A friend of mine, Bill Muehlenberg, has written a response to the 2006 Australian census figures, which have just been released.
See his response here:
http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2007/06/28/sense-on-the-census/. It’s basically refuting the exaggerated headlines that Christian values are on the decline.
It’s interesting how many birthdays (and deathdays) of famous people can be found for any given date.
Try looking up your own birthday! I did it by going here and just changing the URL. March 13 isn’t my real birthday, I’ve put a different one here because I know it is all you need to access someone’s account with some utilities companies over the telephone.
This is a grammar most deserving of its title. It is truly comprehensive in every sense of the word. The grammar is explained along lines that a Westerner with even a pinch of grammatical knowledge can understand.
It is probably a good idea that the examples of erroneous grammar are included, complete with an asterisk to indicate that it is an error. However, I can’t help feeling that they’ll remain in my memory and I won’t be able to tell the difference between a sentence that’s been hailed as a grammatically correct example and one that is incorrect. I can’t really think of any alternatives to the way the authors have done this though.
It would be great if there were just a few exercises at the end of each chapter, complete with an answer key. That really wouldn’t add all that much to the total page count of the book, but would greatly add to its overall usefulness. After all, most of us who actually buy/read this book are students of Chinese who need all the exercises we can get - aren’t we?
Lastly, here are a few shortcomings I found in this book:
On page 46, section 2.14 should be cross referenced to chapter 7.
I’m not sure whether this is actually a mistake or not, but hai2shi0 (or) is explained in section 23.4. But there’s no reference made to huo4zhe3 at all, which is exceedingly relevant.
In the index, on page 417 xiang3 points to a non-existent 8.1.6. It should be 18.1.6 (page 284).
This is a picture of Asher and I outside Walmart and McDonald’s in Wuhan, China. Not ever having spent a great deal of time in the US I’d never actually been to a Walmart. So this was my first and only time.
Walmart in Chinese is 沃尔玛.
McDonald’s is 麦当劳.
These words are basically loan words, which sound similar to Walmart and McDonald’s, respectively.
I hope to write a bit more about our trip to China on here at some stage.
Please note that my comments will reflect my being neither a qualified nor experienced linguist. I purchased this book because I have found guides to the morphology of a language to be a useful approach (one of many) to learning a language. Another “morphology” I found handy in language learning was The Morphology of Biblical Greek by William D. Mounce (ISBN: 0310226368).
Languages can generally be divided into the following units (of ascending size) for the purpose of study: phoneme (sound), morpheme (meaningful unit - word or part of a word), syntax (grammar) and semantics (text/story). This may be modelled in different ways by different theorists. This book is, of course, focussing on the second of these units, that of the morpheme. It looks at words, parts of words, particles and focusses on the very meaning of the concept “word” itself.
I’ve already mentioned my lack of linguistics background. If you are approaching this book as a linguist, you’ll get much more out of it than me, at many more levels. A simple (!) learner of Chinese can also benefit, in the sense that s/he can gain a greater “feel” for the language using linguistics, as opposed to grammar - though the two at times overlap. But read on!
In China I showed a number of native speakers some charts/tables from this book. They were unanimous that they had never heard of quite a few of the example words (usually disyllables). Admittedly, the words may still be used in other areas of China, however, I recommend you proceed with the same caution. Before memorising lists of words from the tables, ensure they are in common usage, at least somewhere in China or a Chinese community. Otherwise you’re wasting your time majoring on minors when it is more profitable to learn words in common use.
I felt a little confused as to what is classified as an affix. In two places (possibly more) there are brief lists (I’ve omitted the characters themselves, but have included the tone number, with neutral tones unmarked):
Page 160: “…bound, affix-type word-forming elements like -tou, -zi, -hua4, -zhe3, -xing4, -le and -men.”
Page 299: “…grammatical affixes: e.g., -le, -zhe [which is rare in modern Chinese], -guo, -de, bu-, and -men…”
I felt that, though this isn’t a grammar as such, some of these categories could have been placed as a chart in an appendix to increase the overall usability of the book. Even better, perhaps a chapter at the beginning to explain some of the linguistic terms (for “gestalt word”, read “compiled word” -ci2) and frameworks. In my opinion, that would enable learners of Chinese to gain so much more from this volume. A chapter like that could be comfortably ignored by linguists (whose purpose escapes me at times - I guess “someone’s gotta do it”).
The author, Jerome “Jerry” Packard, is currently professor of Linguistics and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign).
In writing up this review I must acknowledge that I visited listserv linguistlist, and you’d do well to do the same, either directly or through a search engine with a few appropriate key words.
Not being a linguist I didn’t want to post an unfair review, so depending on your needs: Highly recommended.
My copy was bought in China. Like many academic linguistics texts available there it was produced for the Chinese market and is not meant to be exported en masse outside of China because of the cheaper price. It looks like this:
This post is a bit of a follow-up from a previous post:
http://www.jamesforsyth.net/asher-loves-thomas-and-toast/
Thanks to my friend Rachel, we have been introduced to a Chinese kids’ cartoon called 舒克和贝塔. It’s about two mice (not much of a review, I know, but that’s all I understand of it so far!). The whole thing looks a bit like Itchy and Scratchy from the Simpsons.
Asher hasn’t been that interested in it yet. He just wants to get back to watching 汤玛士小火车 (Thomas the Tank Engine), which he regards as far more important. Last night we tried to read to him in bed, and he insisted on having all his six train carriages in bed with us.
Just a few points…
The second edition of this volume (2003) has been fine tuned and, in my opinion, improved.
Personally I found it helpful to copy and adapt the diagrams on how to construct arguments, with blank, fill-in boxes for trialling different concepts. Please note, however, that the “acknowledgement and response” (i.e. acknowledgement and response to exceptions to rules, seemingly opposing evidence, etc) part of the “claim, evidence, warrant, reason” diagram should be linked with dual-direction arrows to each other part of the argument. This is the case because an acknowledgement and response may be required for any part of the argument process. The authors make this clear themselves in the text, but it is not so clear in the diagram.
If I can find the original files I used to make these diagrams I’ll post them here.
I found the bibliographical pointers at the back of the book to be relevant, up to date and of great assistance to anyone about to embark on a lengthy and challenging research project.
For those wishing to expand their knowledge on how to construct arguments, Williams and Colomb have also written “The Craft of Argument” which is now also in its second edition (2003). There is some degree of repetition here, but it is well worthwhile learning to firmly ground your arguments.
I particularly liked the tip (in the volume at hand) about placing a warrant first, which a hostile audience is likely to accept. Then moving to specifics which will cause your reader some real cognitive dissonance!
Today we took Asher to Hudson’s. We bought him a muffin, which looked sturdy enough because the top was nice and crisp. I hear that there’s a craze in the U.S. these days of eating the muffintop alone (see the Seinfeld episode), which has nothing to do with another kind of muffin top. Underneath the top everything else underneath quickly disintegrated into crumbs. He ended up totally covered with the stuff. I took him, then the cushion he was sitting on, outside for a good shaking down, to the amazement of the baristas.
***Again, this post is a work in progress, I’m posting it now for any initial feedback & to think it over as I go***
As a Reformed Baptist much of my theology comes from the Protestant Reformers, which I believe to be a faithful rendition of what is actually contained in the Word of God.
However, the Reformers weren’t always right. This can be seen in the book pictured above by Martin Luther.
Abraham was given the land of Israel as early as the book of Genesis, which entitles them to that land forever. Since the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament are the same God, there is no contradiction or need to change our view on this if we are Christians. What happened in 1947 is good news for all Jews and Christians. This needn’t have anything to do with our view of prophecy at all, in fact I don’t personally hold to any premillennialist or dispensationalist views.
Jews are a benign people. They won’t try to evangelise to your children. They won’t force conversion on anybody. They don’t infiltrate a country and eventually say “to be Australian (for example) is to be Jewish”. They just don’t think and behave like that.
Modern Judaism in particular is particularly compatible with democracy and human rights. Did you know that the only Middle Eastern state to have a gay pride parade is Israel? (Not that I’m endorsing such activity).
In our own small way, we make a statement to support the Jews by always buying Kosher Nuttelex brand margarine.
Most of the Reformers, other than the “Anabaptists” were also incorrect in their view of baptism, but we’ll save that for another post.
This book is logically set out and is complete with lexica and indices.
In case you have already studied Latin, and don’t want to switch the way you go through your declension paradigms, Collins uses the following order: NGDAA - Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Ablative. That’s the way I personally prefer it, as I did Greek that way, except that in Greek there was no Ablative, but a Vocative in its place.
For those of you, like myself, who hold to a reformed faith, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater and forget about Latin. Remember, all of the reformers knew Latin, and that doesn’t make them papists by any means. Furthermore, logically, isn’t knowledge better than the lack of knowledge?
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a somewhat tongue-in-cheek “Mass” in his book Fates Worse than Death. In an appendix at the back of that book is John F. Collins’ Latin translation!
It’s a shame this book didn’t come with its own answer key in the back. Honestly… it took another author to write one, which has recently been released.
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