mair

Victor Mair (2014) provides a striking example of the severity of the character amnesia problem.

For context, Victor Mair is a leading figure in Chinese history and linguistics.

Welcome tae this PDF file aboot coElgot algebra and mair.

For the former I recommend Victor Mair or Thomas Cleary.

On the other hand, Mair seems to think that slaughtering your native lexicon and replacing it with a bunch of English/Russian loanwords would be a good thing, while I disagree.

The messier answer: Middle Chinese (or Middle Sinitic as Mair calls it) was taken seriously as a language that people actually spoke and as the ancestor of Chinese varieties by the early Sinologist Bernhard Karlgren.

Everything I've listed there indeed has a pre-Song history (most from Sui/Tang, some from the Northern/Southern Dynasties, 是 as a copula Mair will argue comes even from the Warring States period).

I'm not so fond of characters either, but I also think calques are a damn sight better than loanwords --- and as Mair notes, a character-based writing system has the side-effect of forcing you to make calques, rather than just stealing foreign words wholesale without understanding them.

East Asian peoples only began showing up in the eastern portions of the Tarim Basin about 3,000 years ago, Mair said, while the Uighur peoples arrived after the collapse of the Orkon Uighur Kingdom, largely based in modern day Mongolia, around the year 842.

The lack of "academic" translations such as Lionel Giles's or Victor Mair's is odd for that site...

Basically Victor Mair's papers always come down to "I don't like Chinese characters", and "I don't like calques".

Mair makes this argument forcefully in his seminal 1994 article "Buddhism and the Rise of Written Vernacular in East Asia:" > Linguistic data that LS [Literary Sinitic, i.e.

[Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia," 1994] Now I'm personally not sure how much I believe that (and e.g.

The author (Victor Mair) of the piece makes two errors: (1) Omaha and Council Bluffs are not twin cities.

OT: Must-read on this subject and good reference material is Ruling the Void from Peter Mair.

The story was reported by Victor Mair, though, who is extremely opposed to using characters and often exaggerates the issues with them.