Taiwanese blockbuster "You Are the Apple of My Eye" has become the highest-grossing Chinese-language movie in Hong Kong's history after its box office receipts surpassed the previous record of HK$61 million (US$7.86 million) on Saturday. ...
Though nascent and unproven, Apple’s new textbook initiative appears to be gaining lots of momentum — and quickly, too. Within days of its debut, Apple’s iBooks textbook store had already racked up a significant number of downloads. Same thing with the company’s textbook authoring tool.
According to Global Equities Research, which monitors Apple’s iBook sales via a proprietary tracking system it doesn’t much care to discuss, more than 350,000 textbooks were downloaded from the company’s iBooks Store within the first three days of availability (caveat: a number of these may well have been free copies of E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth downloaded for free by folks interested in seeing an iPad textbook in action)
And there were some 90,000 downloads of iBooks Author, Apple’s free textbook-creation tool, during the same time.
If those numbers are accurate, Apple’s textbook effort would seem to be off to a good start. Which is good news for everyone involved — particularly textbook publishers, who stand to make more money on books sold through iBooks than those sold at retail.
According to Global Equities Research, the supply chain markup on textbooks ranges between 33 percent and 35 percent. So there are savings to be had in cutting out that publisher-to-distributor-to-wholesaler-to-retailer process.
Add to this the lower cost of iBook production, which the research outfit estimates to be 80 percent less than print publication — and a system under which textbooks are sold directly to students, who use them for a year, rather than to schools which keep the texts for an average of five years — and the math here starts to looks pretty good.
Said Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry, “[This is] a recipe for Apple’s success in the textbook industry.”
Classic manga taking off in digital market
January 13, 2012
Multi-volume manga masterpieces published decades ago are seeing a resurgence in popularity on the e-book market.
New hardware platforms, such as smartphones and tablet computers, are bringing new readers to older works of manga, which are easier to digitize because they are less likely to compete with paper editions.
eBook Initiative Japan Co., the Tokyo-based operator of eBookJapan, one of Japan's largest e-book shops, said manga accounts for 80 percent of its 52,000 available titles.
Last year's list of top sellers included long-running, middle-of-the-road manga that began to appear serially in magazines between the 1960s and the 1980s.
They included: "Oishinbo" (story by Tetsu Kariya, art by Akira Hanasaki), themed on gastronomy; "Shizukanaru Don" (The quiet Don) by Tatsuo Nitta, about a man who doubles as a company employee and the leader of a crime syndicate; and "Golgo 13" by Takao Saito, the story of a sniper.
Monthly sales of "Golgo 13" have quintupled over the last three years. Other multi-volume classics have also more than doubled their sales.
eBook Initiative Japan's corporate performance improved drastically after it began distributing e-books to Apple Inc.'s iPhones in 2008 and to Android-based devices and Apple's iPads in 2010.
The company topped the 5-million mark in accumulated number of copies sold in August 2008. That number doubled to 10 million by January 2011.
At eBookJapan, the combined number of e-books sold for smartphones and tablet computers in the second half of 2010 was 6.13 times the corresponding number in the first half of the year.
The main customers of eBookJapan are in their 30s and 40s.
"People of generations that are unfamiliar with onetime long-sellers and bestsellers are embracing those works as something totally new to them," said Akira Takashima, managing director at eBook Initiative Japan. "Works that have lost none of their sheen and allure over a decade or two, much like Shakespeare's and Beethoven's works, have started to take off."
The prices per volume are mostly set between 400 and 600 yen ($5.20 and $7.80), or 20 to 30 percent cheaper than paper editions. An increasing number of customers are making bulk purchases of multi-volume series, such as "Golgo 13."
The e-book editions are beneficial both to the customers and the publishers. For customers, the e-books take up no space and are available in bulk even after their paper counterparts have disappeared from storefronts. Some eBookJapan customers have told the online shop's operator that they are thrilled to be able to carry all volumes of a manga series with them on vacations.
For publishers, e-books allow them to secure a stable income from sales of established works without competing against their paper editions.
At Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha Ltd., a midmarket publishing house based in Tokyo, the long-running "Shizukanaru Don" series accounts for one-third of all proceeds from e-books. While the 100 existing volumes of the manga have sold 44 million copies in the paper edition, 3.3 million copies have been downloaded digitally, with women accounting for 60 percent of all readers.
The stream of female customers was small at the outset, but that readership expanded through the "recommendation" feature of the e-book store website, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha officials said.
That illustrates how a publisher can tap into a new category of readers.
The takeoff of manga classics in the e-book market also reflects a change in readers' attitudes at a time when hardware platforms have evolved from cellphones to smartphones and to tablet computers.
The top seller at eBookJapan in 2011 was the "Grappler Baki" (Baki the Grappler) series by Keisuke Itagaki, themed on combative arts, which became available online in February 2011. Akita Publishing Co., the Tokyo-based publisher of the series, said 42,000 copies were downloaded by the end of the year.
"Baki," a sequel to the "Grappler Baki" series, sold more than 20,000 copies over a three-month period following its digital release in August. It was eighth in eBookJapan's annual sales ranking.
"The spread of smartphones came at a time when fans had long been waiting for digitized editions (of manga)," explained Hirokazu Takahashi, an executive producer at Akita Publishing. "The pictures drawn with a mighty touch are suited for digital editions because they look so real against the backlight."
While cellphones can only display one frame at a time, smartphones and tablet computers allow users to see entire pages, and at enhanced image resolutions.
According to the marketing firm Impress R&D, the e-book market in Japan was worth 65 billion yen in fiscal 2010, up a robust 13.2 percent year on year.
Growth of the e-book market has traditionally relied on manga for cellphones, and especially on pornographic material.
Adult manga have small numbers of frames per page and small numbers of pages, which have made them ideal for reading on cellphones.
In recent years, though, adult manga seldom make the list of top 30 annual sellers at the eBookJapan store. The increasing number of available classic titles is expected to accelerate the departure from dependence on adult manga.
NTT Solmare Corp., the Osaka-based operator of Comic C'Moa, Japan's largest online retailer of manga for cellphones, in June 2011 started distributing 35,000 titles for smartphones of KDDI Corp.'s au brand. Toward the end of last year, the company also began serving NTT DoCoMo Inc.'s smartphones.
NTT Solmare, which did not want to lose the clientele it won through the distribution of e-books to cellphones, designed the menu for smartphone screens in exactly the same way as the menu for cellphone screens.
The user does not need to do anything to continue using the website after upgrading his or her device from a cellphone to a smartphone.
"An e-book store will simply be ousted from the market if it fails to broaden the selection of available titles and image resolutions to cope with different types of user devices," said Hiroki Oohashi, the president and CEO of NTT Solmare.
(This article was written by Naoki Takehata and Shigeyori Miyamoto.)
Among the most surprising qualities of “Babel No More,” Michael Erard’s globe-trekking adventure in search of the world’s virtuosos of language learning, is that a book dealing with language acquisition and polyglot linguistics can be so gripping. But indeed it is — part travelogue, part science lesson, part intellectual investigation, it is an entertaining, informative survey of some of the most fascinating polyglots of our time.
The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners
By Michael Erard
Illustrated. 306 pp. Free Press. $25.99.
How is it, Erard asks, that certain people are able to accumulate what for the average person is a daunting number of languages? What are the secrets of polyglots who can master 6, 26, 96 languages? What are their quirks and attitudes? Are their brains wired differently from ours?
Erard, a journalist who writes frequently on language and whose previous book was “Um . . . : Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean,” begins by visiting Bologna, Italy, the hometown of one of history’s most distinguished polyglots, the 19th-century cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti. The cardinal is said to have known 45, 50, 58 or even more languages, depending on whom you ask. Victorian travelers who met him at ecclesiastical banquets reported that he affably conversed in all directions with foreign visitors in languages ranging from French, German and Arabic to Algonquin and “Californian.” (Lord Byron, who challenged the cardinal to a multilingual contest of profanities, was not only summarily defeated but walked away from the contest having learned a number of new Cockney gibes.) No less a figure than Pope Gregory XVI, in an attempt to catch Mezzofanti out, orchestrated a prank in which he secretly gathered dozens of foreign seminarians and then unleashed them on the unsuspecting cleric, all of them addressing him loudly in a tangle of languages. With much aplomb, Mezzofanti took up the pontiff’s challenge, answered them, and prevailed.
Mezzofanti is a beguiling character. Erard has combed through the cardinal’s archives in Bologna for clues about his practices and proficiency, and “Babel No More” is, among other things, a quest to see what benefits Mezzofanti’s strategies might offer us.
Erard is a “monolingual with benefits,” as he calls himself, “more than a monoglot, much less than a polyglot.” English is his native tongue, and he has learned Spanish, Chinese and Italian at varying levels of proficiency. Here he talks to several world specialists in polyglottery, asking simple but effective questions in an effort to define “multilingual” beyond, say, the definition in the American Heritage Dictionary: “Using or having the ability to use several languages.” How many languages does one have to speak to be considered a polyglot? (At least six seems the consensus.) What does it really mean to speak a language? Knowing a few phrases? Giving a cabdriver directions? Debating politics? Claire Kramsch, a linguist Erard consults, provides wise insight: “Asking how many languages you know is only asking half the question. You should also ask, ‘In how many languages do you live?’ ”
Linguists warn Erard that some self-proclaimed polyglots may say they speak any number of languages, when in fact most of them know only a few grammatical rules, and have only a smattering of ready words and phrases. True polyglots, we are told, find it difficult to say precisely how many languages they speak, since their many languages hover unavoidably at different levels of proficiency. And what does fluency mean? Does an American who has learned Polish as a second language need to be able to pass for a Pole in Warsaw to be considered fluent? As Erard notes, this is a feat very few can manage.
“Babel No More” introduces the generation of polyglots who came after Mezzofanti, and some of today’s foremost language gatherers. To Erard’s surprise, he initially had a hard time tracking them down. The remarkable Erik Gunnemark, who could translate from 47 languages — “though for 20 of them he needed dictionaries” — died just before Erard managed to meet him. Ziad Fazah, once listed in Guinness World Records as speaking 56 languages, was crossed off Erard’s list when, on a Chilean television show, he failed to understand even the simplest sentences that speakers of various languages said to him. (The Russian speaker asked, “What day is today?” This drew a blank.)
Eventually, traveling from Berkeley to Hyderabad, from Chihuahua to Düsseldorf, Erard does have success. One polyglot he meets, Alexander Arguelles, who lives in Berkeley “on unemployment checks and Korean translation work,” shows that anyone who hopes to achieve fluency in more than six languages must dedicate himself to the task rigorously — in fact almost exclusively. Arguelles keeps his languages in shape by subjecting himself to an unforgiving schedule, keeping spreadsheets that record the hours and minutes he spends on each one. Arguelles “tracks his linguistic progress through the hours as saints once cataloged their physical self-sacrifices,” Erard writes. Of 4,454 hours of language study Arguelles did over a period of 456 days, he spent 456 hours on his native language, English, and also 456 on Arabic, and then a descending number of hours on the remaining 50 languages on his spreadsheet. Though his learning techniques may seem strange, they also appear to be effective. In one, called “shadowing,” students listen to language recordings on a portable player while briskly walking in a public place, gesticulating energetically as they shout out the foreign words and phrases they are listening to. Though one is bound to make a spectacle of oneself, this technique seems to help the beginner shed some of the self-consciousness connected with speaking a foreign language.
Eventually, in a section called “Revelation: The Brain Whispers,” Erard ventures into the field of neurolinguistics to see how the language prodigy’s brain may be physiologically different from the average one. We are presented with a wide spectrum of neurological information that aims to pinpoint the cognitive abilities involved in learning languages, and the areas of the brain that jump into action when language comes into play. Erard doesn’t shy from controversial questions: Are there links between Asperger’s and hyperpolyglottery? Are most polyglots left-handed, musical men who can’t drive? He also sets out to find the brain of Emil Krebs (1867-1930), a German hyperpolyglot who was said to know some 65 languages. (He tracks it down at the University of Düsseldorf, and it reveals many secrets.)
To me, Erard’s experiences in India were particularly interesting. There he met polyglots from families and communities that are ethnically and linguistically mixed, and who therefore speak many languages out of necessity rather than an urge to accumulate. This leads him to distinguish between the multilingual and the hyperpolyglot, or the purely acquisitive language learner. “For multilinguals, learning languages is an act of joining society,” he writes. “There’s no motive, no separable ‘will to plasticity’ that’s distinct from what it means to be part of that society.” But “being a hyperpolyglot means exactly the opposite. The hyperpolyglot’s pursuit of many languages may be a bridge to the rest of the world, but it walls him off from his immediate language community.”
Peter Constantine has translated works from German, Russian, French, modern Greek, ancient Greek, Italian, Albanian, Dutch, Slovene and other languages. He is the author of “Japanese Street Slang.”
There has always been disagreement on these American shores as to just what the “best” English is. The status of Parisian French or Tuscan Italian has long been unassailable. Yet in the early 1940s, fusty Chicagoans were writing to The Chicago Tribune declaring Midwestern speech America’s “purest,” while New York radio announcers were speaking in plummy Londonesque, complete with rolled r’s. Down in Charleston, S.C., the elite’s sense of the best English involved peculiar archaisms like “cam” for “calm” and “gyardin” for “garden.”
In “Speaking American,” a history of American English, Richard W. Bailey argues that geography is largely behind our fluid evaluations of what constitutes “proper” English. Early Americans were often moving westward, and the East Coast, unlike European cities, birthed no dominant urban standard. The story of American English is one of eternal rises and falls in reputation, and Bailey, the author of several books on English, traces our assorted ways of speaking across the country, concentrating on a different area for each 50-year period, starting in Chesapeake Bay and ending in Los Angeles.
We are struck by the oddness of speech in earlier America. A Bostonian visiting Philadelphia in 1818 noted that his burgherly hostess casually pronounced “dictionary” as “disconary” and “again” as “agin.” William Cullen Bryant of Massachusetts, visiting New York City around 1820, wrote not about the “New Yawkese” we would expect, but about locutions, now vanished, like “sich” for “such” and “guv” for “gave.” Even some aspects of older writing might throw us. Perusing The Chicago Tribune of the 1930s, we would surely marvel at spellings like “crum,” “heven” and “iland,” which the paper included in its house style in the ultimately futile hope of streamlining English’s spelling system.
A challenge for a book like Bailey’s, however, is the sparseness of evidence on earlier forms of American English. The human voice was unrecorded before the late 19th century, and until the late 20th recordings of casual speech, especially of ordinary people, were rare. Meanwhile, written evidence of local, as opposed to standard, language has tended to be cursory and of shaky accuracy.
For example, the story of New York speech, despite the rich documentation of the city over all, is frustratingly dim. On the one hand, an 1853 observer identified New York’s English as “purer” than that found in most other places. Yet at the same time chronicles of street life were describing a jolly vernacular that has given us words like “bus,” “tramp” and “whiff.” Perhaps that 1853 observer was referring only to the speech of the better-off. But then just 16 years later, a novel describes a lad of prosperous upbringing as having a “strong New York accent,” while a book of 1856 warning against “grammatical embarrassment” identifies “voiolent” and “afeard” as pronunciations even upwardly mobile New Yorkers were given to. So what was that about “pure”?
Possibly as a way of compensating for the vagaries and skimpiness of the available evidence, Bailey devotes much of his story to the languages English has shared America with. It is indeed surprising how tolerant early Americans were of linguistic diversity. In 1903 one University of Chicago scholar wrote proudly that his city was host to 125,000 speakers of Polish, 100,000 of Swedish, 90,000 of Czech, 50,000 of Norwegian, 35,000 of Dutch, and 20,000 of Danish.
What earlier Americans considered more dangerous to the social fabric than diversity were perceived abuses within English itself. Prosecutable hate speech in 17th-century Massachusetts included calling people “dogs,” “rogues” and even “queens” (though the last referred to prostitution); magistrates took serious umbrage at being labeled “poopes” (“dolts”). Only later did xenophobic attitudes toward other languages come to prevail, sometimes with startling result. In the early years of the 20th century, California laws against fellatio and cunnilingus were vacated on the grounds that since the words were absent from dictionaries, they were not English and thus violations of the requirement that statutes be written in English.
Ultimately, however, issues like this take up too much space in a book supposedly about the development of English itself. Much of the chapter on Philadelphia is about the city’s use of German in the 18th century. It’s interesting to learn that Benjamin Franklin was as irritated about the prevalence of German as many today are about that of Spanish, but the chapter is concerned less with language than straight history — and the history of a language that, after all, isn’t English. In the Chicago chapter, Bailey mentions the dialect literature of Finley Peter Dunne and George Ade but gives us barely a look at what was in it, despite the fact that these were invaluable glimpses of otherwise rarely recorded speech.
Especially unsatisfying is how little we learn about the development of Southern English and its synergistic relationship with black English. Bailey gives a hint of the lay of the land in an impolite but indicative remark about Southern child rearing, made by a British traveler in 1746: “They suffer them too much to prowl amongst the young Negroes, which insensibly causes them to imbibe their Manners and broken Speech.” In fact, Southern English and the old plantation economy overlap almost perfectly: white and black Southerners taught one another how to talk. There is now a literature on the subject, barely described in the book.
On black English, Bailey is also too uncritical of a 1962 survey that documented black Chicagoans as talking like their white neighbors except for scattered vowel differences (as in “pin” for “pen”). People speak differently for interviewers than they do among themselves, and modern linguists have techniques for eliciting people’s casual language that did not exist in 1962. Surely the rich and distinct — and by no means “broken” — English of today’s black people in Chicago did not arise only in the 1970s.
Elsewhere, Bailey ventures peculiar conclusions that may be traceable to his having died last year, before he had the chance to polish his text. (The book’s editors say they have elected to leave untouched some cases of “potential ambiguity.”) If, as Bailey notes, only a handful of New Orleans’s expressions reach beyond Arkansas, then exactly how was it that New Orleans was nationally influential as the place “where the great cleansing of American English took place”?
And was 17th-century America really “unlike almost any other community in the world” because it was “a cluster of various ways of speaking”? This judgment would seem to neglect the dozens of colonized regions worldwide at the time, when legions of new languages and dialects had already developed and were continuing to evolve. Of the many ways America has been unique, the sheer existence of roiling linguistic diversity has not been one of them.
The history of American English has been presented in more detailed and precise fashion elsewhere — by J. L. Dillard, and even, for the 19th century, by Bailey himself, in his underread “Nineteenth-Century English.” Still, his handy tour is useful in imprinting a lesson sadly obscure to too many: as Bailey puts it, “Those who seek stability in English seldom find it; those who wish for uniformity become laughingstocks.”
John McWhorter’s latest book is “What Language Is (and What It Isn’t and What It Could Be).”
美國從一九五○年至一九八九年的四十年間，白人女性罹患乳癌的比率增加了兩倍，古爾德（Jay M. Gould）與古德曼（Benjamin A. Goldman）兩位醫師比較美國所有距離原子爐一百六十公里地區跟沒有原子爐地區做比較，發現有原子爐地區的乳癌率非常高，是其他地區的五倍。從核電廠 發出的低劑量輻射線是會致人於死的，這兩位醫師因此寫了《致死的虛構—國家主導的低劑量輻射線的隱蔽》，震撼世界，最近因福島核災發生而再度受到矚目。
George Steiner is one of the preeminent essayists and literary thinkers of our era. In this remarkable book he concerns himself with language and the relation of language to literature and to religion. Written during a period when the art of reading and the status of a text have been threatened by literary movements that question their validity and by computer technology, Steiner's essays affirm the primacy of reading in the classical sense. Steiner covers a wide range of subjects, from the Hebrew Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare to Kafka, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, Husserl, and Freud. The theme of Judaism's tragic destiny winds through his thinking, in particular as he muses about whether Jewish scripture and the Talmud are the Jew's true homeland, about the parallels between the "last supper" of Socrates and the Last Supper of Jesus, and about the necessity for Christians to hold themselves accountable for their invective and impotence during the Holocaust.
{presence：臨在；鑒臨；親在：指兩存有物某種程度的互相滲透。造物主天主臨在於宇宙，尤其與我們人類同在，包括基督親臨信徒中，尤指基督親在聖體聖事中。presence at Mass：參與彌撒；與祭。presence of God：天主的鑒臨；天主的臨在：無所不在的天主，此時此刻就在我們面前，善人的靈魂是天主的聖殿。}
:At that hour, in the days following, the totalities of personal experience, of human contacts, of landscape around me became a mosaic, each fragment at once luminous and resistant in its "quiddity" (the Scholastic term for integral presence revived by Gerard Manley Hopkins). 翻譯為.......每個碎片的"本質" "quiddity" (....指完整呈現的詞語........).
我們需要索引來詳細審查一些術語 譬如說 本書翻譯成"重重深淵"的 :在第一章類似「紋中紋手法（mise en abyme）」(ミザナビーム(mise-en-abyme)とは、フランス語で「深淵に入る」と言う意味で、英語では"put in the abyss"と訳されます。 また、ミザナビームの別名として、入れ子構造の物語(Chinese box narrative)、 ...)
If the revelation of incommensurable "singleness" held me spellbound, it also generated fear. I would come back to the mise en abyme of one blazon within another, to that "setting in the abyss." I would consider a fathomless depth of differentiation, of non-identity, always incipient with the eventuality of chaos. How could the senses, how could the brain impose order and coherence on the kaleidoscope, on the perpetuum mobile of swarming existence?
根據 The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 它的定義為類似"千重鏡相或 盒中盒":
mise‐en‐abyme[meez on ab‐eem], a term coined by the French writer André Gide, supposedly from the language of heraldry, to refer to an internal reduplication of a literary work or part of a work. Gide's own novel Les Faux‐Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1926) provides a prominent example: its central character, Édouard, is a novelist working on a novel called Les Faux‐Monnayeurs which strongly resembles the very novel in which he himself is a character. The ‘Chinese box’ effect of mise‐en‐abyme often suggests an infinite regress, i.e. an endless succession of internal duplications. It has become a favoured device in postmodernist fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and others. See also metafiction.
譬如說 上圖為 『Le récit spéculaire: essai sur la mise en abyme』的英訳本。就是這方面的專書--讀者可看畫中有畫 (16世紀のクエンティン・マサイスという画家の作品に描かれた凸型の鏡について。)
Michael J. Sandel (born March 5, 1953) is an American political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for the Harvard course ...
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