Newsletter No. 435

No. 435, 4.4.2014 5 especially respiration, mastication, remembering, and reasoning. Language is a complex adaptive system (CAS) with several interacting subsystems such as phonology, grammar, lexicon, etc., each constantly adapting and self-organizing to changes in our daily lives. Other examples of CAS include the stock market, the brain and the ecosystem. Professor Wang’s fieldwork has taken him to many parts of the world including some remote regions in China where he witnessed for himself the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity in China. At the same time, in the face of massive urbanization and globalization, he saw that many minority languages or dialects are under threat of dying out. He says, ‘Most of us realize the importance as well as the urgency of maintaining the biodiversity of the globe we live in, but few of us see that the same applies to our cultural and linguistic diversity.’ The Yunnan Province had invited him for a comprehensive tour of the endangered languages there, and made a half-hour film of the visit ( http://tiny.cc/b28j5w ) . However, all is not lost and some adaptive changes seem to be at work. Professor Wang acknowledges that some dialects are being revived or even popularized by, curiously enough, modern media and communication technology. Jin Yucheng ’s popular novel Fan Hua , which depicts Shanghainese life from the 1960s, has made speaking the Shanghai dialect something attractive and voguish. Wang Jing ’s film Feng Shui , depicting the trials and tribulations of a woman from Wuhan, has made the Wuhan dialect sound familiar and acceptable to hearers from outside that part of China. The new media have also helped to preserve vernaculars which are on the verge of becoming extinct. The extremely popular mobile app game ‘Crazy Dialects’ challenges users to identify and decipher progressively arcane and little- known dialects spoken in China. Professor Wang was quoted in the China Daily (8 December 2013) as saying, ‘Language preservation is largely a spontaneous bottom- up process. The multimedia are a healthy and inevitable step.’ One simply has not seen enough of the birth, growth, decline and death of languages. Professor Wang is the director of the newly established Joint Research Centre for Language and Human Complexity (JRCLHC) at CUHK ( http://clhc.cuhk.edu . hk ). It is a joint effort of three partnering institutions: CUHK, Peking University and the University System of Taiwan, with the objective to pool the expertise and resources of the three partners for strategic studies of language as a complex adaptive system. Professor Wang has long collaborated with linguists at Peking University on fieldwork in Yunnan, and with cognitive neuroscientists at the University System of Taiwan on laboratory experiments on language processing. A central mission of JRCLHC is to interweave the research from these two symbiotic approaches in linguistic research. The three partners of JRCLHC are already offering a non-credit course at CUHK on the biological foundations of language, which is drawing students from various disciplines at several Hong Kong universities. Various aspects of human complexity, e.g., politics, human relationship, education, health care, etc., are mediated by and constituted in language. But Professor Wang cautions that most prevailing models of human behaviour and psychology are products of a Eurocentric conception, that is, the samples of facts and observations are taken from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) populations. Perhaps too obvious to state, our world or reality is more complex than that. One of the goals of JRCLHC is to examine human complexity with emphasis on various Chinese languages and dialects. Special attention will be paid to features not commonly found in European languages and culture, including the lexical use of tones, a rich system of classifiers, a relatively simple morphology, and writing in thousands of sinograms. With the establishment of JRCLHC, Professor Wang will continue to take on the grand challenge of answering the questions once posed by Gauguin: ‘Where did we come from?’, ‘What are we?’, and ‘Where are we going?’. He is convinced that language plays a pivotal role toward answering all three questions. 著名作家、教育家，人稱「小思」的盧瑋鑾教授，1964年畢 業於中大新亞書院中文系，為中大首屆畢業生。 1962年，就讀二年級的盧教授與其他新亞同學響應中 文系高級講師曾克耑先生「風窮詩倡和」的結集，用 「風」字韻創作四十篇不同主題的詩。盧教授撰寫 〈華夏篇〉，以史入詩，從清末列強入 侵、辛亥革命爆發，寫到軍 閥割據，描述近代中國跌宕 起伏的命運，最後興起「民 憂國難何時窮」的感嘆。詩 作經修改後刊載於《新亞生活》、《中國學生周報》及各大報章。 這篇盧教授求學時期所撰的古詩習作手稿，現於大學展覽廳展出。 Renowned writer and educator Prof. Lo Wai-luen (alias Xiao Si) was one of CUHK’s first batch of graduates who graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature of New Asia College in 1964. In 1962, Professor Lo, who was a Year 2 student, and other students of New Asia College responded to senior lecturer Mr. Tseng Ke- tuan’s call for submission of poetry by composing some 40 poems of different topics. In her poem ‘Hua Xia’ (China), Professor Lo depicts the vicissitudes of modern Chinese history, including the invasion by Western powers, the outbreak of the 1911 Revolution, and the Warlord Era. At the end of the poem, she laments the fate of China. The edited poem was published in New Asia Life , The Chinese Student Weekly , and several newspapers. The manuscript of the poem is now on display in the University Gallery. 王士元教授探訪雲南普米族人，向一名婦人展示相片 Prof. William S-Y Wang shows a picture to a woman of Pumi ethnic minority