Traditional grammar Puns

Hello, I am looking for beginner grammar resources using traditional characters. Any PDF or textbook recommendation would be appreciated.

Just to give some background, I have just recently started studying Taiwanese mandarin vocabulary after 5 years of studying Japanese. So grinding through characters and vocabulary hasn't been too bad for me. I would really like to get some basic grammar structures down so I can start ging this language a real go.,

Tia

This will be short, but it has all the good ingredients: Boomer tourist (m60s), me (f33), retail hell during Christmas, free food samples, and patronising condescencion. I‘m on mobile, sorry for the weird format.

I‘ve worked in retail for close to a decade now and thought I‘ve seen it all. On this particular day last weekend I was working as a sample lady for my 2nd job in a bakery in a very busy, high end retail store giving out samples of my country’s traditional Christmas cookies.

This family comes along. I hear them talking English to each other and noticed they were Brits. So I switched languages and proceded to give them my little speech about the cookies on my plate.

Me: „ ... and this is like a butter cookie“

Boomer: cuts me off mid-sentence „Not like. It IS a butter cookie.“

Me: „Uhm, no, it‘s like. And I‘m fluent in English, I know what I‘m talking about. You don‘t need to falsly correct me.“

Boomer: „No, you‘re not fluent. This is not LIKE a butter cookie, it IS a butter cookie!“ He‘s getting upset now.

Me: „Have you eaten this cookie before?“

Boomer: „No, but you ...“

Me: „So how would you know it IS a butter cookie? It has other ingredients in it and we don‘t call it butter cookie, that‘s why I say it‘s LIKE a butter cookie for tourists because that‘s in most cases the closest example they know.“

By now the Boomer glares at me angrily, but his son shoots me a „I‘m so sorry“ look and tries to quietly move his dad away from me and my cookies. I give a handful of them to the son‘s kids and wish them all a happy Christmas.

The rules of phonology, morphology, syntax, including the exact grammatical terminology for all of this, the stuff found in textbooks like H&Q or Smyth, had to come from somewhere. I'm interested in how much the grammar, as laid out in something like H&Q, is indebted to the work of classical grammarians and how much is more recent.

How do we rationalize or justify the different parts of speech found in Traditional Grammar? I don't mean their definitions, rather .. Why is a noun a noun? Why is a verb a verb? An adjective an adjective, and so on...etc..

I can't seem to find any detailed source on this matter online.

Edit - I 'd prefer answers from a linguistics point of view if possible

I would appreciate it if someone familiar with traditional grammar could help with the following queries.

1. When does NatvavidhAnam apply to double n? I’ve seen निषण्ण but also प्रपन्न. Is there a sUtra that makes the first example retroflex but not the second? Are both optionally retroflex?

2. I can’t seem to find a comprehensive English description of Shatvam that covers all cases. Can someone point me to one? I notice a lot of arbitrary forms, for example विसर्गः and मधुसूदनः don’t undergo retroflexion but विषादः, निषादः and निषूदम् do.

I'm looking for recommendations for a variety of books like graded readers for non-natives, books geared toward native children, as well as studying resources for grammar and vocabulary that uses traditional characters (Taiwan). I've been googling what I can, but it seems to be hard to find resources for Mandarin that use traditional. I see lots of stuff for simplified, but are there traditional options?

As I'm interested in learning Mandarin to go to Taiwan and because I'm familiar with a lot of the traditional characters from learning Japanese, I decided to go that route and am starting with A Course in Contemporary Chinese. What vocabulary and grammar books are there for teaching important vocabulary and grammar (using traditional)? When learning Japanese, I used a book like this one where vocabulary are organized into chapters and sections based around a topic, and each entry includes the word, meaning in English and Vietnamese, and an example sentence using it, along with downloadable audio of native speakers reading each word and its sentence out per MP3 file so one can listen to just the word and its sentence. Are there any like this?

Additionally, for practicing reading books and stories, what books, novels, anthologies and series are there intended for non-native learners and for natives (children)? Are there graded readers with traditional, and where might I be able to buy them? I normally buy Le Petit Prince in my target language, but Amazon Canada (I'm in Canada) doesn't have it with traditional characters Mandarin (they have Cantonese though). I like this Japanese series where the stories are short and intended for non-natives, and comes with audio of a native speaker reading the story.

Are there bookstores' websites you regularly go to and would recommend that ship internationally/ to Canada where I could find books with traditional characters?

I'm going through the Allset Grammar Wiki and am pretty impressed. I read each grammar point and copy the example sentences that I have any trouble with into Anki. So far I've put 10 hours or so and I'm only halfway through B1. I expect at least another 10 hours of effort to complete B1 and B2. And this is with using a script I wrote to simplifying adding cards to Anki, it would take even longer without that.

Previously I read Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar (and loved it), but aside from that book and the Allset Grammar Wiki I have no experience with other textbooks.

Will it be smart for me to just continue through with the Allset Grammar Wiki, and not touch another textbook? E.g., is it sufficiently complete? Or, should I invest in some more textbooks as well?

“They,” is a plural term. It means more than 1 person. This should never have been given any other meaning - and especially not one that implies an individual can be more than one person.

Also. He = dingaling between your legs. This is a masculine term to describe a male. She = no dingaling between your legs. This is a feminine term to describe a female.

Stop allowing these maniacs to destroy society, tradition, intelligence, biology and grammar.

Mental illness is NOT something to be celebrated and sure as f*ck is not a virtue by any stretch of the imagination.

/endrant

The ablative in Latin takes IE ablative endings but has the functions of instrumental and (later?) locative as well. Is it coincidence that ancient grammarians did not end up calling it instrumental, locative of something else?

In comparison, the Greeks decided that their merger of dative and locative should primarily be called "dative", but people later found out that the outward forms more closely resemble the IE locative.

I know that now most people just say "who" for everything, and they use accusative pronouns for everything other than the subject of the sentence (for example, "It is her." instead of "It is she."), but let's just talk about the traditional grammar, for fun.

For, "You are X. ", X is nominative. So, it is "who" not "whom". But for "I know X.", X is accusative. So, it is "whom" not "who". "I know who you are" is a connected form of the two. So, the "who" in it takes over both X's in the two parts. But the first X is nominative and the second X is accusative. Then, in the past when people strictly distinguished "who" and "whom", what did they use in that case?

Would they have realized the Sanskrit/Prakrit relationship did not apply to what we now call Dravidian, Austroasiatic, and Tibetoburman languages?

Link to the whole package.

1. Volume I: Grammar based on Srila Jiva Goswami's sutras PDF link
2. Volume II: Learn to write Devanagari (pdf link)
3. Volume III: Word-for-word translation of all the words of the Gita (pdf link) with the commentary of Sridhara Swami known as Subodhini.

For Gaudiyas and other Vaishnavas: The aim of the Sri Sri Harinamamrta Vyakarana (pdf) by Sri Assem Krishna Das Baba

I am doing a presentation, part of which will touch on the differences in (combinatory categorial grammar and traditional formalisms. I would like to include examples that show how the same sentence was parsed in each, especially wh-dependencies. Are there any examples of this?

I am trying to learn chinese and I'm looking for resources which go over chinese grammar and sentence structure. However, all the ones I can find are in simplified chinese - I want to learn traditional chinese