This week in grad school class about Chinese grammar, we covered the topic of grammaticalization. Of interest to me was one paper in which the author made a case for the demonstrative pronoun 这 beginning to take on the role of definite article in Beijing dialect. In this usage, 这 is pronounced “zhe” (neutral tone). The author also examined 那, and the same thing is not happening.
This made me think of English. We have…
Some of you may have noticed that the URL of my weblog has changed. It’s now /life/ instead of /weblog/. This is not because I think “Life” is a great name for my weblog, or because I think this is not a blog or something. I actually liked using the name “weblog” because it’s the simplest, most accurate description.
The reason for the change is Google. I had the word “weblog” in both the title of the HTML document as…
Bingfeng of Bingfeng’s Teahouse did this week’s Top Ten List for the China Blog List. I think it’s kinda interesting to see which blogs about China–by foreigners–a Chinese guy reads. There you have it.
In other news, for the blogs that provided the URL, I have added RSS links to the lower right corner of the entries in the list… sort of. I can say for sure that it works in Firefox, but there’s an occasional 1-pixel…
Did you ever have to diagram in gradeschool? Remember how that worked? Here’s an example:
They mixed the dough quickly, put it into the oven, and waited.
It’s intended to help the mind better grasp parts of speech and how they relate to each other in a sentence. I don’t think it really helps much, though. It seems more like demented grammarians forcing their “fun” on innocent children.
Here’s a
John has lived in China for
10
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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