Festschrift for John DeFrancis now available for free
Most readers of Pinyin News will already know of John DeFrancis, editor of the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary and author of The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy and many other important...
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carvings said to be in oldest script ever discovered in Western Hemisphere
The latest issue of Science features an article on a stone slab found in Veracruz, Mexico. Scholars have identified the inscriptions on the stone — tentatively dated to at least 900 B.C.E. — as the...
View Articlea shameless proposal
A Taipei city councilor with the KMT on Tuesday launched an attack on President Chen Shui-bian disguised as a signage proposal. His idea: Change the name of Ketagalan Boulevard (凱達格蘭大道 Kǎidágélán...
View ArticleEssay in Hanyu Pinyin
Although I have a few texts here on Pinyin Info written in Pinyin, most of them aren’t long and are usually conversions from texts written in Chinese characters. So it is with very great pleasure that...
View Articlereviews of books related to China and linguistics (2)
Sino-Platonic Papers has just released online its second compilation of book reviews. Here are the books discussed. (Note: The links below do not lead to the reviews but to other material. Use the link...
View ArticleCritique of ordering of dictionaries for Mandarin Chinese
Sino-Platonic Papers has rereleased for free its very first issue, from February 1986: The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some...
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John DeFrancis video
Ten years ago John DeFrancis was awarded the Chinese Language Teachers Association’s first lifetime achievement award. Since he could not be present at the association’s annual conference to receive...
View ArticleJohn DeFrancis, 1911-2009
John DeFrancis has died at the age of 97. I’ll write more about this later. Right now, I’m still too sad.
View ArticleJohn DeFrancis memorial service
A video from the moving memorial service for John DeFrancis is now available online. It’s almost two hours long, so allot yourself some time if you want to watch it.
View ArticleHomographobia
Twenty-five years ago, John DeFrancis wrote a terrific essay on what he aptly dubbed homographobia (in Mandarin: tóngyīncí-kǒngjùzhèng). It’s a word that deserves wider currency, as the irrational fear...
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Xin Tang 6
My previous post linked to a new HTML version of Homographobia, an essay by John DeFrancis. The work was first published in November 1985, in the sixth issue of Xin Tang (New China). Xin Tang (Xīn...
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ABC English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary out soon
The ABC Chinese-English Dictionary was published ten years ago. It was revolutionary in that, for the first time, a Mandarin-English dictionary was ordered entirely by the headwords’ pronunciation as...
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Wenlin releases major upgrade (4.0)
One of my favorite programs, Wenlin (which bills itself as “software for learning Chinese”), has just released a major upgrade for both Mac and Windows versions. This doesn’t happen often; it has been...
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Pinyin sort order
The standard for alphabetically sorting Hanyu Pinyin is given in the ABC dictionary series edited by John DeFrancis and issued by the University of Hawaii Press. Here’s the basic idea: The ordering is...
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If you ever find yourself stuck on how to pronounce English
It’s times like this I especially miss John DeFrancis. How he would have loved this! It’s partially an example of what he dubbed “Singlish” — not Singapore English but Sino-English, the tortured...
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