Victor H. Mair: Word

Victor H. Mair is American sinologist and linguist. Explore interesting quotes on word.

Victor H. Mair: 10 quotes0 likes

“On July 4 1983, I met with officials of the Committee for the Reform of the Written Language in Peking. They informed me that they were working on another revision of their word list and that they would consider making an alphabetized dictionary based on it. Their eyes lit up when I told them I would gladly pay a small fortune for such a reference tool. An alphabetically ordered dictionary would certainly be worth such a sum because of the huge amount of time it would save in my research. Naturally, I hope that the Chinese will be able to produce this type of dictionary at a cost that will make it widely available.”

The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (February 1986).

“As a working Sinologist, each time I look up a word in my Webster's or Kenkyusha's I experience a sharp pang of deprivation. Having slaved over Chinese dictionaries arranged in every imaginable order(by K'ang-hsi radical, left-top radical, bottom-right radical, left-right split, total stroke count, shape of successive stroke, four-corner, three corner, two-corner, Kuei-hsieh, ts'ang-chieh, telegraphic code, rhyme tables, phonetic keys, and so on ad nauseam), I have become deeply envious of specialists in those languages, such as Japanese, Indonesian, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Vietnamese, and so forth, which possess alphabetically arranged dictionaries.”

The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (February 1986).

“There is a widespread public misperception, particularly among the New Age sector, that the Chinese word for “crisis” is composed of elements that signify “danger” and “opportunity.” I first encountered this curious specimen of alleged oriental wisdom about ten years ago at an altitude of 35,000 feet sitting next to an American executive. … While it is true that wēijī does indeed mean “crisis” and that the wēi syllable of wēijī does convey the notion of “danger,” the jī syllable of wēijī most definitely does not signify “opportunity.” … The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like “incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes).” Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A wēijī indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary.”

danger + opportunity ≠ crisis http://www.pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html (2009).