Category: language

Samoan Language Coursebook

Posted on by stephchun

This revised edition of Gagana Samoa, by Galumalemana Afeleti Hunkin, is an important modern Samoan language resource. Designed for both classroom and personal use, it features a methodical approach suitable for all ages; an emphasis on patterns of speech and communication through practice and examples; 10 practical dialogues covering everyday social situations; an introduction to the wider culture of fa‘asamoa through photographs; more than 150 exercises to reinforce comprehension; a glossary of all Samoan words used in the coursebook; oral skills supplemented by an optional CD.

June 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3131-8 / $26.00 (PAPER)

A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa

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“Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese: A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa succeeds admirably in the goals the author has set for it. The introduction is the clearest and most useful document of its kind I have seen in recent years. It lays out in relatively few pages what others have heretofore taken reams to express. The body of the work gives the reader the entire syllable inventory of Old Chinese in a clear and useful format. The index and finding list are well organized and allow quick access to the material in the text. I predict that it will become a standard handbook for sinologists in general, just as Kalgren’s Grammata Serica and Grammata Serica Recensa have been during the past sixty years.” —W. South Coblin, University of Iowa

“The present work will fill the need for an updated and easy-to-use source for citing the various historically reconstructed stages of Chinese. It retains the basic structure of Karlgren’s early works with one big difference: the inclusion of an additional historical stage, Later Han Chinese. [Axel] Schuessler’s work will allow a much wider audience to access the most important result of Chinese historical phonology, especially those not interested in specializing in the study of historical phonology. It will also be a helpful resource for the linguist who, although familiar with the linguistic literature concerning Old Chinese, often needs a convenient way to look up reconstructions. Even those given to a more speculative turn of mind may well find that their work is greatly facilitated by Schuessler’s book. I believe that in a short time Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese will become a standard reference on the active sinologist’s bookshelf.” —Jerry Norman, University of Washington

April 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3264-3 / $58.00 (CLOTH)

Fundamental Spoken Chinese

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Fundamental Spoken Chinese, by Robert Sanders and Nora Yao, introduces most of the basic grammatical patterns of modern spoken Mandarin in a carefully planned, graduated fashion. Every chapter follows the same organizational format and includes: key grammar points, new vocabulary items arranged by part of speech, sentence patterns, and four or five short dialogues illustrating contextual use of each new grammar pattern and vocabulary item. Non-technical explanations of grammar are written from the perspective of the English-speaking learner and are illustrated with multiple sentences in simple chart form. When appropriate, vocabulary and culture notes are provided, together with numerous drills, exercises, and in-class activities. Finally, English-Chinese translation exercises help determine how well students have mastered the chapter’s grammar and vocabulary.

“The course set out in Fundamental Spoken Chinese and Fundamental Written Chinese provides a thorough training in all the skills that a learner needs to reach a basic level of proficiency in Mandarin Chinese as well as a solid foundation for more advanced study. Fundamental Spoken Chinese is marvelously executed. The explanations of grammar and usage are exceptionally clear, the best I’ve ever seen in a textbook. The charts used to illustrate grammatical constructions are easy to follow, and the examples are well chosen for maximal clarity. The dialogues are naturalistic and well keyed to everyday situations, as is the vocabulary. Fundamental Written Chinese has many of the same virtues as its companion volume. Like Fundamental Spoken Chinese, Fundamental Written Chinese not only teaches the content of the lesson but also inculcates habits essential for further learning. The emphasis on explaining characters explicitly in terms of radicals and phonetics is an example of the kind of approach that makes for successful advanced learners. The two books are designed to be flexible so that teachers of various approaches can use them either to introduce the spoken and written skills simultaneously or to introduce writing after the spoken language has progressed to a certain level. Teachers and learners are provided with all the basic tools needed in one well-designed package.” —Mark Hansell, Carleton College

April 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3156-1 / $39.00 (PAPER)

The Role of Contact in the Origins of Japanese and Korean

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Despite decades of research on the reconstruction of proto-Korean-Japanese (pKJ), some scholars still reject a genetic relationship. The Role of Contact in the Origins of the Japanese and Korean Languages, by J. Marshall Unger, addresses their doubts in a new way, interpreting comparative linguistic data within a context of material and cultural evidence, much of which has come to light only in recent years.

The weaknesses of the reconstruction, according to Unger, are due to the early date at which pKJ split apart and to lexical material that the pre-Korean and pre-Japanese branches later borrowed from different languages to their north and south, respectively. Unger shows that certain Old Japanese words must have been borrowed from Korean from the fourth century C.E., only a few centuries after the completion of the Yayoi migrations, which brought wet-field rice cultivation to Kyushu from southern Korea. That leaves too short an interval for the growth of two distinct languages by the time they resumed active contact. Hence, concludes Unger, the original separation occurred on the peninsula much earlier, prior to reliance on paddy rice and the rise of metallurgy. Non-Korean elements in ancient peninsular place names were vestiges of pre-Yayoi Japanese language, according to Unger, who questions the assumption that Korean developed exclusively from the language of Silla. He argues instead that the rulers of Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla all spoke varieties of Old Korean, which became the common language of the peninsula as their kingdoms overwhelmed its older culture and vied for dominance.

November 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3279-7 / $46.00 (CLOTH)

How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters

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At long last the approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. Book 1 of Remembering Traditional Hanzi and Remembering Simplified Hanzi, by James W. Heisig and Timothy W. Richardson, cover the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the Chinese writing system, plus another 500 that are best learned at an early stage. (Book 2 adds another 1,500 characters for a total of 3,000.)

Traditional / October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3324-4 / $25.00 (PAPER)
Simplified / October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3323-7 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Kokota Grammar

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Kokota Grammar, by Bill Palmer, describes the grammar of Kokota, a highly endangered Oceanic language of the Solomon Islands, spoken by about nine hundred people on the island of Santa Isabel. After several long periods among the Kokota, Dr. Palmer has written an unusually detailed and comprehensive description of the language. Kokota has never before been described, so this work makes an important contribution to our knowledge of the Oceanic languages of island Melanesia.

Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication, No. 35
October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3251-3 / $35.00 (PAPER)

Remembering the Kanji 2 and 3 Now Available

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Following James W. Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji 1, the second volume,
Remembering the Kanji 2: A Systematic Guide to Reading the Japanese Characters, takes up the pronunciation of characters and provides students with helpful tools for memorizing them. Behind the notorious inconsistencies in the way the Japanese language has come to pronounce the characters it received from China lie several coherent patterns. Identifying these patterns and arranging them in logical order can reduce dramatically the amount of time spent in the brute memorization of sounds unrelated to written forms.

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3166-0 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Students who have learned to read and write the basic 2,000 characters run into the same difficulty that university students in Japan face: The government-approved list of basic educational kanji is not sufficient for advanced reading and writing. Although each academic specialization requires supplementary kanji of its own, a large number of these kanji overlap. With that in mind, the same methods employed in volumes 1 and 2 have been applied to 1,000 additional characters determined as useful for upper-level proficiency, and the results published as the third volume in the series, Remembering the Kanji 3: Writing and Reading Japanese Characters for Upper-Level Proficiency, by James W. Heisig and Tanya Sienko.

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3167-7 / $54.00 (CLOTH)

Also available from University of Hawai‘i Press: Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each.

Fundamentals of Japanese Grammar

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Fundamentals of Japanese Grammar: Comprehensive Acquisition, by Yuki Johnson, is an extensive and thorough explanation of crucial Japanese grammar in English and the culmination of years of teaching and research. Informed by the work of eminent linguist Susumu Kuno, it is designed for students who have studied basic Japanese grammar and wish to better organize their knowledge and expand it in greater depth and at a higher level. Its organization presents a holistic picture of Japanese grammar for the benefit of learners and is distinctive in that grammar items are reorganized in terms of specific grammatical categories, such as particles, te-form compounds, dictionary-form compounds, stem-form compounds, passive constructions, conditional sentences, and so forth. The author offers a thorough discussion of various pragmatic constraints illustrated with sample sentences, dialogues, and essays that aid in understanding the structure and use of the language from a cultural perspective.

January 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3176-9 / $32.00 (PAPER)

Comparative Tai Source Book

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William J. Gedney’s Comparative Tai Source Book, by Thomas John Hudak, provides accurate and reliable data from 1,159 common cognates found in 19 dialects from the Tai language family. Originally collected by noted Tai linguist, the late William J. Gedney, the data are organized into the three branches of the Tai language family, the Southwestern, the Central, and the Northern, to facilitate comparisons among the various sound systems within the individual branches and within the Tai language family as a whole.

This is the latest volume (number 34) in the Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication series.

December 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3190-5 / $30.00 (PAPER)

Literacy in a Hmong-American Community

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Writing from These Roots: Literacy in a Hmong-American Community, by John M. Duffy, documents the historical development of literacy in Wasau, Wisconsin, of Laotian Hmong, a people who came to the U.S. as refugees from the Vietnam War and whose language had no widely accepted written form until one created by missionary-linguists was adopted in the late twentieth century.

“We are only beginning to recognize the global forces that have long shaped literacy in the United States. What we need now is a book that demonstrates how to theorize U.S. literacy with regard to globalization’s complex legacy. Writing from These Roots satisfies this need, and then some. Duffy’s careful representation of Hmong literacy narratives is a remarkable accomplishment in its own right, not least for the respect he shows the women and men whose stories enable him to delineate personal, cultural, and national pathways to literacy. In also documenting Hmong people’s transnational pathway to literacy in the United States, Duffy expertly details the rhetorical means by which literacy can make legible the self-fashioning of distinct identities against a historical backdrop bleached by generations of assimilationist public policy and racist discourse. Duffy’s insistence that we think rhetorically about literacy is a call that will resonate in literacy scholarship for years to come.” —Peter Mortensen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

June 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3012-0 / $45.00 (CLOTH)

Also available from University of Hawai‘i Press: The Hmong of Australia: Culture and Diaspora, edited by Nicholas Tapp and Gary Lee.

Remembering the Kana

Posted on by UH Press

Following on the phenomenal success of Remembering the Kanji, James W. Heisig has prepared a companion volume for learning the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries of modern Japanese: Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each. In six short lessons of about twenty minutes, each of the two systems of “kana” writing are introduced in such a way that the absolute beginner can acquire fluency in writing in a fraction of the time normally devoted to the task.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3164-6 / $15.00 (PAPER)

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