Page 1. Taking Advantage of China's Literary... more Page 1. Taking Advantage of China's Literary Tradition in Teaching Chinese Students MARY S. ERBAUGH University of California, Berkeley AMERICANS WHO TEACH CHINESE STUDENTS know that China cherishes its literary tradition. ...
ABSTRACTSouthern Chinese dialects – Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Hakka – have received little offici... more ABSTRACTSouthern Chinese dialects – Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Hakka – have received little official support from the governments of the nations where Chinese is spoken; they are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, and are often deeply stigmatized. Although China's language wars have paralleled cold war hostilities, unofficial forces in the 1990s are rapidly enhancing dialect prestige, as an economic boom increasingly links the “Greater China” of the People's Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. (Chinese dialects, Mandarin, Cantonese, Min, Hakka, bilingualism, Hong Kong, Taiwan, official language)
Review of Chan Sin-wai, ed. Translation in Hong Kong: Past, Present and Future.
We often ... more Review of Chan Sin-wai, ed. Translation in Hong Kong: Past, Present and Future.
We often think of Chinese translators as rendering literary masterpieces, such as The Dream of the Red Chamber, as the chapters in this volume make clear.... But the reality for professional translators is tough and wide-ranging. Liberal arts graduates are asked to translate engineering documents. Hong Kong interpreters work for the police and the courts, where many judges still do not speak Chinese. The devil is in the details, as this volume makes clear.
... Chair, and Theraphan L. Thongkum) and the Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Develop... more ... Chair, and Theraphan L. Thongkum) and the Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development at Mahidol University (Suriya Ratanakul, Chair). ... typing and/or editorial help at various times: Jane A. Smalley, Leigh R. Kambhu, Carol J. Smalley, Um-porn Suteeca, and Rita ...
Few China scholars or Chinese citizens know one of the most basic facts about Deng Xiaoping, Hu Y... more Few China scholars or Chinese citizens know one of the most basic facts about Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang, Zhu De, Chen Yi, Guo Moruo or many other modern leaders: they are all Hakka. Most popular and official histories, in China and abroad, ignore this basic ethnic bond. The title of this article is used ironically, in deliberate parody of the genuine Secret History of the Mongols. The subtitle points toward an ironic but serious effort to illuminate a major facet of revolutionary history which remains almost entirely unexplored.
Courtesy reveals fundamental judgments about who merits respect. Traditional Chinese courtesy res... more Courtesy reveals fundamental judgments about who merits respect. Traditional Chinese courtesy rests on lifelong hierarchical bonds that are too clear to require constant verbal reinforcement. But strangers, women, peasants, migrant workers, and others often do not merit face work because they lack status, fall outside the network of insiders, or are politically taboo. Until very recently, European-style equivalents of "hello," "please," "thanks," "sorry," or "goodbye" existed only in impersonal-sounding translations restricted to brief contacts with foreigners. As Beijing steps back from the socialist revolution, it is promoting these "five courteous phrases" (ni hao, qing, dui bu qi, xiexie, zai jian) to expand courtesy to universal, reciprocal greetings. Popular acceptance of this "verbal hygiene" is spreading via rapid, urban service encounters in which one's connections are unknown. In this way, China's self-identity as an "advanced civilization" is being retooled in international terms. T RADITIONAL CHINESE COURTESY GREETS people by rank and title, often as an honorary family member. People greet an elderly man as "paternal grandfather" (yeye) or a young woman as "older sister" (jiejie). Until recently, Chinese had no equivalent to uniform, Western-style greetings such as "hello," other than impersonal-sounding translations. Yet since the early 1980s, imported courtesies have become so popular that people even teach them to babies. In remote southwestern Fujian, for example, a grandfather in a traditional Hakka circular fortress held up his two-month-old grandchild, waving its hand in a "hello" (ni hao) to visitors from the city (visit to Fujian's Nanjing, December 10, 1989). This seemingly trivial shift in custom points to profoundly contested shifts in social roles. All analyses are ideological and contestable, including this one. But traditional Chinese courtesy has been hierarchical and nonreciprocal, calibrated according to asymmetrical ranks of tightly defined relationships. The muchvalued maxim that "insiders are different from outsiders" (nei wai you bie) governed degrees of courtesy. Relationships were oriented toward lifelong bonds whose duties were clear enough to preclude constant spoken reinforcement.
Southern Chinese dialects - Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Hakka - have received little official suppo... more Southern Chinese dialects - Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Hakka - have received little official support from the governments of the nations where Chinese is spoken. They are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, and are often deeply stigmatized. Although China's language wars have paralleled cold war hostilities, unofficial forces in the 1990's are rapidly enhancing dialect prestige, as an economic boom increasing links the 'Greater China' of the People's Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
The 1989 democracy movement in Fujian province followed a very different course from the tragedy ... more The 1989 democracy movement in Fujian province followed a very different course from the tragedy in Beijing, one which may have been much more typical of China as a whole. Events in Fujian were derivative, confined to a small group of intellectuals and students, with very little participation by workers or other citizens. Activists were well-informed about developments in Beijing; they organized numerous demonstrations with a few slogans which matched those in Beijing, but with no specific demands. There was only one brief hunger strike, and little tension before the June 4 Beijing massacre. The massacre's impact was felt quite broadly throughout Fujian society, although with considerable detachment, as people adjusted their lives to China's newly uncertain political environment.
Abstract: This article presents an account of temporal understanding in Mandarin Chinese. Aspectu... more Abstract: This article presents an account of temporal understanding in Mandarin Chinese. Aspectual, lexical, and adverbial information, and pragmatic principles all contribute to the interpretation of temporal location. Aspectual viewpoint and situation type give information in the absence of explicit temporal forms. The main, default pattern of interpretation is deictic. The pragmatic principles are the Bounded Event Constraint, the Simplicity Principle of Interpretation, and the Temporal Schema Principle. Lexical and adverbial information can lead to non-default interpretations. Two other temporal patterns, narrative dynamism and anaphora, appear in text passages that realize the 'discourse modes ' of narrative and description. We state the semantic meaning of grammatical forms and explain the deictic pattern. Three times are needed to explain temporal interpretation, following Reichenbach (1947). Mandarin forms code the relation between a designated perspective time, o...
ED510017 - Difficult Characters: Interdisciplinary Studies of Chinese and Japanese Writing. Pathw... more ED510017 - Difficult Characters: Interdisciplinary Studies of Chinese and Japanese Writing. Pathways to Advanced Skills Series, Volume 6.
A study of the time-and aspect-marking of 24-month-old native Mandarin-speaking children analyzed... more A study of the time-and aspect-marking of 24-month-old native Mandarin-speaking children analyzed tneir language during free play, and matched fifty utterance samples containing active predicates with all utterances using the perfective suffix "-le." It was found that the children mentioned the future, particularly their immediate intentions, twice as often as the past. Features that correlated with the children's use of the "-le" perfective were found to be tied to the child's personal experience of events. Characteristics of the events included pastness, a clear end point, the re-enactment potential, transitivity, and agentivity, in that declining order of statistical occurrence. It is concluded that, in general, young children express their more elaborate time and aspect distinctions when they are talking about the events that affect them most directly. Personal involvement was found to be a far more powerful trigger for aspect marking than were syntactic or semantic factors. These results are found to parallel results of research on Turkish-speaking children. (MSE)
Letters:
Language and Math
Items such as "Language may give Chinese an edge in math" (Random Sa... more Letters:
Language and Math
Items such as "Language may give Chinese an edge in math" (Random Samples, 29 October, p. 651) lend respectability to linguistically and scientifically unsound speculation. Chinese children, it is hypothesized, are better at math because the words for the numerals are shorter than they are in English. Language has nothing to do with it. As a psycholinguist who specializes in Chinese, I must point out that Russian and Japanese children's math scores knock the socks off those of U.S. children. Yet their numerals are much longer than in English ('one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six' in Russian are pronounced adin, dvaa, tri, chyetiri, pyat, shest, and in Japanese iti, ni, san, si, go rotu). In addition, Chinese has no grammar for singular versus plural; one says the equivalent of "Mimi have three pen." If language affected arithmetic, Chinese children should do worse, not better.
Mary S. Erbaugh
Center for Asian and Pacific Studies
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403
Page 1. Taking Advantage of China's Literary... more Page 1. Taking Advantage of China's Literary Tradition in Teaching Chinese Students MARY S. ERBAUGH University of California, Berkeley AMERICANS WHO TEACH CHINESE STUDENTS know that China cherishes its literary tradition. ...
ABSTRACTSouthern Chinese dialects – Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Hakka – have received little offici... more ABSTRACTSouthern Chinese dialects – Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Hakka – have received little official support from the governments of the nations where Chinese is spoken; they are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, and are often deeply stigmatized. Although China's language wars have paralleled cold war hostilities, unofficial forces in the 1990s are rapidly enhancing dialect prestige, as an economic boom increasingly links the “Greater China” of the People's Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. (Chinese dialects, Mandarin, Cantonese, Min, Hakka, bilingualism, Hong Kong, Taiwan, official language)
Review of Chan Sin-wai, ed. Translation in Hong Kong: Past, Present and Future.
We often ... more Review of Chan Sin-wai, ed. Translation in Hong Kong: Past, Present and Future.
We often think of Chinese translators as rendering literary masterpieces, such as The Dream of the Red Chamber, as the chapters in this volume make clear.... But the reality for professional translators is tough and wide-ranging. Liberal arts graduates are asked to translate engineering documents. Hong Kong interpreters work for the police and the courts, where many judges still do not speak Chinese. The devil is in the details, as this volume makes clear.
... Chair, and Theraphan L. Thongkum) and the Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Develop... more ... Chair, and Theraphan L. Thongkum) and the Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development at Mahidol University (Suriya Ratanakul, Chair). ... typing and/or editorial help at various times: Jane A. Smalley, Leigh R. Kambhu, Carol J. Smalley, Um-porn Suteeca, and Rita ...
Few China scholars or Chinese citizens know one of the most basic facts about Deng Xiaoping, Hu Y... more Few China scholars or Chinese citizens know one of the most basic facts about Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang, Zhu De, Chen Yi, Guo Moruo or many other modern leaders: they are all Hakka. Most popular and official histories, in China and abroad, ignore this basic ethnic bond. The title of this article is used ironically, in deliberate parody of the genuine Secret History of the Mongols. The subtitle points toward an ironic but serious effort to illuminate a major facet of revolutionary history which remains almost entirely unexplored.
Courtesy reveals fundamental judgments about who merits respect. Traditional Chinese courtesy res... more Courtesy reveals fundamental judgments about who merits respect. Traditional Chinese courtesy rests on lifelong hierarchical bonds that are too clear to require constant verbal reinforcement. But strangers, women, peasants, migrant workers, and others often do not merit face work because they lack status, fall outside the network of insiders, or are politically taboo. Until very recently, European-style equivalents of "hello," "please," "thanks," "sorry," or "goodbye" existed only in impersonal-sounding translations restricted to brief contacts with foreigners. As Beijing steps back from the socialist revolution, it is promoting these "five courteous phrases" (ni hao, qing, dui bu qi, xiexie, zai jian) to expand courtesy to universal, reciprocal greetings. Popular acceptance of this "verbal hygiene" is spreading via rapid, urban service encounters in which one's connections are unknown. In this way, China's self-identity as an "advanced civilization" is being retooled in international terms. T RADITIONAL CHINESE COURTESY GREETS people by rank and title, often as an honorary family member. People greet an elderly man as "paternal grandfather" (yeye) or a young woman as "older sister" (jiejie). Until recently, Chinese had no equivalent to uniform, Western-style greetings such as "hello," other than impersonal-sounding translations. Yet since the early 1980s, imported courtesies have become so popular that people even teach them to babies. In remote southwestern Fujian, for example, a grandfather in a traditional Hakka circular fortress held up his two-month-old grandchild, waving its hand in a "hello" (ni hao) to visitors from the city (visit to Fujian's Nanjing, December 10, 1989). This seemingly trivial shift in custom points to profoundly contested shifts in social roles. All analyses are ideological and contestable, including this one. But traditional Chinese courtesy has been hierarchical and nonreciprocal, calibrated according to asymmetrical ranks of tightly defined relationships. The muchvalued maxim that "insiders are different from outsiders" (nei wai you bie) governed degrees of courtesy. Relationships were oriented toward lifelong bonds whose duties were clear enough to preclude constant spoken reinforcement.
Southern Chinese dialects - Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Hakka - have received little official suppo... more Southern Chinese dialects - Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Hakka - have received little official support from the governments of the nations where Chinese is spoken. They are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, and are often deeply stigmatized. Although China's language wars have paralleled cold war hostilities, unofficial forces in the 1990's are rapidly enhancing dialect prestige, as an economic boom increasing links the 'Greater China' of the People's Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
The 1989 democracy movement in Fujian province followed a very different course from the tragedy ... more The 1989 democracy movement in Fujian province followed a very different course from the tragedy in Beijing, one which may have been much more typical of China as a whole. Events in Fujian were derivative, confined to a small group of intellectuals and students, with very little participation by workers or other citizens. Activists were well-informed about developments in Beijing; they organized numerous demonstrations with a few slogans which matched those in Beijing, but with no specific demands. There was only one brief hunger strike, and little tension before the June 4 Beijing massacre. The massacre's impact was felt quite broadly throughout Fujian society, although with considerable detachment, as people adjusted their lives to China's newly uncertain political environment.
Abstract: This article presents an account of temporal understanding in Mandarin Chinese. Aspectu... more Abstract: This article presents an account of temporal understanding in Mandarin Chinese. Aspectual, lexical, and adverbial information, and pragmatic principles all contribute to the interpretation of temporal location. Aspectual viewpoint and situation type give information in the absence of explicit temporal forms. The main, default pattern of interpretation is deictic. The pragmatic principles are the Bounded Event Constraint, the Simplicity Principle of Interpretation, and the Temporal Schema Principle. Lexical and adverbial information can lead to non-default interpretations. Two other temporal patterns, narrative dynamism and anaphora, appear in text passages that realize the 'discourse modes ' of narrative and description. We state the semantic meaning of grammatical forms and explain the deictic pattern. Three times are needed to explain temporal interpretation, following Reichenbach (1947). Mandarin forms code the relation between a designated perspective time, o...
ED510017 - Difficult Characters: Interdisciplinary Studies of Chinese and Japanese Writing. Pathw... more ED510017 - Difficult Characters: Interdisciplinary Studies of Chinese and Japanese Writing. Pathways to Advanced Skills Series, Volume 6.
A study of the time-and aspect-marking of 24-month-old native Mandarin-speaking children analyzed... more A study of the time-and aspect-marking of 24-month-old native Mandarin-speaking children analyzed tneir language during free play, and matched fifty utterance samples containing active predicates with all utterances using the perfective suffix "-le." It was found that the children mentioned the future, particularly their immediate intentions, twice as often as the past. Features that correlated with the children's use of the "-le" perfective were found to be tied to the child's personal experience of events. Characteristics of the events included pastness, a clear end point, the re-enactment potential, transitivity, and agentivity, in that declining order of statistical occurrence. It is concluded that, in general, young children express their more elaborate time and aspect distinctions when they are talking about the events that affect them most directly. Personal involvement was found to be a far more powerful trigger for aspect marking than were syntactic or semantic factors. These results are found to parallel results of research on Turkish-speaking children. (MSE)
Letters:
Language and Math
Items such as "Language may give Chinese an edge in math" (Random Sa... more Letters:
Language and Math
Items such as "Language may give Chinese an edge in math" (Random Samples, 29 October, p. 651) lend respectability to linguistically and scientifically unsound speculation. Chinese children, it is hypothesized, are better at math because the words for the numerals are shorter than they are in English. Language has nothing to do with it. As a psycholinguist who specializes in Chinese, I must point out that Russian and Japanese children's math scores knock the socks off those of U.S. children. Yet their numerals are much longer than in English ('one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six' in Russian are pronounced adin, dvaa, tri, chyetiri, pyat, shest, and in Japanese iti, ni, san, si, go rotu). In addition, Chinese has no grammar for singular versus plural; one says the equivalent of "Mimi have three pen." If language affected arithmetic, Chinese children should do worse, not better.
Mary S. Erbaugh
Center for Asian and Pacific Studies
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403
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Papers by Mary Erbaugh
We often think of Chinese translators as rendering literary masterpieces, such as The Dream of the Red Chamber, as the chapters in this volume make clear.... But the reality for professional translators is tough and wide-ranging. Liberal arts graduates are asked to translate engineering documents. Hong Kong interpreters work for the police and the courts, where many judges still do not speak Chinese. The devil is in the details, as this volume makes clear.
Language and Math
Items such as "Language may give Chinese an edge in math" (Random Samples, 29 October, p. 651) lend respectability to linguistically and scientifically unsound speculation. Chinese children, it is hypothesized, are better at math because the words for the numerals are shorter than they are in English. Language has nothing to do with it. As a psycholinguist who specializes in Chinese, I must point out that Russian and Japanese children's math scores knock the socks off those of U.S. children. Yet their numerals are much longer than in English ('one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six' in Russian are pronounced adin, dvaa, tri, chyetiri, pyat, shest, and in Japanese iti, ni, san, si, go rotu). In addition, Chinese has no grammar for singular versus plural; one says the equivalent of "Mimi have three pen." If language affected arithmetic, Chinese children should do worse, not better.
Mary S. Erbaugh
Center for Asian and Pacific Studies
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403
We often think of Chinese translators as rendering literary masterpieces, such as The Dream of the Red Chamber, as the chapters in this volume make clear.... But the reality for professional translators is tough and wide-ranging. Liberal arts graduates are asked to translate engineering documents. Hong Kong interpreters work for the police and the courts, where many judges still do not speak Chinese. The devil is in the details, as this volume makes clear.
Language and Math
Items such as "Language may give Chinese an edge in math" (Random Samples, 29 October, p. 651) lend respectability to linguistically and scientifically unsound speculation. Chinese children, it is hypothesized, are better at math because the words for the numerals are shorter than they are in English. Language has nothing to do with it. As a psycholinguist who specializes in Chinese, I must point out that Russian and Japanese children's math scores knock the socks off those of U.S. children. Yet their numerals are much longer than in English ('one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six' in Russian are pronounced adin, dvaa, tri, chyetiri, pyat, shest, and in Japanese iti, ni, san, si, go rotu). In addition, Chinese has no grammar for singular versus plural; one says the equivalent of "Mimi have three pen." If language affected arithmetic, Chinese children should do worse, not better.
Mary S. Erbaugh
Center for Asian and Pacific Studies
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403