I had an interesting Rorschach encounter with the oracle bone graph for woman a couple of years back. Oddly, this experience came in a rather roundabout way through an investigation into the character for interpretation, yi 譯. At the time, I was starting my Chinese translation business and wanted to come up with a meaningful logo for the business. I thought that an investigation into the character yi 譯 might help to inspire some ideas, and so I tried to do a little bit of digging into why it was written the way it was. Of note, the Liji (Book of Rites) has four characters for interpreting officials, as James Legge wrote in his elegant translation:
To make what was in their minds apprehended, and to communicate their likings and desires, (there were officers) – in the east, called transmitters (ji 寄); in the south, representationists (xiang 象); in the west, Di-dis (didi 狄鞮); and in the north, interpreters (yi 譯).
YouTube music's algorithm suggested to me an album, 24 Hours in Soweto, in the amapiano genre that I love which mostly comes from the Zulu community in South Africa. I was struck by the album cover, which seems to have some random Chinese characters, some garbled. Wondering if it's AI art. Can you make any sense of it?
I've read many articles of this sort, but I cite this one because it is fairly recent and is from a reputable newspaper.
If you’ve spent any time learning Japanese or just getting around Japan, you’ve probably come across romaji — the Roman alphabet version of Japanese. It shows up on signs, maps, train stations and in most textbooks for foreign learners. But not all romaji is the same. Depending on where you look, you might see shi spelled as shi, si or even something else.
Throughout my research and teaching career, I have always emphasized that, when it comes to genuine etymology of Sinitic, what matters are the sounds and meanings of the constituent etyma, going all the way back to the fundamental roots. The shapes of the glyphs used to write the eyma in question are far less important than the sounds and meanings. In fact, discussion of the shapes of the glyphs is often more of a distraction than a benefit to understanding what the true etymologies of given etyma are. We demonstrated that by the sharp disagreements we had over the meanings of the shapes of the ancient glyphs / forms / shapes of such a simple / definite / concise lexeme / morpheme as "woman; female". That is why the sound nǚ and its attendant meaning "woman; female" are more important for Sinitic etymology than is the the three-stroke character 女, albeit the latter derived from more complicated and difficult to explain / interpret forms.
I've always felt that it shows the profile of a submissive, kneeling female figure with her arms crossed in front of her (I say this after examining scores of variants of OB forms of 女).
Compared to the previous Julesy presentation, "This might be the most hated film in Korea" (see "Hangul and Buddhism" [1/16/26]), today's video is tame, but the consequences of what she describes — the advent of a phonetic script to replace a logographic / morphosyllabic script — were profound.
No sooner had I posted about a block of 11,328 proposed Small Seal characters dating back roughly two millennia being incorporated in UNICODE than a single spanking new sinograph surfaced and was urgently put forward for inclusion, and it is causing a bit of a ruckus. That is the third-person gender-neutral pronoun [X也], which is pronounced the same as all the other characters for supposedly gendered Sinitic third-person pronouns, viz., tā (see below for their graphic forms).
N.B.: The proposed neograph under dicussion is provisionally being written as [X也], but bear in mind that, as I have pointed out countless times, all sinographs, by the exigencies / inherent nature of the script, whether they have 1 stroke or 64 / n strokes, must be squeezed inside the same size box as all other sinographs. In other words, [X也] perforce — once the typographers get it worked out — will eventually have to fit inside exactly the same space as 也 and biáng (you can get an authentic plate of these belt-like Shaanxi noodles at Xi'an Sizzling Woks, 40th & Chestnut in University City next to Penn [opens at 11:30 AM, closed on Tuesdays]). There are many Language Log posts about diverse aspects of this jabberwockyish character. Just look it up under "biang"
Draft Minutes of UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) Meeting 185 Cupertino, California, United States — October 27-29, 2025 Hosted by Apple in Cupertino and virtually UTC #185 Agenda Revision date: November 26, 2025
Knowing full well that 漢文 ("Sinitic Writing; Classical Chinese; Literary Sinitic") is pronounced Hànwén in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM), Kanbun in Japanese, and Hanmun in Korean, I wanted to know how it is pronounced in Vietnamese, and was directed to this resource, "Another Nôm Lookup Tool based on Unicode", where I learned that it is Hán văn.
Many people who don't have the slightest clue about how Chinese characters work have been snookered by the (in)famous Chinese "poem" that has 92 or 94 characters all pronounced "shi" (though in different tones). It's supposed to be a test of one's accuracy in mastering tones and is said to be intelligible when spoken aloud with the correct tones. Some people think it proves how profound Chinese characters are. In actuality, it proves absolutely nothing of value. Nobody talks like this.
Photograph from Neil Kubler of a sign in front of a gift shop in Penghu, Taiwan selling Pénghú wénshí 澎湖文石 ("Pescadores aragonite"); its name in Chinese, wénshí 文石 literally means "patterned stone", an apt characterization for this carbonate mineral which is favored by sculptors.
