How many species of hummingbird do we really need?

A hummingbird we saw in Costa Rica in 2005.

Today I was reading a review of the book "Hummingbirds," which has photos of most of the 338 known species, and it got me thinking: 338 species of hummingbirds? Nature's abundance and variety amazes me.

And then I thought about how a friend of mine who is against all tree huggers and in favor of all real estate development might respond to this information. He might say, "Well, how many species of hummingbird do we really need? Do they all need to be protected? Don't construction people need jobs? Don't people need places to live? Should we stop building highways so we can all spend the rest of our lives stuck in traffic?"

Why the Chinese will never drop their written language

As I scratch the surface of Chinese, I now understand why the language cannot be simply converted to the Roman alphabet. They have to keep the ideograms, and we will never see newspapers or books written in the Romanized version of Chinese. Too bad. That would make learning the language easier.

This biography is supposed
to be flattering. I don't know.

Chinese does not have that many sounds. Many words are just one or two syllables. The problem is that you can have a syllable like shi which means different things in the four different tones for that syllable. But beyond that, each of those four tones may represent many different words and meanings.

One sound for 11 words

When you look in a Chinese-English dictionary for definitions for just the fourth tone of the syllable shì (the accent means falling tone) you find 11 different words with 11 different ideograms. This one sound  represents city, market, vow, matter, power, family name, to be, to try and more. Neither the sound nor the Romanized written form gives you a clue to the difference. You have to see the ideogram. (Context helps, of course.) 

Contrast that with English where homonyms like too, two and to are spelled differently. Or hoard, horde and whored; or palate, pallet and palette. At least in the written form, you can see that they are all different.

My Japanese office mate

Yoichi Nishimura is a newspaper editor on a one-year sabbatical here at Tsinghua University to study China-U.S.-Japan relations. We go to lunch together most days with Joe Weber, a visiting professor of business journalism from the University of Nebraska.

Yoichi has a nose for good restaurants and is always scouting for the next unique experience. He learned well during five years as a correspondent in Moscow for Asahi Shimbun, Japan's second-largest newspaper, and six years at the Washington bureau. "The secret of working in a foreign country is finding good restaurants," he says. 

Yoichi is managing editor of Asahi. Twenty years ago the paper sent him to Moscow State University for a year of intensive study of Russian. He lived with a family and developed his conversational skills. All of this helped him cover the fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union. He wrote a book about Russia's army and weapons systems in the post-Soviet era.