Thursday, November 3, 2011

Sino-Platonic Papers

(available here) describes itself in this way:

Sino-Platonic Papers is an occasional series edited by Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. The purpose of the series is to make available to specialists and the interested public the results of research that, because of its unconventional or controversial nature, might otherwise go unpublished.

It's full of interesting stuff about East Asian languages.  In particular there seems to be rather a lot of skepticism about the benefits of hanzi and kanji; one might innocently expect Western experts in these languages to be enthusiastic fanboys/girls for the characters, either because it was the characters that they first found interesting about the languages or because they're proud of the memorization-mountain that they have climbed.  But readers of  Language Log will know that Victor Mair is not a starry-eyed fan of characters!

Anyway: interesting stuff (mostly in PDF form, though some HTML), and well worth a read.

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