Studies in Colloquial Chinese and Its History: Dialect and Text presents cutting-edge research into issues regarding prestige colloquial languages in China in their spoken forms and as well as their relationship to written forms and the colloquial literary language. These include the standard regional languages and prestige dialects of the past, the influence of historical forms of spoken Chinese on written Chinese, the history of guānhuà and the history of báihuà, proto-dialects and supra-regional common languages (koines), and their relationship to spoken dialects. The various studies in this collection focus on the dialect groups with the most substantial written tradition, including Mandarin, Wu, Min, and Cantonese, in north, central and eastern coastal, and southern China respectively. The contributors explore the histories of these dialects in their written and spoken forms, presenting a variegated view of the history and development of the regional forms, including their evoluti
For Commandant Verhœven life is beautiful: he is happily married, expecting his first child with the lovely Irène. But his blissful existence is punctured by a murder of unprecedented savagery. Worse
Grounded in a desire to bring back to life rare items from the University of Hong Kong’s Fung Ping Shan Library that are entwined within the world of music and to place them in a context of books and images in American, British, and other Asian collections, Chinese Music in Print views the library as a repository not of information but of artifact, and then uses these artifacts as a means for generating scholarly narrative. It begins by assessing seminal texts in the Confucian canon set against the delicacy of the concubine and amanuensis Shen Cai’s calligraphy and poetry. Confucianism was itself a crucial aspect of courtly life, and an exploration of its ritual is the book’s second theme. Vernacular genres of opera and song are represented in the third chapter, while the Great Sage returns in the fourth for an exploration of the repertoire and richness of his favourite instrument, the qin. The final chapter ends the journey with discussion of the legacy of generations of Europeans who
The Carrie Diaries is the coming-of-age story of one of the most iconic characters of our generation. Before Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw was a small-town girl who knew she wanted more. She's re
