Victor H. Mair

Victor H. Mair (born 1943) is Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States. Professor Mair has edited the standard "Columbia History of Chinese Literature" and the "Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature".

Dr. 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.

Dr. Mair specializes in early vernacular Chinese, and is responsible for translations of the "Dao De Jing" and the "Zhuangzi". 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.

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., pinyin), which is advantageous for Chinese education, computerization, and lexicography.

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 words 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 "" could find it under "ba" 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).
*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, they published the first general Chinese-English single-sort dictionary in 1996. According to the "Acknowledgements" (1996:ix), "This dictionary owes its genesis to the initiative of Victor H. Mair of Pennsylvlania." A revised and expanded edition was published in 2000.

References

*Boucher, Daniel, Neil Schmid, and Tansen Sen. 2006. " [http://www.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/~asiamajor/ The Scholarly Contributions of Professor Victor H. Mair: A Retrospective Survey] ", "Asia Major" 3.6:1-12.
*DeFrancis, John, ed. 1996. "The ABC [Alphabetically Based Computerized] Chinese-English Dictionary". Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X
*DeFrancis, John, ed. 2003. "ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary". Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
*Mair, Victor H. 1986. " [http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp001_chinese_dictionary.pdf The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries and Current Lexicographical Projects] ", "Sino-Platonic Papers" 1:1-31.

Works written or edited by Victor H. Mair

* [http://www.sino-platonic.org/ Sino-Platonic Papers]
* [http://www.pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html danger + opportunity ≠ crisis] -- an essay by Mair debunking a common saying about Chinese characters
* "The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West". J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair (2000). Thames & Hudson. London. ISBN 0-500-05101-1

External links

* [http://www.sas.upenn.edu/ealc/faculty/mair.htm Official homepage]
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