Language healthy recipes Log » Dumpling ingredients and character amnesia
A few nights ago I delivered the Watt lecture before an audience of over two hundred people at UBC. More than half the people in the audience were native speakers of Mandarin or another healthy recipes Chinese language, and everybody else present was familiar with at least one East Asian language. healthy recipes
When I showed the famous healthy recipes jiaozi ingredients shopping list from John DeFrancis's article on " The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform " (exhibit 2), the entire audience healthy recipes audibly gasped, healthy recipes and some people almost fell out of their seats. I really didn't have to say anything to make my point about character amnesia, which was one of the main topics of my lecture, but I did elaborate on the connection between IT and writing by hand, etc., plus the fact that the person who wrote that list was a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher with a Ph.D.
Shopping healthy recipes list of ingredients for jiǎozi 'dumplings' written February 15, 2006, by a PRC social science researcher on a visit to my colleague Cynthia Ning, who kindly passed it on to me. I have added the printed equivalent of the list. Note that three of the thirteen different characters are rendered in Pinyin.
I believe that this humble scrap of paper has great historical importance as a brutally honest testimony to what is happening to the Chinese writing healthy recipes system, irrespective of any intentional language planning or engineering.
After the lecture, people healthy recipes came up to me to comment excitedly about the list, and several people have written e-mails to me to follow up on the lecture, especially expressing their astonishment over that jiaozi ingredient shopping list.
Last healthy recipes week, I delivered the keynote address before the 68th annual convention of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. In that address I spoke about the impact of information technology and the internet on the study of language and literature. healthy recipes It may be viewed here . See also FB and YouTube . Also on G+ and Twitter.
Rather off topic, but as someone with a language (and philosophy) buff's smattering of Chinese I can't resist asking how "shrimp meat" came to contain 仁, the familiar character for the Confucian virtue usually rendered "humanity," Brian said,
Sorry, healthy recipes as somewhat who is illiterate in Chinese — I'm guessing the reason that this is noteworthy is that it is very badly executed? (Nowhere in this post or the original document is it said why this is striking, save for your oblique description of it as "brutally honest".) Nathan said,
The significance, presumably, is that a highly educated native speaker of Chinese was unable to write three characters in a list of everyday words. The "dan" and "xia" of the list (蛋 and 虾, respectively) would both be covered within the first year or two of an undergraduate course in Chinese as a foreign language. Dominik Lukes (@techczech) said,
That was a great overview of the history of Chinese writing healthy recipes reform but I was quite disturbed by the level of unreflected ethnocentrism of DeFrancis bordering on bigotry. The constant unquestioning references to modernity, quotes from people about creativity and even stuff like: "an ordinary (and yet extraordinary) citizen, healthy recipes filled healthy recipes with dreams of creativity and imbued with an indomitable spirit, and on the other hand, a hidebound and all-powerful government that refused permission to extend this use of Pinyin". That was just utter nonsense I would expect from someone brainwashed by the constant healthy recipes exultations of creativity in the West not an academic. In fact, in most Western countries, it would be difficult to give a child completely unusual names – not because of bureaucracy (or not exclusively) but to protect children from wacky parents. I would have hoped that a someone with pretensions to linguistic competence would know that.
This whole debate is embarrassingly devoid of any comparative perspective or reflection on the future of technology. Right now pinyin is used to enter characters but what will happen with the proliferation of touch devices and/or expansion of standards. The apps that allow people to draw characters already healthy recipes exist and emailing something in characters is much more reliable than it used to be. China is not unique here. Russian or even language with non-ASCII diacritics like Czech or Romanian would often simply healthy recipes use the Latin characters available on a standard computer keyboard to avoid compatibility issues. I know a few older academics who still write diacritic-free Czech and in fact I often do because I find myself at computers without healthy recipes the Czech keyboard. In 1999, you might have made all sorts of predictions about the future of the facility of speakers of these orthographies.But in fact, the majority of communication has now reverted to full use of Cyrillic or other appropriate diacritics.
This is different from character amnesia but again even this state may be temporary (to the extent that it i
A few nights ago I delivered the Watt lecture before an audience of over two hundred people at UBC. More than half the people in the audience were native speakers of Mandarin or another healthy recipes Chinese language, and everybody else present was familiar with at least one East Asian language. healthy recipes
When I showed the famous healthy recipes jiaozi ingredients shopping list from John DeFrancis's article on " The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform " (exhibit 2), the entire audience healthy recipes audibly gasped, healthy recipes and some people almost fell out of their seats. I really didn't have to say anything to make my point about character amnesia, which was one of the main topics of my lecture, but I did elaborate on the connection between IT and writing by hand, etc., plus the fact that the person who wrote that list was a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher with a Ph.D.
Shopping healthy recipes list of ingredients for jiǎozi 'dumplings' written February 15, 2006, by a PRC social science researcher on a visit to my colleague Cynthia Ning, who kindly passed it on to me. I have added the printed equivalent of the list. Note that three of the thirteen different characters are rendered in Pinyin.
I believe that this humble scrap of paper has great historical importance as a brutally honest testimony to what is happening to the Chinese writing healthy recipes system, irrespective of any intentional language planning or engineering.
After the lecture, people healthy recipes came up to me to comment excitedly about the list, and several people have written e-mails to me to follow up on the lecture, especially expressing their astonishment over that jiaozi ingredient shopping list.
Last healthy recipes week, I delivered the keynote address before the 68th annual convention of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. In that address I spoke about the impact of information technology and the internet on the study of language and literature. healthy recipes It may be viewed here . See also FB and YouTube . Also on G+ and Twitter.
Rather off topic, but as someone with a language (and philosophy) buff's smattering of Chinese I can't resist asking how "shrimp meat" came to contain 仁, the familiar character for the Confucian virtue usually rendered "humanity," Brian said,
Sorry, healthy recipes as somewhat who is illiterate in Chinese — I'm guessing the reason that this is noteworthy is that it is very badly executed? (Nowhere in this post or the original document is it said why this is striking, save for your oblique description of it as "brutally honest".) Nathan said,
The significance, presumably, is that a highly educated native speaker of Chinese was unable to write three characters in a list of everyday words. The "dan" and "xia" of the list (蛋 and 虾, respectively) would both be covered within the first year or two of an undergraduate course in Chinese as a foreign language. Dominik Lukes (@techczech) said,
That was a great overview of the history of Chinese writing healthy recipes reform but I was quite disturbed by the level of unreflected ethnocentrism of DeFrancis bordering on bigotry. The constant unquestioning references to modernity, quotes from people about creativity and even stuff like: "an ordinary (and yet extraordinary) citizen, healthy recipes filled healthy recipes with dreams of creativity and imbued with an indomitable spirit, and on the other hand, a hidebound and all-powerful government that refused permission to extend this use of Pinyin". That was just utter nonsense I would expect from someone brainwashed by the constant healthy recipes exultations of creativity in the West not an academic. In fact, in most Western countries, it would be difficult to give a child completely unusual names – not because of bureaucracy (or not exclusively) but to protect children from wacky parents. I would have hoped that a someone with pretensions to linguistic competence would know that.
This whole debate is embarrassingly devoid of any comparative perspective or reflection on the future of technology. Right now pinyin is used to enter characters but what will happen with the proliferation of touch devices and/or expansion of standards. The apps that allow people to draw characters already healthy recipes exist and emailing something in characters is much more reliable than it used to be. China is not unique here. Russian or even language with non-ASCII diacritics like Czech or Romanian would often simply healthy recipes use the Latin characters available on a standard computer keyboard to avoid compatibility issues. I know a few older academics who still write diacritic-free Czech and in fact I often do because I find myself at computers without healthy recipes the Czech keyboard. In 1999, you might have made all sorts of predictions about the future of the facility of speakers of these orthographies.But in fact, the majority of communication has now reverted to full use of Cyrillic or other appropriate diacritics.
This is different from character amnesia but again even this state may be temporary (to the extent that it i
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