http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu The end of the queue? Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:45:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en On Monday morning, October 12th, we met at the train station for a 7:40 train.  On Saturday, I had called Mr Guan (the Jilin City Manchu Association's resident Manchu language expert), and he said he couldn't go.  This was very unfortunate because that left me as the only one going ... http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu/2008/11/sanjiazi-02/ On Thursday, October 9th, I took my computer to a shop to get it fixed (my fan wasn't on right, causing the CPU to heat up, in turn causing the C drive to crash, apparently).  I had brought my copy of Gertraude Roth Li's wonderful book Manchu: a Textbook for ... http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu/2008/11/sanjiazi-01/ I found my first real case of minim confusion, which I previously said was theoretically possible in Manchu because medial "a", pre-consonantal "n", and one form of "k" are all made up of identical strokes. By my "first real case", I mean two words that are attested in dictionaries, having the ... http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu/2008/09/minim-confusion/ Randy's recent creation of the Tiny Little Corpus (TLC™) of Manchu from the Art of War provides a fine excuse to dump the data into the mind-blowing visualization tools at Many Eyes (h/t to Ideophone) and get a new perspective on what Sunzi says. The screenshot below doesn't really do it ... http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu/2008/09/sunzi-visualizes-manchu-acquisition/ It is with great fanfare that I announce Victor Mair's new addition to Sino-Platonic Papers: an expanded set of notes (1.03 MB download, PDF) on his 2007 translation of the Art of War. The notes themselves are fantastic, but what made me practically fall out of my chair was what he ... http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu/2008/09/the-art-of-war-in-manchu/ I went to Wulajie again earlier this week.  A fellow school headmaster had arranged a trip there for his school so the students could learn about Manchu culture and spend part of the afternoon drawing.  His school is an art school, and he said he chose Wulajie partly because he ... http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu/2008/09/wall-mystery-solved/ Sometimes you just can't explain things. I have a friend who likes to send me YouTube links of bands, and sometimes I send some back. I had been trying to think of songs that I liked when I was growing up. Somehow, David Essex's 1973 hit Rock On came ... http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu/2008/06/manchu-shaman-reincarnated-as-brit-pop-star/ You've all seen those movies where someone finds some ancient parchment or carving with strange runes written on it. And then some professor-type runs off with it for an hour or so and then comes back holding it above his head shouting, "I've got it! It means...." Yeah, right. Deciphering an ... http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu/2008/05/the-writing-on-the-wall/ Seeing as I live up here in Manchuria, all the hubbub about Manchu stirred up my wanderlust instinct and I was chomping at the bit to go poke around in 三家子 (sānjiāzi) or someplace. On the map, I noticed that there were some Manchu villages nearby, so I heeded ... http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu/2008/05/breaking-ground/ Over the last year or so, Beijing Sounds has been a source of inspiration for those of us grappling with the finer points of life in China. Mandarin language obsessives have been treated to recordings and analyses of real Běijīnghuà, spoken by Beijingers young and old, as well as some ... http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu/2008/05/to-the-end-of-the-queue/