Timely Snow

This from John Pasden. The translation is correct, but to me the Chinese implies that you Obama is also learning English, but perhaps there’s a nuance I’ve missed.

Interesting discussion about the cultural origins and historical evolution of beliefs about authorship and plagiarism, particularly as apply to China. I wish there were more substantiation of the historical claims, but it was interesting nonetheless.

A nice discussion of Chinese characters by Zhang Jinghe (thanks to Pinyin News). It does, however, state baldly a piece of linguistic dogma that is simply wrong, to wit:

Basically, language consists of words we orally utter…Scripts are for writing down languages, be they Egyptian with Hieroglyphs, cuneiform in
Mesopotamia, Mayan with glyphs in South America, Arabic [...]

A bit more than a year ago (April 15, 2008) we put down our 16 year old dog, Princess. She had clearly come to the end of the road—she couldn’t stand up on her own or manage most bodily functions, and had a fair amount of pain. Still, it was a fairly traumatic loss. We [...]

In an otherwise pretty forgettable discussion of commencement speeches, Mark Oppenheimer cites this from Richard Russo as his favorite commencement speech. It is, indeed, pretty good. I’ve sat through a number of these, and it’s hard to do well. My own graduation speaker was Isaac Azimov, who gave a really mediocre speech despite being one [...]

This post has some interesting pictures showing changes from 2008 to now. I didn’t realize they’d done some reconstruction on the Mutianyu Great Wall section. I think the picture is at the start of the area where you’re not supposed to walk (if you go left once you get to the Wall itself), but it [...]

The future of newspapers is a topic much in the news of late, as many papers (mostly due to financial shenanigans of one sort or another) find themselves in a deep economic hole. Ann Arbor is ground zero for one effort to reshape traditional newspapers, one that I’m guessing will fail. The Ann Arbor News [...]

James Fallows has been hosting a very interesting discussion on Chinese vs. American education on his excellent blog. Because he wrote the book that most influenced the way I’ve thought about an early issue eerily reminiscent of this—the discussion of US/Japanese differences in the wonderful More Like Us—I felt I should chime in.

The problem is, [...]

The “May 8th Tragedy.”

I’m surprised to realize that it’s already 10 years since the destruction of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia. The article above links to a number of contemporaneous articles and a foreign student’s journal on Salon. I happened to be in Beijing at the time, having just gotten there. I spent that day [...]

The New York Times weblog had a debate (or at least posted opinions from a number of scholars and writers) on the Traditional vs. Simplified characters issues. Most of what they had to say was reasonable, although I wonder about this claim from someone named Hsuan Meng:

The advantage of traditional characters is that they offer [...]