Language Log

[This is a guest post by Christopher Paris (website).]

I just wanted to thank you for your 2009 essay on the misinterpretation of “wēijī” as meaning both opportunity and crisis.

This controversy takes on dramatic new importance as the misinterpretation has been used to justify the invention of a school of thought that “risk is positive.” When challenged with English language dictionaries dating back to the 1700s, showing risk as typically meaning a potential threat or harm, the proponents of “positive risk” run to the wēijī trope. They say, “the Chinese came up with this 3000 years ago, so English dictionaries don’t matter.”

I sent the above photograph of a body lotion (bodirōshon ボディローション) bottle to Nathan Hopson and asked him why it has so many katakana words, also why they have to give a phonological gloss for yuzu, which should be a fairly common word in Japanese (even I know it!).

In my latest (of many) posts on that redoubtable sinograph, biáng ("Annals of Biang, Vienna edition" [1/3/25]), I posed this question:  "How do we know that this character is to be pronounced in the second tone?"

Chris Button sensibly queried in reply:  "So, something aside from the syllable being a phonotactic violation?"

Later, he elaborated,  "Even if biang (regardless of tone) were allowed in 'standard' Mandarin, the second tone would not be allowed in any case. So we have a double violation of sorts: one on the phonemic level, and one on the tonemic level."  This too is sensibly spoken.

The Xi'an topolect does have the tripthong -iang. (source)

The tones of Xi'an topolect, though four in number, are conspicuously different from those of MSM. (source)

From Haun Saussy:

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixtieth issue:

“Kanji and the Computer: A Brief History of Japanese Character Set Standards,” by James Breen.

https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp360_kanji_computers_japanese_character_set.pdf

ABSTRACT
This paper describes the development of the character coding systems and standards that enable Japanese text to be recorded and used in computer systems. The Japanese coding systems, which were first developed in the late 1970s, pioneered the approaches to handling the large numbers of kanji characters and established a pathway that was adopted in other standards for Asian languages. The paper covers the development of the major Japanese standards and their evolution into the Unicode character standard, which is now the basis for all language coding.

This was inevitable:

Kaohsiung university faces backlash over simplified Chinese exam:
Education ministry says faculty member's business card listing ‘Taiwan Province, China’ is ‘inappropriate’ by Charlotte Lee, Taiwan News (1/3/25)

(article in Mandarin)

The language is the same; it's only the script that is different — but that really matters:  Think Hindi-Urdu, Serbo-Croatian, Hangul-Hanja, Maltese-Arabic.

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology is facing controversy after a final exam in its Department of Aquaculture was in simplified Chinese, while a faculty member's business card listed “Taiwan Province, China.”

You may or may not have heard of Kucha.  For those who are interested in Tocharian or Uyghur, you almost certainly would be well aware of this oasis city on the northern rim of the Taklamakan Desert in the Tarim Basin of Eastern Central Asia. 

Coordinates: 41°42′56″N 82°55′56″E

Kucha is the historical seat of so-called Tocharian B, i.e., Kuśiññe Kantwo, the home of the renowned Buddhist translator, Kumārajīva (344-413), and an important center of Uyghur history and culture from the 7th to 13th centuries.

A giant step backward — about a thousand years.  Writing regression.

“'Pseudo-Chinese': New Japanese Social Media App Only Allows Kanji", Jay Allen, Unseen Japan (12/18/24)

Whatever possessed some folks to do this?

Wanna stress-test your Japanese knowledge? A new social media app for Japanese users dares you to ditch kana by allowing only kanji input, a.k.a. "Pseudo-Chinese."

Or is that stress-testing your Chinese knowledge?  What kind of language results?  Natural, normal, native Japanese?  Or some kind of hentai Nihongo kaibutsu 変態日本語怪物 ("abnormal Japanese language monstrosity")?

The PRC uses hànyǔ pīnyīn 汉语拼音 ("Sinitic spelling") for phonetic annotation, Taiwan uses zhùyīn fúhào 注音符號 ("phonetic symbols") for the same purpose.  Since we are well acquainted with pīnyīn, but not very familiar with zhùyīn fúhào, I will focus on the latter in this post:

Mark Swofford, "If you ever find yourself stuck on how to pronounce English", Pinyin News (5/7/23):

Here are some lyrics from a popular song, “Count on Me,” by Bruno Mars, with a Mandarin translation. The interesting part is that a Taiwanese third-grader has penciled in some phonetic guides for him or herself, using a combination of zhuyin fuhao (aka bopo mofo) (sometimes with tone marks!), English (as a gloss for English! and English pronunciation of some letters and numbers), and Chinese characters (albeit not always correctly written Chinese characters — not that I could do any better myself). Again, this is a Taiwanese third-grader and so is someone unlikely to know Hanyu Pinyin.

"Oldest Alphabet Discovered in Ancient Syrian Tomb Redefines History of Writing", by Chrissy Newton, Debrief (November 21, 2024)

A research team at Johns Hopkins University has discovered evidence of the world’s oldest alphabetic writing, carved onto finger-length clay cylinders, outdating other scripts by 500 years. 

Recovered during excavations in a tomb in Syria, the writing is believed to date to around 2400 BCE. This new finding disrupts how archaeologists understand where the alphabet originated, and how it was shared across civilizations, societies, and cultures, leaving anthropologists with new questions about what the findings mean for early urban civilizations.  

“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite,” said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders in a statement. “Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated.”

“And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now,” he added. Schwartz will share details of his discovery on Thursday, Nov. 21, at the American Society of Overseas Research’s Annual Meeting. 

Part 1 of this post appeared on 8/26/16.  The first two paragraphs read as follow:

Founded in 1858, Keio is the oldest university in Japan and one of the best, also ranking high in world ratings.  Its name is written 慶應 in kanji.  That's a lot of strokes to scribble down every time you want to write the name of your university, so Keio people often write it this way:   广+K 广+O (imagine that the "K" and the "O" are written inside of the 广).  That makes 6 strokes and 4 strokes instead of 15 strokes and 17 strokes respectively, 10 strokes total instead of 32.

In these character constructions, "K" and "O" are functioning as phonophores, and Kangxi radical 53 广 ("dotted cliff" or "house on cliff") is functioning as the semantophore.

New article in Antiquity (05 November 2024):  "Seals and signs: tracing the origins of writing in ancient South-west Asia", by Kathryn Kelley, Mattia Cartolano, and Silvia Ferrara

Abstract

Administrative innovations in South-west Asia during the fourth millennium BC, including the cylinder seals that were rolled on the earliest clay tablets, laid the foundations for proto-cuneiform script, one of the first writing systems. Seals were rich in iconography, but little research has focused on the potential influence of specific motifs on the development of the sign-based proto-cuneiform script. Here, the authors identify symbolic precursors to fundamental proto-cuneiform signs among late pre-literate seal motifs that describe the transportation of vessels and textiles, highlighting the synergy of early systems of clay-based communication.