Mark Swofford of Pinyin News has announced that the 1991 Schriftfestschrift: Essays in Honor of John DeFrancis on His Eightieth Birthday (Sino-Platonic Papers) is now available as a free PDF in honor of the 95th birthday of Professor DeFrancis. The print edition was US$35.
Download the free 260-page PDF if you’re interested in Chinese, other Asian languages, linguistics, language policy, or writing systems. It’s 14.7 MB and took me an hour and forty minutes on dial-up to download.
You aren’t allowed to sell the book or make dervative works of it.
Swofford also kindly provided the table of contents:
- Tabula Gratulatoria
- Introduction, by Victor H. Mair
- Publications of John DeFrancis
- Hanzi Bu Tebie Biaoyi, by Zhang Liqing
- Typology of Writing Systems, by Zhou Youguang
- Dui Hanzi de Jizhong Wujie, by Yin Binyong
- The Information Society and Terminology, by Liu Yongquan
- A Bilingual Mosaic, by Einar Haugen
- The Polysemy of the Term Kokugo, by S. Robert Ramsey
- Memorizing Kanji: Lessons from a Pro, by J. Marshall Unger
- Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, by David Moser
- Ethnolinguistic Notes on the Dungan, by Lisa E. Husmann and William S-Y. Wang
- Korean Views on Writing Reform, by Wm. C. Hannas
- Language Policies and Linguistic Divergence in the Two Koreas, by Ho-min Sohn
- Okinawan Writing Systems, Past, Present, and Future, by Leon A. Serafim
- Proposal of a Comparative Study of Language Policies and Their Implementation in Singapore, Taiwan, and China (PRC), by Robert L. Cheng
- The Topical Function of Preverbal Locatives and Temporals in Chinese, by Feng-fu Tsao
- Yes-No Questions in Taipei and Peking Mandarin, by Robert M. Sanders
- Patronizing Uses of the Particle ma: Bureaucratic Chinese Bids for Dominance in Personal Interactions, by Beverly Hong Fincher
- Gender and Sexism in Chinese Language and Literature, by Angela Jung-Palandri
- A zhezi Anagram Poem of the Song Dynasty, by John Marney
- Some Remarks on Differing Correspondences in Old Chinese Assumed to Represent Different Chinese Dialects, by Nicholas C. Bodman
- Can Taiwanese Recognize Simplified Characters?, by John S. Rohsenow
- Simplified Characters and Their (Un)relatedness, by Chauncey C. Chu
- The Teaching of Culture and the Culture of Teaching: Problems, Challenges, and Opportunities in Language Instruction, by Eugene Eoyang
- The Culture Component of Language Teaching, by Kyoko Hijirida
- Thinking About Prof. John DeFrancis, by Apollo Wu
- Wo suo Renshi de De Xiansheng, by Chih-yu Ho
- Two Poems for Professor John DeFrancis, by Richard F. S. Yang
- Announcement, by Stephen Fleming
DeFrancis, Emeritus Professor of Chinese at the University of Hawaii, is the author and editor of a number of books on Chinese. I own ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, and Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. They are great works. Happy belated birthday.
You can read free sample chapters of
- the E-book (“Why Chinese is So Damn Hard”)
- The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (“The Ideographic Myth”)
- Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (“Chinese”) and
- various other books about Chinese characters and romanization
on Swofford’s site: Pinyin.info: A guide to the writing of Mandarin Chinese in romanization.