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Lädt ... Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984)von John DeFrancis
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Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. I read the Amazon reviews, noticing that the negative and equivocal reviews were written by people who actually read Chinese with some degree of fluency, and realized that I don't need to read this book. So I skimmed. Assertions about the desirability of abolishing Chinese characters in favour of an alphabetical system, which is the burden of DeFrancis's argument, annoy me. Trying to read romanized Chinese text is as difficult as trying to read English text written in Chinese characters (you might call it a rebus format), and just as frustrating; not to mention the millennia of cultural heritage embodied in the characters which would be entirely lost to the world. Orwellian Newspeak is benign by comparison. DeFrancis begins his book with a shaggy-dog tale, a "joke" dozens of pages long and full of "corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative", in which the Japanese during WWII anticipate complete victory over the US and spearhead a committee to plan writing the English language in Chinese characters. It is highly ironic that he fails to comprehend that he wants to inflict the same kind of violence upon the Chinese language. Zeige 4 von 4 keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
William S.Y. Wang, professor of linguistics, University of California at Berkeley: 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. Joshua A. Fishman, research professor of social sciences, Yeshiva University, New York: 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. Delightfully engaging ... this book contains a wealth of hard facts about Chinese. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)495Language Other Languages Languages of East & Southeast AsiaKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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It's by one of the most prominent Chinese linguists of the last century, who in the first half of the book tackles (and for the most part demolishes) many of the myths about the Chinese language held both by outsiders and by Chinese scholars themselves. For example: that Chinese characters are ideographic, expressing ideas directly without appeal to spoken language; that the language itself is monosyllabic; that Chinese is a unified language across China with only minor differences in pronunciation.
I would have rated it higher if the second half hadn't been so out of date. It consists mostly of discussions of the political history of the attempt to spread literacy in China, and the issues of the writing system--should the characters be replaced or at least supplemented by a phonetic system? Written in 1984, the whole discussion I believe has been or soon will be rendered obsolete by the widespread use of the internet and cell phones, for the way characters are input into computing devices is by typing phonetically. Once communication is mediated by computers, game over. ( )