A cultural history of the Chinese language (edition 2012)

It's one of those books that's pressing an argument that really ought to be pressed to academics targeted at the general public. There's a lot of details here, but it's in service of a controversial theory that needs beaten on by academics. "[T]he study of Chinese language has been eliminated by established linguistic and sociological theories which are constructed in much younger languages" is silly; there are many good scholars who claim Chinese linguists as their field of study, both inside and outside China. Ultimately, I can't recommend it; there's better books about Chinese writing and about Chinese poetry and Chinese culture and Chinese history, even if (as she claims) no one has put together a decent one that does all of them.

The author's main idea is that Chinese language is heavily impacted by the historical development of other forms of expression such as literature, dance, music, and theater. She skillfully explores the relationship between and among these media and sketches a compelling framework that can ignite the imaginations of readers within and outside of academia. The general reader of history will certainly find a satisfying amount of information about Chinese cultural form, its history, and language. A scholarly reader will be challenged to consider and perhaps carry on an analysis of the thoughts that the author presents.

In all, this is a very good work. ( )

Chinese has existed as a language for about 5,000 years and has approximately 1.5 billion speakers. It is a language of nuance, culture, and tremendous range. Having evolved from the simple pictograms of Archaic Chinese to the complex and compact artistic and tonal structure of today’s China, the language is an incredibly difficult thing to encapsulate. The problem here, though, is neither can Sharron Gu.

She claims that the reason for writing the book was that she couldn’t find an appropriately scholarly text on Chinese language and culture for her American-born son. It seems that there still aren’t any.

http://lifelongdewey.wordpress.com/2012/10/03/495-a-cultural-history-of-the-chin... ( )

This is a very interesting book but it might be more accurately described as a series of essays on intersections between Chinese culture and Chinese language. There are chapters on music, art, and nature which are only distantly related to language itself. The chapters on poetry and drama are more relevant to the title.
The poetry is interesting for including a good many classic poems in the original Chinese in pinyan transscription so that the sound patterns can really be seen by those who do not read much Chinese (such as myself). Unfortunately te presentations of poems are inconsistent; the best solution would be to give the sounds in Chinese, a literal translation intyo English and ten a more literary one. In fact often only one or two of these versions are given Many of the English translations include rather heavy-handed rhymes reminiscent of the early translations of H.Giles a hundred years ago. Grantng that Waley's imagist versions which have become the conventional form for Chinese in English do not represent the sound patterns in Chinese, often the rhymes in Gu's translations do not follow the sound patterns of the original either.The Chinese versions do make clear the very heav use of direct repetition in the poetry which is often disguised in English. There are good discussions of the changing sound patterns in the poetry over time which are rarely discussed in non-specialist works. The English prose of Gu's own comments is fluent, even scholarly, but occasionally non-idiomatic, especially in omissions of articles. Over all, the book is stimulating but some details are irritating. ( )

I wanted very much to like this book, mainly because the majority of the exposure I've had to Chinese cultures has been through "sound bites" on museum cards, or through short blurbs in art, music, or history books. I liked that there was a single book which tied the multiple cultural histories of China into a single book, without being a scholarly tome. I think it was useful for me, but I don't think I'd recommend it to anyone else, unless I knew they would have the wherewithal to wade through a wandering book. For me, wandering was useful, because it helped me tie things together. However, it would be difficult for many to follow, since there's very little true structure to the book.

So, ultimately, I think there was good information in the book, and the author spent a lot of effort creating this book. However, I'd say it's an acquired taste, and many people would find it frustrating to try and follow.