Archive for Books
January 6, 2025 @ 6:48 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Books, Language and food, Vocabulary, Words words words
I love potato chips, but am not a fan of french fries, so I'm all confused when I'm in Britain where "chips" are "crisps" and "fries" are "chips"!
One reason I like potato chips is because they are salty and savory to counteract all the sweets I consume, so I keep a big box of 18 small bags of chips and Doritos, Cheetos, and Fritos on hand to rescue me from hunger pangs whenever I feel them coming on. But I dislike Pringles because they're not real.
The British take their crisps more seriously than any other nation
No other snack bridges the class divide in the same way
Economist (12/19/24)
This is a book review of Crunch: An Ode to Crisps. By Natalie Whittle. Faber; 256 pages; £18.99
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December 23, 2024 @ 7:28 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Books, Phonetics and phonology
New book in the Cambridge University Press Elements (in Phonetics) series: The Phonetics of Taiwanese, by Janice Fon and Hui-lu Khoo (12/11/24):
Summary
Taiwanese, formerly the lingua franca of Taiwan and currently the second largest language on the island, is genealogically related to Min from the Sino-Tibetan family. Throughout history, it has been influenced by many languages, but only Mandarin has exerted heavy influences on its phonological system. This Element provides an overview of the sound inventory in mainstream Taiwanese, and details its major dialectal differences. In addition, the Element introduces speech materials that could be used for studying the phonetics of Taiwanese, including datasets from both read and spontaneous speech. Based on the data, this Element provides an analysis of Taiwanese phonetics, covering phenomena in consonants, vowels, tones, syllables, and prosody. Some of the results are in line with previous studies, while others imply potential new directions in which the language might be analyzed and might evolve. The Element ends with suggestions for future research lines for the phonetics of the language.
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August 31, 2024 @ 4:30 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Books, Language and history, Language and religion, Language and society, Manuscripts, Vernacular
Just published is a volume edited by David Holm, Vernacular Chinese-Character Manuscripts from East and Southeast Asia (De Gruyter), in their Studies in Manuscript Cultures series.
The book has chapters on Hokkien, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Yao, Zhuang, and other Tai-speakers who use Chinese-based vernacular scripts.
Previously announced on Language Log
here.
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August 23, 2024 @ 1:48 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Books, Language and computers, Writing systems
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-fourth issue: "Handling Chinese Characters on Computers: Three Recent Studies" (pdf), by J. Marshall Unger (August, 2024).
Abstract
Writing systems with large character sets pose significant technological challenges, and not all researchers focus on the same aspects of those challenges or of the various attempts that have been made to meet them. A comparative reading of three recent books—The Chinese Computer by Thomas Mullaney (2024), Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu (2022), and Codes of Modernity by Uluğ Kuzuoğlu (2023)—makes this abundantly clear. All deal with the ways in which influential users of Chinese characters have responded to the demands of modern technology, but differ from one another considerably in scope and their selection and treatment of relevant information long known to linguists and historians.
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June 27, 2024 @ 10:19 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Books, Philology
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June 22, 2024 @ 7:47 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Books, Censorship, Language and politics
In a country like China that is drenched in censorship, people who have opinions that differ from those of the government resort to any means possible to get their message across.
"Bookstores Become Sites of Subtle Protest Against Xi Jinping", by Alexander Boyd, China Digital Times (7/18/24)

The novel “Changing of the Guard” displayed at left, alongside “Study Outline for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”
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April 21, 2024 @ 6:20 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Books, Decipherment, Gender, Language and astronomy, Language and medicine, Manuscripts
This is one of the most novel theories on the Voynich manuscript (Beinecke MS408; early 15th c.) that I've ever encountered, and there are many.
The Voynich Manuscript, Dr Johannes Hartlieb and the Encipherment of Women’s Secrets, by Keagan Brewer and Michelle L Lewis, Social History of Medicine, hkad099 (22 March 2024)
Keywords: Voynich manuscript, Dr Johannes Hartlieb, women’s secrets, sex, gynaecology

A floral illustration on page 32
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April 6, 2024 @ 6:25 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Books, Language and literature, Writing
If someone is investigating texts, they can concentrate on the subject / content / style / linguistic nature of the writing. Increasingly, however, scholars have begun to concentrate on the objects and materials on which the writing takes place. From this, they tease out all sorts of interesting information about the social, political, and economic aspects of the texts. A new book on this topic is Thomas Kelly's The Inscription of Things: Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).
Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written.
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April 4, 2024 @ 10:50 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Books, Epigraphy, Writing systems
First Soundings
by Martina Galatello
This is the first book-length palaeographic study of about a thousand fragments in Syriac and Sogdian languages discovered between 1902 and 1914 in the Turfan area on the ancient Northern Silk Roads. This manuscript material, probably dating between the late 8th and 13th /14th centuries, is of utmost relevance for the history of an area that represents a crossroads region of various communities, languages and religions, not least the East Syriac Christian community. Palaeographic factors such as form, modulus, ductus, contrast, spaces between letters and ligatures have been examined. Particularly significant is a peculiar ligature of the letters sade and nun. One important observation that emerges from this research is the almost total absence of monumental script in favour of mostly cursive forms, most of them East Syriac cursive forms. These represent a valuable source for the study of the history of the East Syriac script due to the paucity of earlier and contemporary East Syriac manuscript evidence from the Middle East, at least before the twelfth century. Moreover, this research sheds light on scribal habits that are highly relevant for a better comprehension of the Sogdian and Syriac-speaking Christian communities, for the history of writing between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and for a greater understanding of the social context in which these and other communities in the same area read, wrote, and shared handwritten texts.
This study is part of the FWF stand-alone project "Scribal Habits. A case study from Christian Medieval Central Asia" (PI Chiara Barbati) at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
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March 20, 2024 @ 8:29 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Books
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March 13, 2024 @ 5:57 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Books, Language and religion, Language and society, Manuscripts
Forthcoming from De Gruyter, July 14, 2024 (ISBN: 9783111382746):
Vernacular Chinese-Character Manuscripts from East and Southeast Asia, edited by: David Holm.
Volume 40 in the series Studies in Manuscript Cultures
Keywords: Asia; vernacular; ritual; library collections; recitation
Topics: Asian Literature; Asian and Pacific Studies; Dialectology; Linguistics and Semiotics; Literary Studies; Literature of other Nations and Languages; Southeast Asia; Textual Scholarship; Theoretical Frameworks and Disciplines
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July 7, 2023 @ 10:57 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Books, Language and philosophy, Proverbs, Writing, Writing systems
From the Wall Street Journal:
‘The Oldest Book in the World’ Review: Also Sprach Ptahhatp
A set of maxims attributed to an adviser of an Egyptian pharaoh may be the world’s earliest surviving work of philosophy.
By Dominic Green
July 6, 2023 6:20 pm ET
What have we? Philosophy in the Age of the Pyramids? Philosophy before there were Greek philosophers?
Green launches his review:
In 1847 the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris acquired a 16-page scroll from the antiquarian Émile Prisse d’Avennes (1807-1879). He had bought it from one of the local men then excavating a cemetery near a pharaonic temple complex at Thebes in Egypt. The Papyrus Prisse, as it is known, contains the only complete version of a set of philosophical epigrams called “The Teaching of Ptahhatp.” Recognized upon its publication in 1858 as “the oldest book in the world,” the “Teaching” is attributed to a vizier to Izezi, the eighth and penultimate pharaoh of the Old Kingdom’s Fifth Dynasty, who ruled Egypt in the late 25th and early 24th centuries B.C.
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June 4, 2023 @ 10:48 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Books, Etymology, Language and archeology, Language and history, Language and literature, Language and religion, Translation
I was stunned when I read the following article in the South China Morning Post, both because it was published in Hong Kong, which is now completely under the censorial control of the People's Republic of China (PRC) / Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and because it raises some disturbing political issues and troubling linguistic problems.
"Why the rewriting of China’s history 3,000 years ago still matters today"
Confucius uncovered the truth of the Shang dynasty but agreed with King Wen and the Duke of Zhou to cover up disturbing facts
Beijing’s claimed triumph over Covid-19, for instance, may not echo with all who endured the draconian quarantines.
Zhou Xin, SCMP (4/25/23)
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