I was on my way home from HKU (Hong Kong University) and was looking for a dinner place and found this handwritten menu:
(explanations and annotations below)
Xinyi is not a native of Hong Kong, but she has been living there long enough to know the folkways and even to be sufficiently familiar with the local lingo to be sensitive to the special flavor of the menu shorthand on display in the eateries there.
This signboard offers a cornucopia of delicious Hong Kong menu shorthand, starting with the first two items (N.B.: not all items on the board are distinctively Cantonese, but plenty of them are):
This morning I received the following link without any accompanying explanation: link is embedded here. As soon as I started to read through the text, it seemed as though it were Hindi-Urdu, or some other northern Indic language, but it was so jumbled with English and jargon that I couldn't really make full sense of all that it was saying. Moreover, it was written in romanization, not Devanagri or Perso-Arabic. I had studied a summer of Hindi-Urdu about 60 years ago, but that was in the two native scripts, and I had become quite proficient in Nepali from having lived in the eastern Himalayas from 1965-67. Nepali was also written in Devanagari and was full of Indic cognates, but also had plenty of Persian and Arabic borrowings.
Around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, there were countless Chinese intellectuals and common citizens who perceived that their nation was in such desperate straits that something drastic had to be done or it would collapse altogether. Many of these concerned citizens focused on the archaic script as unsuited for the purposes of modern science. Others concentrated on the "unsayable" classical / literary language (wényán 文言) as primarily responsible for China's backwardness, which resulted in Japan's defeat of China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95). There were scores upon scores of reformers, the best minds of the country, who put forward a broad variety of proposals for language and script reform.
Well, first of all, the difficulty of learning a language can only be measured relative to the language(s) the learner already knows. Japanese is easier for Koreans than for Americans; I would guess Chinese is easier for English speakers than, say, Arabic speakers. Second, language isn't writing. Learning to write Japanese or Chinese is hardly a snap even for native speakers.
The Koreans and Vietnamese got rid of them within the last century, even the Chinese — for more than a century — seriously considered abolishing the sinographs, and have simplified them until they are but a pale remnant of what they used to be. Moreover, after WWI, when — with the help of the American occupation — Japan had a real chance to switch to an alphabet, the Japanese, on the whole, still clung to the kanji. This is not to mention that the first great novel in an East Asian language, The Tale of Genji (before 1021 AD), which has a stature in Japan similar to that= of Shakespeare in the United Kingdom (Sonja Arntzen), was written by Lady Murasaki in the phonetic hiragana syllabary (aka "women's writing").
The fact that the Japanese still have not abandoned the archaic morphosyllabic / logographic script is a conundrum that has puzzled me since I first learned Chinese and Japanese more than half a century ago. Such a fundamental question about the history of East Asian writing is one that could scarcely escape the attention of rishika Julesy. Here is her video about this thorny matter, "Why Kanji Survived in Japan (But Not in Korea or Vietnam)" (22:25). I am confident that, as always, she will have something enlightening to say about this perplexing subject.
Since 2001, the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies (SJEAS) has been playing an increasingly prominent role in scholarship on East Asia, especially language aspects. Sponsored since 2001 by the Academy of East Asian Studies (AEAS) at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea, SJEAS is an international, multidisciplinary publication dedicated to research on pre-1945 East Asian humanities. SJEAS presents new research related to the Sinographic Cosmopolis/Sphere of pre-1945 East Asia, publishing both articles that stay within traditional disciplinary or regional boundaries and works that explore the commonalities and contrasts found in countries of the Sinographic Sphere. SJEAS is particularly keen to highlight new research by scholars from China (broadly conceived), Japan, Korea, and Vietnam that engages with Western scholarship in this field.
We've been discussing simplified characters, both official and unofficial (believe you me, they're all out there). They come and go as people find them useful or not. This is one thing that makes characters very different from alphabets and syllabaries. The latter two types of writing systems tend to settle down to a more or less fixed number of elements / letters / symbols (generally around 50-100 symbols for a syllabary and 20-40 or so for an alphabet, whereas morphosyllabographic / logographic writing systems tend to keep burgeoning out of control if they are a living, functioning script.
It has often been mentioned on Language Log that the simplification of Chinese characters by the PRC government did not come at one fell swoop in 1965, but was spread out over a long period of time, and had at least one additional formal stage, in 1977, that was retracted in 1986.
This has resulted in uneven acquisition of separate sets of simplified characters by students who went through primary and secondary education at different times.
There's been a lot of hoopla about the famous Chinese author Lin Yutang's (1895-1976) purported MingKwai ("clear-quick") typewriter in the last few years. Fortunately, linguist Julesy popped the hallucinatory bubble about the proclaimed wonders of the MingKwai by grappling with the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of the MingKwai: "The many myths about the Chinese typewriter" (9/7/25).
Now, in a new video that I just learned about two days ago, we get inside a replica of the MingKwai and can see how incredibly complex its innards are:
