names, ethnicity, and colonialism
Joel at Far Outliers has an interesting post on how Koreans chose Japanese names during the Japanese colonial period. (Spotted on Language Hat.) Regarding name frequency in Taiwan, I once did some...
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Korean brands, images, and naming
Choe Yong-shik, the author of What’s Wrong With Korea’s Global Marketing, has some interesting comments on company names and branding in South Korea. He notes that in 1992 the Korean company Samsung...
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Firefox extensions for Mandarin Chinese texts
Although my favorite Web browser remains Opera (which is now free), I recognize that Firefox (which has always been free) has some nice things going for it, especially its wide range of extensions. At...
View ArticleThe state of translation in Korea
A new book with the provocative title of Are Translators Traitors? examines Korea’s translation situation and pronounces it “deplorable.” As a professor of Western history at Woosuk University, the...
View ArticleSouth Korea’s ‘English villages’
English continues to expand in South Korea, which is now home to “the world’s biggest English immersion camp,” according to an article from Agence France-Presse. Speaking Korean is banned in this...
View ArticleFestschrift 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...
View ArticleKorean romanization — again
It’s not just Taiwan that can’t seem to get its romanization situation resolved well. “Calls for a revision of the current Romanization system for the Korean alphabet, Hangul, are gaining more ground...
View ArticleKorean university students show little knowledge of Chinese characters
A group of 384 freshmen at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea were tested on their knowledge of hanja (Chinese characters, as are sometimes used in writing words in Korean). Although this sample...
View ArticleGoogle’s new ‘cross-language information retrieval’
Google has just launched a “cross-language information retrieval” (CLIR) function to Google Translate. Here is how Google describes it: Now, you can search for something in your own language (for...
View ArticleIndian influence on Chinese popular literature: a bibliography
Sino-Platonic Papers has rereleased for free another book-length back issue: A Partial Bibliography for the Study of Indian Influence on Chinese Popular Literature (10.8 MB PDF), by Victor H. Mair....
View ArticleChina shifting its position on traditional Chinese characters?
Many Web sites in China are running the story that Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese scholars have reached an agreement on unification of Chinese characters — and that this involves using many...
View ArticleSome remarks from North Korea on language
I haven’t provided any news from North Korea in quite some time. Truly, I am wicked human scum whose frantic attempts to stifle the true voice of the people will be thwarted. So here are some remarks...
View Articlemassive Korean dictionary of Chinese characters nears completion
The final volumes in what is being touted as the world’s largest Chinese character dictionary are scheduled to be published in May. The fifteen-volume work (excluding the index) will reportedly cover...
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Korea may make some spellings mandatory
I’ve been doing so much on signage lately that I’ve been neglecting the issue of romanization. (Remember romanization?) Here’s something just in from South Korea, a country that rivals Taiwan in making...
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US grad enrollments in Mandarin fall
Although the number of people studying Mandarin in the United States has continued to rise (more about that in a later post), enrollments there in graduate courses in Mandarin have declined. No. of...
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