Language Log

5 Mysterious Writing Systems That No One Has Deciphered:  These ancient scripts offer tantalizing clues about civilizations we still don’t fully understand.
Crystal Ponti, History (5/15/26)

The five undeciphered writing systems covered in this post are:  Linear A, Indus Script, Rongorongo, Proto-Elamite, and The Phaistos Disk.  We have discussed each of these scripts on Language Log, some of them at consierable length and on multiple occasions.

In part 1 of this post, "The (ir)reality of the MingKwai typewriter" (10/17/25) and many preceding, related posts (see "Selected readings" and the links to which they lead), we saw what a boondoggle and fiasco the Chinese typewriter (especially Lin Yutang's MingKwai) was.  Yet people are still glorifying and extolling the clumsy, clunky, cumbersome Chinese typewriter as though it were leading the IT revolution (when the reality is quite the contrary).  So much hype and sensationalism about the retrograde Chinese typewriter!

The following bilibili video, although in Chinese, will show how complicated and expensive to replicate such a device is:

Taken outside a hotel in Shenzhen:

The role of a Scotsman, John Ross (1842-1915), in creating it.  Although he was a Christian missionary who spent over half his life in China, he was apparently a gigachad.

The following video is densely packed with solid information and moves rapidly, so you have to pay close attention to follow it.

That's the title of an essay that appeared in my e-mail today from an outfit called Cantonese Script Reform 粵字改革.  Here's what they say:

Written Cantonese must have spaces, like Korean. The calligraphic issue must give way. For the space itself is a grammatical marker that marks the beginning and the end of a word. This tool of demarcation will allow poet and playwright to invent new words by putting words together within the confinements delineated by the spaces between words. Written Cantonese needs all the tools imaginable for it to revitalise and resurrect its lost vocabulary. A Hebrew-esque recycling off ancient words for purposes anew is the way to go. But we can’t do that if we can’t tell if this is a new word because we can’t tell if these characters familiar so and so sequenced are merely a fanciful poetic playful arrangement or other mark of the invention of a new word, where a familiar noun is turned into a verb or verb is turned into an adjective or an adjective is now henceforth interpreted as a noun in this particular context.

This is the regular script form of the Chinese character for horse:  馬.

When I used to give talks in schools, libraries, and retirement homes, anywhere I was invited, I would write 馬 (10 strokes, official in Taiwan) on the blackboard or a large sheet of paper and show it to the audience, then ask them what they thought it meant.  Out of the hundreds, if not thousands, of people to whom I showed this character, not one person ever guessed what it signified.  When I told those who were assembled that it was a picture of something they were familiar with, nobody got it.  When I said it was a picture of a common animal, nobody could recognize what it represented.  

All the more, when I showed the audiences the simplified form of the character, 马 (3 strokes, official in the PRC), nobody could get it.

[This is a guest post by Michael Broughton.]

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).

From Charles Belov:

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?

Japan might finally switch to romaji system you already use

Japan Today (June 30, 2025)

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.

From Weibo:

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.

We've been discussing the oracle bone form (late 2nd millennium BC) of nǚ女 ("woman; female"):

(WP)

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.