text written in Egyptian hieroglyphs and deciphered it successfully. Of course the Chinese zodiac does not contain hundreds of scripted symbols but its twelve symbols remain elusive to this day. No one knows the true story, only a children oriented legend exists. As a matter of fact, for the Chinese zodiac, more than a puzzle, not only you will have to put all the pieces into their original places in order to see the actual image but you will have also to find the right filter in order to see the hidden the path of the inventor's thinking and this hidden path will lead you to the final place where the true message is revealed. When you can read the message then everything will become clear and the message will even surprise you more: it contains an amazingly the first declaration of freedom for mankind - an universal value that we all cherish today. Last but not least, the message will also reveal who were truly its inventors. All in all, this extraordinarily coded message is finally revealed for the first time. So how was it secretly embedded in the zodiac? The book will explain it all.All the Chinese ideograms of the zodiac signs, at first look, do not resemble anything, let alone the animals they stand for. Most Chinese scholars said that the ideograms represent the calendar hours, months and years therefore they did not have any etymological bearing with the animals themselves, but rather an astronomical meaning. Unfortunately the etymology for these ideograms do not reveal anything meaningful. Now if we take a deep look into the drawing of these ideograms, especially their equivalent in other ancient scripts of the Chinese writing system (Traditional, Bronze, Seal, Liushutong, Oracle bones) then compare them with the animals they represent, you will be surprised that they actually mean something totally relevant. Finally you will see the mystery behind the drawing of these ideograms. Moreover they will you what original animals they stood for.