On February 8th, "Reading Good Books in the First Month: The Commercial Press Monthly New Book Launch" was held in Beijing to share the monthly good books with readers.
After reader voting and expert review, the "Top Ten Good Books of the Commercial Press" in February 2022 were selected as "Category View of China and the West from Language", "Faust (Part II)", "Lu Xun's Research Notes", "The Purchasing Power of Money", "The Transformation of Western Rome", "Syllable-Semantic Vision of Chinese Prosody grammar research", "Ecology, Community and Lifestyle", "A Brief History of Geomagnetism", "Plants That Changed Human History", and "Our Future: Digital Society Utopia".
In "Looking at the Western Category View from Language", the author raises the comparison of Chinese and Western languages to the perspective of thinking style, and explores the Chinese and Western category views from the perspective of language comparison. For example, pairs of philosophical concepts such as "the unity of heaven and man", "the use of the body is not two", "there is birth in nothing", "heaven-man", "man-saint", "use of the body", "instrument-Tao", "nothing-being" and so on are dynamic, by the "A and B containment" relationship of life and two, in the minds of Chinese, this kind of inclusive relationship and change in relationship is the norm rather than the abnormal or transitional state, from this perspective can be explained more clearly the important concept of Chinese philosophy "he".
Another linguistic work on the list is "Syllables of Chinese Prosody grammar research - semantic vision", which is entered by a specific example, how to read "yellow stewed chicken rice"? Most people will pronounce it as "yellow stew/chicken rice" and pause a little after "yellow stew" before saying "chicken rice". However, if you divide according to semantics, it should be "yellow stewed chicken" + "rice", these habits that are not easy to detect in the use of language can be found in this book, "Syllables - Semantic Vision of Chinese Prosody Grammar Research", each chapter is like a small case, grasping the basic pattern of Chinese "syllables – morphemes – characters", by analyzing the prosody pattern of Chinese sentence structure, the prosody status of Chinese tetrasyllabic components, the prosody factors of Chinese compound words, etc., providing a "syllable – Semantics (pragmatics)" associated with chinese prosody grammar research ideas.
"Syllable-Semantic Vision of Chinese Prosody Grammar Research" mainly puts forward the following three points: prosody itself is a means of expressing grammatical meaning in Chinese; prosody expresses grammatical meaning, which is not achieved by adjusting and realizing the number of syllables as an intermediary, but through the number of opposites of syllables; the interpretation of the phenomenon of Chinese prosody grammar should be more from the semantic pragmatic mechanism to find the cause.
Faust Part II
Literary and historical categories, Faust (Part II), written between 1825 and 1831, was composed by Goethe between the ages of 76 and 82, condensing his lifelong practice and thinking. The second part staged the "big world", that is, the public sphere of affairs, involving a wide range of forms of government, economic and financial, academic academics, historical changes, military operations, sea and land reclamation, overseas plunder, etc., all put on the stage, including the Goethe era and even the entire modern history, Germany and Europe important events. The current academic research on Faust is limited to the first part because of the complexity of the content involved in the second part and the difficulty of translation. In February 2022, the Commercial Press launched Faust (Part II), translated and annotated by Professor Gu Yu of the Department of German at Peking University. Based on the translator's study of Faust for more than ten years, the translator referred to several versions of the German annotated translation.
The Transformation of Western Rome is a cutting-edge work on the history of late antiquity (4th-6th centuries). Author Ian Wood judges each of the representative views on the decline and fall of the late ancient west of Rome, and offers his own explanation. The book analyzes the impact of the rise of the church on human resources, political structures, cultural life, and especially on the land economy. In the western history of the late Roman Empire, barbarians and churches were not the main reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire, as Gibbon said in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The authors argue that the important feature of late antiquity was not the demise of Rome, or the "end of civilization," but a fundamental social transformation.
At the beginning of 2022, the Commercial Press also focused on "Our Future: Digital Social Utopia". Every advance in technology brings comfort at the same time, but also compresses our living space, resulting in personal data being violated and traded. Some are naïve about the future of digitalization; some warn of the dictatorship of Silicon Valley digital companies; and some prefer to go back in time. Our Future: A Digital Social Utopia paints a picture of the future of a hopeful digital age: machine work, workers singing; free life, and more. At the same time, the book objectively and calmly analyzes the threat to cultural, moral, and political capabilities of the process of digital development that is full of excitement and desire to expand at the expense of reflective judgment, and explores possible measures to create a promising digital age.
Ecology, Community and Lifestyle – An Outline of Ecological Wisdom is written by Arne Nas, a famous Norwegian philosopher and founder of deep ecological philosophy, who advocates a holistic ecological idea that transcends anthropocentrism. Deep ecology is not only the most remarkable new idea in many western environmental theory trends, but also has become a leading environmental value concept in the contemporary Western environmental movement.
It is worth mentioning that in line with the theme of the Beijing Winter Olympics, the Commercial Press launched the "Terminology of Winter Olympic Sports Projects". This is a multilingual paper terminology manual for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, mainly for interpreters, volunteers, athletes, referees, news media staff and other staff of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games. It contains more than 3,000 terms and nouns for core competition projects, involving all competition items of the Beijing Winter Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, covering 8 languages of Chinese, French, English, Russian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean/Korean. This 8-language Olympic language service manual is the first time in the history of the Olympic Games.
Among the original books, the Collected Works of Chen Guyuan has launched three volumes, namely The Outline of the History of the Chinese Legal System, the History of Marriage in China, and the Collected Legal Works of Chen Guyuan. This collection of essays presents Chen Guyuan's thought and academic context; the "Lu Xun Research Notes" compiled, commented and summarized by the scholar Professor Qian Liqun expounds the overall nature of Lu Xun's thought, presenting Lu Xun in marriage, mother-son, father-son relationship. In addition, "Spring Festival in Beijing" and "Xiangrui China" were also launched during the Spring Festival, adding a bookish atmosphere to the Spring Festival of the Year of the Tiger.
It is understood that the Commercial Press's brand series "Chinese Translation of World Academic Masterpieces Series", "Compilation of Contemporary Chinese Academic Works", "Translation Series of History of Science", "Future Philosophy Series", "Horizon Series", "Anthropological Perspective Translation Series", "Translation Series of Masterpieces of Economics", "Translation Series of Classic Civilization", "Translation Series of Masterpieces of Art History" and so on have all been published.