I’m in Taiwan attending a conference on English language teaching and testing. My friend the eminent linguist Geoff Pullum gave a mind-blowingly sharp plenary lecture on grammar in the afternoon, and later there was a panel discussion about the design and use of small corpora (or Tiny Little Corpora, as I have called them here).
A couple days ago I went to the National Palace Museum library and met a Manchu scholar, 莊吉發, who has been quite prolific in producing published Manchu materials. He gave me the address of a publishing company that he uses, and the next day I went to go find it.
It was a lovely tiny little bookshop overflowing with delightfully academic books. The owner is a delightfully energetic man who is over 70 but looks barely 50. We chatted for well over an hour about all kinds of geeky Chinese subjects. I ended up buying quite a selection of books: Manchu children’s Stories, Dialogue (in Manchu and Chinese) from Dream of the Red Chamber, Dialogue (in Manchu and Chinese) from Journey to the West, Manchu Stories, and two books about Manchu shamanism!
What a treasure!
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