Chinese version of my recent blog post about orientalism and tourism
东方主义，这种西方文化中对东方文化及人文的旧式及带有偏见的理解，可谓是由来已久、根深蒂固。一日偶读澳大利亚旅游杂志《出发和到达》中一篇题为“爱情游戏，中国风”的文章，我对东方主义在当今世界的影响力，尤其是在旅游文本中的呈现，感触尤为深刻。
乍看标题“爱情游戏，中国风”，觉得有趣而有些费解：什么样的“爱情游戏”可以称为“中国风”呢？接下来的副标题解释道：“远离现代社会的纷扰，中国纳西族在罕见的母系社会中独享亘古不变的清静”。文中描绘的中国西南边陲的云南白沙古镇是纳西族的故乡之一。而作者描绘的方式却使得白沙镇成为代表整个中国的一个影像：亘古不变，陷入一个远离现代文明的永恒世界。 Continue reading
Persian version of my blog post about language evolution
Translated by Anna Mirzaiyan (آنا ميرزاييان)
آخر اين هفته سری به سایت ای بِی زدم، اما به جای وسيله ای كه دنبالش می گشتم، به چند مورد استفاده ی غير استاندارد از ساختار منفی در زبان انگليسی بر خوردم:
We not ship to Russia یا We not use cheap couriers
اين نوع استفاده آنقدر در ميان فروشندگان مختلف متداول است كه به سختی می توان باور كرد ساختاری بهتر از اين را بلد باشند. برعكس، ساختار منفی بدون فعل كمكی آنقدر رايج است كه مي توان گفت استفاده از آن عمدی است.
In the past couple of years, I have been a passenger in Sydney taxis driven, inter alia, by an agricultural engineer from India, a civil engineer from Somalia, a surgeon from Vietnam, an MBA graduate from Pakistan, an architect from Iran, and an IT professional from Egypt. I don’t recall ever being in a Sydney taxi driven by a native-born person. While this may not mean much as I don’t catch taxis all that often, I’ve been in taxis driven by native-born Australians in Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory. In contrast to migrant taxi drivers, none of them had tertiary qualifications. The overqualified migrant taxi driver has by now become a stock character of Australian literature, e.g., the taxi-driving former orchestra conductor from Vietnam featured in Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist. Continue reading
I am currently a visiting scholar from Isfahan, Iran, in Sydney, Australia. Therefore, I speak English most of the time. I use English with my colleagues at work although, interestingly, the majority of my colleagues speak a language other than English at home. For English practice, I am obviously in an ideal situation: total immersion, the holy grail of foreign language learning! However, I have found that total immersion has its downsides, too. Above all, the prevalence of a language other than the mother tongue is, at times, anything but pleasant. Now that I have not spoken in my mother tongue for a while, I have begun to hanker for it! The longer I am here, the more I find myself hoping to meet Persian speakers. While Persian may have sounded mundane and thus not worthy of attention back home, it has turned into a source of inspiration for me here in Australia. Continue reading
I’ve just run a search for the terms “multilingual” and “multilingualism” in the National Library of Australia’s archive of Historic Australian Newspapers, 1803-1954. In the process, I have learnt that the adjective “multilingual” was used for the first time in an Australian newspaper on October, 25, 1882 in the Tasmania-based The Mercury in a review of the then-most-recent issue of The Calcutta Review. This is the sentence in which “multilingual” appears for the first time in an Australian newspaper:
[T]hough individually weak in mind and body, [they] were numerous. They were barbarous multilingual worshippers not so much of many gods as of many devils. Continue reading
