Victor H. Mair
Encyclopedia
Victor Henry Mair is a Philologist specializing in Sinitic and Indo-European
languages, and holds the position of Professor
of Chinese Language
and Literature
in the Department of East Asia
n Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania
, Philadelphia, United States
. Among other accomplishments, Professor Mair has edited the standard Columbia History of Chinese Literature and the Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature. Professor Mair is the series editor of the Cambria Sinophone World Series (Cambria Press
).
Professor Mair received his Ph.D.
from Harvard University
in 1976. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania since 1979. He is also founder and editor of Sino-Platonic Papers
, an academic journal
examining Chinese, East Asian and Central Asian linguistics and literature.
Professor Mair specializes in early written vernacular Chinese, and is responsible for translations of the Dao De Jing (the Mawangdui Silk Texts
version), the Zhuangzi
and The Art of War
. He has also collaborated on interdisciplinary research on the archeology of Eastern Central Asia
. The American Philosophical Society
awarded him membership in 2007.
Three of Mair's former students characterize his wide-ranging scholarship.
).
In the first edition of Sino-Platonic papers (1986), he suggested the publication of a Chinese dictionary
arranged in the same familiar way as English, French, or Dungan
dictionaries: "single-sort alphabetical arrangement" purely based on the alphabetic spelling of a word, regardless of its morphological
structure. Most Chinese word
s are multisyllabic compounds
, where each syllable or morpheme
is written with a single Chinese character
. Following a two-millennia tradition, Chinese dictionaries – even modern pinyin-based ones like the Xinhua Zidian
– are regularly ordered in "sorted-morpheme arrangement" based on the first morpheme (character) in a word. For instance, a Chinese dictionary user who wanted to look up the word Bābāduōsī 巴巴多斯 "Barbados" could find it under ba 巴 in traditional sorted- morpheme ordering (which is easier if one knows the character's appearance or radical
but not its pronunciation) or under baba in single-sort alphabetic ordering (which is easier if one knows the pronunciation). The following example is adapted from DeFrancis (2000:10).
In 1990, after unsuccessfully trying to obtain financial support for an alphabetically collated Chinese-English dictionary, Mair organized an international team of linguists and lexicographers who were willing to work as part-time volunteers. Under the editorial leadership of John Defrancis
, they published the first general Chinese-English single-sort dictionary in 1996. According to the "Acknowledgments" (1996:ix), "This dictionary owes its genesis to the initiative of Victor H. Mair of Pennsylvania." A revised and expanded edition was published in 2000.
Works listed in Library of Congress (Chronological order)
Indo-European
Indo-European may refer to:* Indo-European languages** Aryan race, a 19th century and early 20th century term for those peoples who are the native speakers of Indo-European languages...
languages, and holds the position of Professor
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
of Chinese Language
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
and Literature
Chinese literature
Chinese literature extends thousands of years, from the earliest recorded dynastic court archives to the mature fictional novels that arose during the Ming Dynasty to entertain the masses of literate Chinese...
in the Department of East Asia
East Asia
East Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms...
n Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
, Philadelphia, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. Among other accomplishments, Professor Mair has edited the standard Columbia History of Chinese Literature and the Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature. Professor Mair is the series editor of the Cambria Sinophone World Series (Cambria Press
Cambria Press
Cambria Press is an independent academic publisher based in Amherst, New York. The publishing company was established by 2006, with its first titles released in September of that year. Cambria publishes academic monographs and new titles by scholars in a wide range of research fields, initially...
).
Professor Mair received his Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
in 1976. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania since 1979. He is also founder and editor of Sino-Platonic Papers
Sino-Platonic Papers
Sino-Platonic Papers is a scholarly monographic series published by the University of Pennsylvania. The chief focus of the series is on the intercultural relations of China and Central Asia with other peoples....
, an academic journal
Academic journal
An academic journal is a peer-reviewed periodical in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as forums for the introduction and presentation for scrutiny of new research, and the critique of existing research...
examining Chinese, East Asian and Central Asian linguistics and literature.
Professor Mair specializes in early written vernacular Chinese, and is responsible for translations of the Dao De Jing (the Mawangdui Silk Texts
Mawangdui Silk Texts
The Mawangdui Silk Texts are texts of Chinese philosophical and medical works written on silk and found at Mawangdui in China in 1973. They include some of the earliest attested manuscripts of existing texts such as the I Ching, two copies of the Tao Te Ching, one similar copy of Strategies of the...
version), the Zhuangzi
Zhuangzi
Zhuangzi was an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE during the Warring States Period, a period corresponding to the philosophical summit of Chinese thought — the Hundred Schools of Thought, and is credited with writing—in part or in whole—a work known by his name,...
and The Art of War
The Art of War
The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise that is attributed to Sun Tzu , a high ranking military general and strategist during the late Spring and Autumn period...
. He has also collaborated on interdisciplinary research on the archeology of Eastern Central Asia
Central Asia
Central Asia is a core region of the Asian continent from the Caspian Sea in the west, China in the east, Afghanistan in the south, and Russia in the north...
. The American Philosophical Society
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, and located in Philadelphia, Pa., is an eminent scholarly organization of international reputation, that promotes useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications,...
awarded him membership in 2007.
Three of Mair's former students characterize his wide-ranging scholarship.
Victor has always cast his nets widely, and he could routinely amaze us with observations far afield from the Chinese text we were reading in class. Today people often attempt to simulate this cosmopolitanism under the rubric of interdisciplinary study, but for Victor, it was quite untrendy: he simply had an insatiable appetite for knowledge and pushing boundaries. Indeed, border-crossing has been our mentor's dominant mode of scholarship, a mode that has constantly interrogated where those very borders are both geographically and categorically. Though never sporting fashionable jargon, Victor has always taken on phenomena and issues that engage aspects of multiculturalism, hybridity, alterity, and the subaltern, while remarkably grounding his work in painstaking philological analysis. Victor demonstrates the success of philology, often dismissed as a nineteenth-century holdover, for investigating twenty-first-century concerns. (Boucher, Schmid, and Sen 2006:1)
Pinyin advocacy
Professor Mair is a long-time advocate for writing Mandarin Chinese in an alphabetic script (viz., pinyinPinyin
Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...
).
In the first edition of Sino-Platonic papers (1986), he suggested the publication of a Chinese dictionary
Chinese dictionary
Chinese dictionaries date back over two millennia to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, which is a significantly longer lexicographical history than any other language. There are hundreds of dictionaries for Chinese, and this article will introduce some of the most important...
arranged in the same familiar way as English, French, or Dungan
Dungan language
The Dungan language is a Sinitic language spoken by the Dungan of Central Asia, an ethnic group related to the Hui people of China.-History:...
dictionaries: "single-sort alphabetical arrangement" purely based on the alphabetic spelling of a word, regardless of its morphological
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
structure. Most Chinese word
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
s are multisyllabic compounds
Compound (linguistics)
In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes...
, where each syllable or morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
is written with a single Chinese character
Chinese character
Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
. Following a two-millennia tradition, Chinese dictionaries – even modern pinyin-based ones like the Xinhua Zidian
Xinhua Zidian
The Xinhua Zidian is a Chinese language dictionary published by the Commercial Press. It is the best-selling Chinese dictionary and the world's most popular reference work. This pocket-sized dictionary of Chinese characters uses Simplified Chinese characters and pinyin romanization...
– are regularly ordered in "sorted-morpheme arrangement" based on the first morpheme (character) in a word. For instance, a Chinese dictionary user who wanted to look up the word Bābāduōsī 巴巴多斯 "Barbados" could find it under ba 巴 in traditional sorted- morpheme ordering (which is easier if one knows the character's appearance or radical
Radical (Chinese character)
A Chinese radical is a component of a Chinese character. The term may variously refer to the original semantic element of a character, or to any semantic element, or, loosely, to any element whatever its origin or purpose...
but not its pronunciation) or under baba in single-sort alphabetic ordering (which is easier if one knows the pronunciation). The following example is adapted from DeFrancis (2000:10).
- 1bābā 叭叭 on. ① crack! crack! ② snap
- 2bābā 粑粑 n. 〈topo.〉 cake
- 3bābā 吧吧 r.f. 〈topo.〉 loquacious
- 4bābā 巴巴 suf. (of limited occurrence) very; intensely | gān∼ very dry ♦ n./v. poop; doodoo; poopoo ♦ attr. coagulated; forming a crust
- bǎba 㞎㞎 n. 〈coll.〉 excrement (of a baby) [this uncommon Unihan U+378E character is unavailable in UTF-8 encoding]
- bàba* 爸爸 n. papa; dad; father
- Bābāduōsī 巴巴多斯 p.w. Barbados
- bābǎi* 八百 num. eight hundred
- bābǎi Luóhàn 八百羅漢[--罗汉] n. 〈Budd.〉 the eight hundred Buddhist saints
- bābàizhījiāo 八拜之交 n. sworn brotherhood
- bābajiejie 巴巴結結[--结结] r.f. 〈coll.〉 haltingly; falteringly; barely succeed in handling sth.
In 1990, after unsuccessfully trying to obtain financial support for an alphabetically collated Chinese-English dictionary, Mair organized an international team of linguists and lexicographers who were willing to work as part-time volunteers. Under the editorial leadership of John Defrancis
John DeFrancis
John DeFrancis was an American linguist, sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa....
, they published the first general Chinese-English single-sort dictionary in 1996. According to the "Acknowledgments" (1996:ix), "This dictionary owes its genesis to the initiative of Victor H. Mair of Pennsylvania." A revised and expanded edition was published in 2000.
Works written or edited by Victor H. Mair
- Sino-Platonic Papers
- danger + opportunity ≠ crisis -- an essay by Mair debunking a common saying about Chinese characters
Works listed in Library of Congress (Chronological order)
- Victor H. Mair, Tun-Huang Popular Narratives (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Influences from India seen in texts from DunhuangDunhuangDunhuang is a city in northwestern Gansu province, Western China. It was a major stop on the ancient Silk Road. It was also known at times as Shāzhōu , or 'City of Sands', a name still used today...
caves. - Victor H. Mair, Painting and Performance : Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis (Honolulu: University of Hawaii PressUniversity of Hawaii PressThe University of Hawaii Press is a university press that is part of the University of Hawaii.The University of Hawaii Press was founded in 1947, with the mission of advancing and disseminating scholarship by publishing current research in all disciplines of the humanities and natural and social...
, 1988). - Victor H. Mair, Cheng Mei Bo Wang, Mei Cherng's "Seven Stimuli" And Wang Bor's "Pavilion of King Terng" : Chinese Poems for Princes (Lewiston, NY, USA: E. Mellen Press, 1988).
- Victor H. Mair, T'ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies Harvard University: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1989). Popular narratives of Buddhist motifs, known as bian wen (變文)
- Laozi, Victor H. Mair, tr. Tao Te ChingTao Te ChingThe Tao Te Ching, Dao De Jing, or Daodejing , also simply referred to as the Laozi, whose authorship has been attributed to Laozi, is a Chinese classic text...
: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way (New York: Bantam Books, 1990). - Victor H. Mair Yongquan Liu, Characters and Computers (Amsterdam, Netherlands ; Washington: IOS Press, 1991).
- Victor H. Mair, The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University PressColumbia University PressColumbia University Press is a university press based in New York City, and affiliated with Columbia University. It is currently directed by James D. Jordan and publishes titles in the humanities and sciences, including the fields of literary and cultural studies, history, social work, sociology,...
, 1994). - Victor H. Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man Inc. in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, 1998).
- Zhuangzi Victor H. Mair, tr. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii PressUniversity of Hawaii PressThe University of Hawaii Press is a university press that is part of the University of Hawaii.The University of Hawaii Press was founded in 1947, with the mission of advancing and disseminating scholarship by publishing current research in all disciplines of the humanities and natural and social...
, 1998). - Songling Pu, Denis C. Mair Victor H. Mair, tr. Liaozhai Zhiyi Xuan (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2000).
- J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair,The Tarim MummiesTarim mummiesThe Tarim mummies are a series of mummies discovered in the Tarim Basin in present-day Xinjiang, China, which date from 1900 BC to 200 AD. Some of the mummies are frequently associated with the presence of the Indo-European Tocharian languages in the Tarim Basin, although the evidence is not...
: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. (2000). Thames & Hudson. London. ISBN 0-500-05101-1 - Victor H. Mair, The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University PressColumbia University PressColumbia University Press is a university press based in New York City, and affiliated with Columbia University. It is currently directed by James D. Jordan and publishes titles in the humanities and sciences, including the fields of literary and cultural studies, history, social work, sociology,...
, 2001). - Songling Pu, Denis C. Mair Victor H. Mair, tr. Liao Zhai Zhi Yi Xuan (Beijing Shi: Wai wen chu ban she, Di 1 ban., 2001).
- Victor H. Mair, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Paul Rakita Goldin, eds. Hawai'i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawaii PressUniversity of Hawaii PressThe University of Hawaii Press is a university press that is part of the University of Hawaii.The University of Hawaii Press was founded in 1947, with the mission of advancing and disseminating scholarship by publishing current research in all disciplines of the humanities and natural and social...
, 2005). - Victor H. Mair, Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu: University of Hawaii PressUniversity of Hawaii PressThe University of Hawaii Press is a university press that is part of the University of Hawaii.The University of Hawaii Press was founded in 1947, with the mission of advancing and disseminating scholarship by publishing current research in all disciplines of the humanities and natural and social...
, 2006). - Victor H. Mair, tr. The Art of War / Sun Zi's Military Methods (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
- Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh, The True History of Tea (Thames & HudsonThames & HudsonThames & Hudson is a publisher of illustrated books on art, architecture, design, and visual culture. With its headquarters in London, England it has a sister company in New York and subsidiaries in Melbourne, Singapore and Hong Kong...
; illustrated edition, 2009). ISBN 978-0500251461 (Hardcover). - Miriam Robbins Dexter and Victor H. Mair, Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia (Amherst, NY: Cambria PressCambria PressCambria Press is an independent academic publisher based in Amherst, New York. The publishing company was established by 2006, with its first titles released in September of that year. Cambria publishes academic monographs and new titles by scholars in a wide range of research fields, initially...
, 2010).
External links
- Official homepage
- 'The Tarim Basin Mummies' by Victor Mair, University of Pennsylvania Museum, YoutubeYouTubeYouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
(video)