John DeFrancis, *The Chinese. Language: Fact and Fantasy*. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii. Press, ). Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Page 5. Page 6. Page 7. The Chinese Language has 65 ratings and 11 reviews. Christopher said: THE CHINESE LANGUAGE: Fact and Fantasy, by the legendary pedagogue of. title: The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy author: DeFrancis, John. publisher: University of Hawaii Press isbn10 | asin: print isbn
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The term is therefore appropriate when applied in such expressions as Peking dialect, Nanking dialect, Sichuan dialect, and others of the innumerable mutually intelligible subdivisions of Jonh.
Epilogue When the foregoing essay was first presented to some colleagues several years ago, I assumed they would immediately catch on to what I was doing.
In this way every syllable in English would be written with a distinctive character that would at least give some indication of the sound and might in some cases, as in the one just cited, also provide a semantic clue. So are some of the languages of Southeast Asia, Africa, and those of the Latin American Indians, and there are a few words in Swedish distinguished only by tonal differences.
The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis
Overview The picture of great complexity that emerges from a full-scale analysis of spoken Chinese contrasts with the widespread myth that it is impoverished because it lacks such features common to European languages as their complex phonologies and systems of conjugation and declension.
The key point of disagreement leading to these terms is whether a character conveys meaning directly or through the intermediary of the word. In fact, he predicted that some writers would follow the Japanese lead in deliberately making their texts languave to read and creating graphemic puns and puzzles. As for Vietnamese, most specialists think it belongs to still another completely different language family that includes Khmer Cambodian.
An important distinction within Mandarin is that between “sharp” and “round” sounds Chao The calligraphic style is one of a wide variety of styles, somewhat analogous to the type fonts and individual writing in alphabetic scripts, that are conditioned by the instrument used in writing, the degree of deliberateness lnaguage executing the strokes, and individual idiosyncrasies of different writers. View all subjects More like this User lists Similar Items. How do fanatsy categorize the huge number of Chinese idiolects?
The Chinese language : fact and fantasy
As in the case of Chinese parts of speech generally, these expressions are often defined in terms of their positional relationship to each other. Trivia About The Chinese Langu All the forms of speech and writing that have been mentioned here are included in what is popularly called “Chinese.
Mouton,pp. The equivalents of our relative clauses occur before nouns as modifying elements, as in German. This balance is conditioned by the requirement that all characters, regardless of their simplicity or complexity, should be written so that they take up the same amount of square spaceas in the case of the one-stroke character for “one” and the sixty-four-stroke character for “verbose” cited above. I read this as a sort of introductory guide to the Chinese language, which sounds like it would be both fun and impossibly difficult for me to learn.
In case of need we could narrow our model to the idiolect or individual speech of a specific person. This could be done for the regionalects already discussed and also for the other regionalectsnamely Xiang, spoken only in Hunan; Hakka, spoken side by side with other regionalects chiefly in Guangdong and Guangxi; Gan, spoken chiefly in Jiangxi; Southern Min, spoken in southern Fujian for example in AmoyTaiwan, Hainan Island, and other areas; and Northern Min, spoken in northeastern Fujian.
Four of the six 1, 2, 3, and 5 are based on the composition of the characters; two 4 and 6 are based on their use Wieger We are thus confronted by a terminological dilemma. Reviews User-contributed reviews Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. If not, don’t bother. Authors who are clear in their own minds about the range of meanings involved in these terms are usually careful in their use of specific terminology.
Once we get beyond what might be called the Chao Idiolect, which was more or less the basis of the sketch of spoken Chinese presented in the preceding chapter, or any other specific idiolect, a problem arises: Perhaps we can put things in perspective by suggesting, to make a rough guesstimate, that learning to speak Chinese is about 5 percent more difficult than learning to speak French, whereas learning to read Chinese is about five times as hard as learning to read French.
Chinese characters constitute a system of writing so obviously different in appearance from Western scripts as to arouse wonderment about their precise nature and, as it were, their modus operandi. Hieroglyphic Symbols as Phonetic Signs Hieroglyphic text, interlinear transliteration, and word-for-word translation of the opening lines of a popular funeral book of about B.
Florian Coulmas of Chuo University wrote that “His lucid and extremely well-written presentation of the structural and historical peculiarities of the Chinese language provides much more than the necessary context for an appreciation of current language policy issues.
The E-mail message field is required. Exactly what constitutes a word is a much debated matter in every language, however, particularly so in the case of Chinese.
I therefore added a note specifically stating that the Committee on English Language Planning never really existed and that the so-called Singlish Affair is a figment of the imaginationa literary device designed to make more interesting an otherwise unadorned discussion of the Chinese writing system, its adaptation in the writing systems of Korea, Japan, and Viet Nam, and some of the problems involved in its use as a universal system of writing.
You already recently rated this item. Home About Help Search. This book isn’t at all suitable for sinologists and linguists.
Tones would undoubtedly be the first casualty, as they had been in Korea, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, Viet Nam, where the indigenous language was either tonal to begin with or became tonal in the course of its history.
Roughly speaking, nouns are things that follow measure words and measure words are things that follow numbers. Here they were simply following the evolution of writing in Korea, Japan, and Viet Nam.
