Recently I’ve been getting lot of e-mail from former students (at Ohio State and Stanford, both undergraduates and graduate students, from all periods of my roughly 50-year teaching career), mostly just saying hello and asking how I’m doing. They’re also mostly people who don’t read this blog or follow me on Facebook, so they really don’t know how I’m doing, and require a thoughtful response, one by one — and then I’ll want to hear how they’ve been doing, and the exchange takes a lot of time, so I’m perpetually way behind on maintaining these relationships. Which is where I am right now, somewhat desperate.
Now I take the coward’s way out, going first with the easy thing, responding to e-mail from a former student — Zheng-sheng Zhang, 1988 Ohio State PhD (Tone and tone sandhi in Chinese, for which I was the Doktorvater) — who does in fact follow this blog and was writing mostly to announce his latest book:
Zhang, Chinese Signs: An Introduction to China’s Linguistic Landscape (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2024)
