· 2000
Manchu was the language of a group of people who in the sixteenth century lived to the northeast of China and later became known as Manchus. After establishing a new state in the southern part of Manchuria in the early seventeenth century, they conquered China and ruled as the Qing dynasty until 1911. Millions of Manchu records along with records in Chinese and Mongolian were created during nearly three hundred years in power. Nowaday, with an imperial Manchu court out of the picture, hardly anybody knows the language. With the accessibility of large number of Manchu documents, today scholars study Manchu to understand the documents.
"The English translation by Lionel Giles of this famous classic, the notes, as well as the original Chinese text found in the 1910 first edition are reproduced here. A Wade-Giles - Pinyin Conversion Chart has been added to make this classic more accessible to the modern Chinese language student."--Cover.
· 2012
Written in the 6th century BC, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is still used as a book of military strategy today. Using a new translation by James Trapp, this bilingual edition of The Art of War lays the original Chinese text opposite the modern English translation.
· 2010
Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar is a comprehensive introduction to the syntactical analysis of classical Chinese. Focusing on the language of the high classical period, which ranges from the time of Confucius to the unification of the empire by Qin in 221, the book pays particular attention to the Mencius, the L�nyu, and, to a lesser extent, the Zu�zhu�n texts. Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar starts with a brief historical overview and a discussion of the relation between the writing system and the phonology. This is followed by an outline of overall principles of word order and sentence structure. The next sections deal with the main sentence types � nominal predicates, verbal predicates, and numberical expressions, which constitute a special type of quasiverbal predication. The final sections cover such topics as subordinate constitutents of sentences, nondeclarative sentence types, and complex sentences.
· 1986
"DeFrancis's book is first rate. It entertains. It teaches. It demystifies. It counteracts popular ignorance as well as sophisticated (cocktail party) ignorance. Who could ask for anything more? There is no other book like it. ... It is one of a kind, a first, and I would not only buy it but I would recommend it to friends and colleagues, many of whom are visiting China now and are adding 'two-week-expert' ignorance to the two kinds that existed before. This is a book for everyone." --Joshua A. Fishman, research professor of social sciences, Yeshiva University, New York "Professor De Francis has produced a work of great effectiveness that should appeal to a wide-ranging audience. It is at once instructive and entertaining. While being delighted by the flair of his novel approach, the reader will also be led to ponder on some of the most fundamental problems concerning the relations between written languages and spoken languages. Specifically, he will be served a variety of information on the languages of East Asia, not as dry pedantic facts, but as appealing tidbits that whet the intellectual appetite. The expert will find much to reflect on in this book, for Professor DeFrancis takes nothing for granted." --William S.Y. Wang, professor of linguistics, University of California at Berkeley
· 2012
The Art Of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise that is attributed to Sun Tzu, a high ranking military general and strategist during the late Spring and Autumn period. Composed of 13 chapters, each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare. This new illustrated edition contains the translated text, and wide ranging photography showcasing how the ideas and philosophies of the Art of War have remained relevant over the course of history.
· 2017
Incompatible with modernity -- Puzzling Chinese -- Radical machines -- What do you call a typewriter with no keys? -- Controlling the Kanjisphere -- QWERTY is dead! Long live QWERTY! Lin Yutang and the birth of input -- The typing rebellion
This reference grammar provides, for the first time, a description of the grammar of Mandarin Chinese, the official spoken language of China and Taiwan, in functional terms, focusing on the role and meanings of word-level and sentence-level structures in actual conversations.
· 2014
《当我们谈论爱情时我们在谈论什么》 In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women. 《当我们谈论爱情时我们在谈论什么》是雷蒙德·卡佛优秀的短篇小说集,由17篇短篇小说组成。讲述了如餐馆女招待、锯木厂工人、修车工、推销员和汽车旅馆管理员等社会底层的体力劳动者的生活。这些普通人有着普通人的愿望,做着再普通不过的事情,但他们发现自己在为生存而挣扎,无法达到在常人看来并不远大的人生目标。他们的生活中充满了窘困和不如意,婚姻破裂,失业,酗酒,破产。卡佛用“极简”的遣词、冷静疏离的叙事,表现了现代社会中人的边缘性以及现代人脆弱的自我意识。本书的出版,为美国短篇小说写作注入了新的生命,并为卡佛赢得了“美国的契诃夫”的称号,使他成为美国继海明威之后受到模仿最多的作家。