The beauty of open access
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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.
Now available open access at the De Gruyter website.
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.
It is always cause for celebration when a significant book on a specialized research topic is made available open access. The same is true of Jeffrey Kotyk's Sino-Iranian and Sino-Arabian Relations in Late Antiquity: China and the Parthians, Sasanians, and Arabs in the First Millennium, which I had previously announced here, and is now available open access at the Brill website here.
Selected readings
- "Bahasa and the concept of 'National Language'" (3/14/13)
- "A hidden minority revealed" (1/29/22) — Zhuang
- "Katratripulr" (5/6/22)
- "The geo-, socio-, ethno-, and politicolinguistics of Taiwan" (7/24/18)
- "Thai 'khwan' ('soul') and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (1/28/19)
- "Two-fifths of the people in Vietnam have the surname Nguyen. Why?" (1/18/20) — with extensive bibliography
- "Words in Vietnamese" (10/2/18)
David Holm, "'Crossing the Seas': Indic Ritual Templates and the Shamanic Substratum in Eastern Asia", Sino-Platonic Papers, 281 (September, 2018), 1-75.
Jeffrey Kotyk, "The Sinicization of Indo-Iranian Astrology in Medieval China", Sino-Platonic Papers, 282 (September, 2018), 1-95.
KIRINPUTRA said,
September 4, 2024 @ 10:16 pm
This is tremendous. Among other things, "Kim Mun Letters" brings fire to man with data that has not been widely accessible till now (AFAIK).
Interesting that the leadoff essay should assuage the demon spirits (?) by circularly reassuring us that "the 'xenicity' of topolects fails to receive acceptance" because "[t]ypological differences arguably play a much less important role" with, say, sinographic Hokkien vs, say, sinographic Kim Mun; and "there are identifiable periods of cultural contact during which script adaptation took place" with a Kim Mun, but not with a Hokkien. I guess this keeps the censors at bay, but has the environment gotten that bad?