Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J and the nature of the sinographic writing system

Submitted by Charles Belov:

I've been browsing through the proposed Unicode 17 changes, currently undergoing a comment period, with interest. While I don't have the knowledge to intelligently comment on the proposals, it's good to see that they are actively improving language access.

I'm puzzled that some new characters have been added to the existing Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C (6 characters) and Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E (12 characters) rather than added to a new extension. But the most interesting is the apparently brand-new Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J, with over 4,000 added characters.

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Dungan radio broadcasts from 2018-2021

We've talked about Dungan a lot on Language Log.  That's the northwest Sinitic topolect written in Cyrillic that has been transplanted to Central Asia.  See "Selected readings" below.

For those of you who are interested and would like to hear what it sounds like in real life — spoken and sung by male and female voices — we are fortunate to have a series of ten radio broadcast recordings (here).

Note the natural, easy, undistorted insertion of non-Sinitic borrowings, e.g., "Salam alaikum" (Arabic as-salāmu ʿalaykum  السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ ("Peace be upon you").  That would not be possible in sinographic transcription of northwest Sinitic speech.  This and other aspects and implications of alphabetic Dungan have been extensively discussed on LL.

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Conversation with a Chinese restaurateur in a west central Mississippi town

Running down the road in Clarksdale, Mississippi, I screeched to a halt (felt like Rroad Runner) when I passed by a Chinese restaurant with the odd name Rice Bowl (in Chinese it was Fànwǎn lóu 饭碗楼 — the only characters I saw on the premises).  It was a tiny, nondescript establishment, with six or so chairs against the walls where you sat while you waited for your order to be prepared.  Most people, however, stood in line or just came in to pick up what they had ordered over the phone.

The owner did a brisk business, but it was strictly take out.  There were about 8 spaces for cars to park outside, though they were constantly coming and going.

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Persian language in the Indian subcontinent

That's the title of a valuable Wikipedia article.  I have no idea who wrote it, but I'm very glad to have access to this comprehensive article, since it touches on so many topics that concern my ongoing research.

Here are some highlights:

Before British colonisation, the Persian language was the lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent and a widely used official language in the northern India. The language was brought into South Asia by various Turkics and Afghans and was preserved and patronized by local Indian dynasties from the 11th century, such as Ghaznavids, Sayyid dynasty, Tughlaq dynasty, Khilji dynasty, Mughal dynasty, Gujarat sultanate, and Bengal sultanate. Initially it was used by Muslim dynasties of India but later started being used by non-Muslim empires too. For example, the Sikh Empire, Persian held official status in the court and the administration within these empires. It largely replaced Sanskrit as the language of politics, literature, education, and social status in the subcontinent.

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Plato's cave

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The linguistic pragmatics of LLMs

"Does GPT-4 Surpass Human Performance in Linguistic Pragmatics?" Bojic, Ljubiša et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (June 10, 2025). Ljubiša Bojić, Predrag Kovačević, & Milan Čabarkapa.  Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 12, Article number: 794 (2025)

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"More and more less confident"

From Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, "U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem Braces for Possible Israeli Strike on Iran" NYT 6/12/2025:

More recently, however, Mr. Trump has said he was less convinced that talks with Iran would yield a new nuclear deal.

“I’m getting more and more less confident about it,” he told The New York Post in a podcast broadcast on Wednesday.

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Names as verbs

In a comment on yesterday's post "A 12th-century influencer", Laura Morland wrote:

Thanks for sharing "to abelard," the new verb of the month! Note to AP: the grammarians will insist that it be spelled with a lower-case "a". (Verbs are never capitalized, not even in German, I don't believe.)

This is one where The Errorist might have the upper hand.

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"Good Science"

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Sinograph ambigram for "mindfulness"

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A 12th-century influencer

From Ada Palmer, "Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age":

The new scholastic method was so exciting! that when Peter Abelard got kicked out of his monastery (for proving its founding saint didn’t exist—that pissed off the abbot, who’d have guessed?) and went to live as a hermit in the wilderness of Champagne, 100,000 people flocked there to form a tent city and listen to him teach. Abelard’s crowd wasn’t bigger than Woodstock but it was twice the size of Paris at the time, ample to make France fear that crowd + superstar preacher => private army? Later, when Thomas Aquinas was up for sainthood, his advocates argued that every single chapter in his Summa Theologica should be considered an individual miracle, and the judges agreed. (It’s official folks, 3,000+ miracles in one compact paperback, only \$12.99! Unless you want to buy it in the period, in which case it’s \$650,000; you don’t get scholarship before the printing press unless wealthy elites believe it’s really, really worth the \$\$\$!)

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Boop?

The latest xkcd:

Mouseover title: "With a good battery, the device can easily last for 5 or 10 years, although the walls probably won't."

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The grammar and sense of a poetic line

Randy Alexander is not a professional Sinologist, but when it comes to reading Chinese poetry, he's as serious as one can be.  The following poem is by Du Fu (712-770), said by some to be "China's greatest poet".  In the presentation below, I will first give the text with its transcription, and then Randy's translation.  After that we will delve deeply into the grammatical exegesis of one line of the poem, the last.  

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