David Moser
Autor(a) de A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language (Penguin Specials)
Obras por David Moser
Covert Sexism in Mandarin Chinese 1 exemplar
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- male
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- 48
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- #325,720
- Avaliação
- 3.7
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I am not here to dispute Tibet's quest for autonomy, nor to say whether it is or isn't part of China because I don't know enough about it to have an opinion. I recommend target="_top">listening to his address to hear what he says.
But clearly, the facts about education and literacy in Tibet are contested. This glowing 2019 report with happy photos is from CGTN, whose headquarters are in Beijing, while the Tibetan Review paints a different picture.
Nevertheless, I do think there's a case to be made for any country to ensure that all its people have access to a uniform language, and sometimes even in places where nationality is not in dispute, that meets with resistance. In the media I see Australia's First Nations people working hard to maintain and resurrect their languages but struggling with English and reliant on translators, and I feel anxious about the choices that their children don't have when they don't go to school.
The West can be criticised for many things, but mass literacy has been a priority in Western societies since industrialisation. Countries that have not achieved this goal for all their people condemn them to poverty and compromised economic development. Literacy enables full participation in society and offers access to information, ideas, health knowledge, and cultural and political activity.
Moser, however, who knows more about this than I ever will, says, however, that in China, the purpose of mandating Putonghua (Standard Chinese) as the common language and especially teaching it to children is to instill a sense of cultural identity, and to strengthen the ‘cohesiveness’ of the people residing within China’s borders. The impact on cultural identity is keenly felt in Tibet and among the Uyghur in Xinjiang, but Moser says that extreme reactions to the imposition of Chinese as the language of instruction are rare.
Anyway...
Moser's book tells me that it was not the Communists who took power in 1949 who mandated a common language in China.
When the Qing dynasty fell to the Xinhai Revolution in 1912, and the Republic of China was formed there was a chasm between the spoken and the written word. Only a tiny elite could read and write classical Chinese.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/11/12/a-billion-voices-chinas-search-for-a-common-...… (mais)