2016.0507
Human Activity is within 700 km
The Chair Professor of Graduate Institute of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, NTNU and member of Academia Sinica Cheng Chin-Chuan visited NTNU on April 27th and gave us a marvelous talk about history, language and culture. The topic of his speech is about the limit of human activity is around 700 km. Prof. Cheng delivered his key point in different facets.
Prof. Cheng dedicates all his life in academic research. He teaches in many places include Hong Kong and Beijing as well as prestigious schools like Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley.
To begin with, Prof. Cheng started from his hometown, a place that’s most familiar to him. He showed us a map describing the distribution of languages like Min-nan and Hakka. From the map, he further elaborated that the area of a language is the area of human activity, which is no more than 700 km. From ancient Chinese poem, the term that describe infinity is around 500km if calculated in today’s measurement.
Except the topic of language, Prof. Cheng also mentioned that the distance between a married lady and her maiden home is less than 700 km. He shared with us many stories in everyday life. The audience enjoyed a lot in this light, humorous afternoon with interesting stories.