Take the test, win a prize

Editor’s note: When we made the incision point into linguistics exploration back in October 2017, we promised you no tests. What we really should have promised you are no grades. Take this “final exam” at your leisure – this is untimed, “open-site,” and really just for fun. That said, answers are due by December 31. In the new year we’ll check the submissions and award a free book of bilingual Chinese stories to the reader with the highest score. Best of luck, language nerds!

How ancient Chinese thought influenced pleasure and delight – Michael Nylan

“Pleasure,” wrote Oscar Wilde, the 19th-century English aesthete, “is the only thing worth having a theory about.” More recently, Andre Malraux asked in The Temptation of the West, “Of all his ideas, is there any one more revealing of a man’s sensibilities than his concept of pleasure?” Both formulations could be plausibly ascribed to some of the most important classical philosophers in China, who deemed pleasure to be one of the most effective tools to motivate right action, as each defined it, as well as to discern a person’s character.

To signify acts of pleasure-seeking, pleasure-taking, and imparting pleasure, a wide range of thinkers from the fourth century BCE to the eleventh century CE deployed the single graph, lè 樂.

An invitation to speak other Chineses – Will Sack

Imagine if all of Germany spoke Shanghainese. Or if a population bigger than Britain spoke Cantonese. Wouldn’t we treat them as more than just sideshows? With 80 and 70 million native speakers respectively, Shanghainese and Cantonese are massive in both use and importance. So why do we so seldom teach them or other non-Mandarin Chineses? Why aren’t we curious what one third of China – a politically and culturally marginalized, but not always economically marginalized, third – has to say and think on their own terms?