Language Log

In the fourth comment to "Striving to revive the flagging sinographic cosmopolis" (4/26/25), I stated my observation of morphosyllabic kanji usage is that it has been declining over time at the expense of kana and other phonetic elements of the writing system, and I expressed the wish that a quantitative study of the actual usage be carried out.  It turns out that we already do have this information, and it is visually evident in these graphs which were called to my attention by Jim Unger.

They are from:

Zusetsu nihongo: Gurafu de miru kotoba no sugata kotoba o hakaru keiryō kokugogaku (Kadokawa ko jiten 9), Hayashi Ōki.

図説日本語: グラフで見ることばの姿 ことばを計る計量国語学 (角川小辞典 9), 林大.

Illustrated Japanese: The appearance of words in graphs, Quantitative Japanese linguistics to measure words (Kadokawa Small Dictionaries), Hayashi Ōki, ed. and comp. (1982), pp. 276-277.

The graphs are derived from a 1969 book by Morioka Kenji on Meiji period language.  Both graphs cover the years 1879-1968.

If we take stock of the sinographic cosmopolis at the end of first quarter of the 21st century, it is evident that it is increasingly moribund.  Vietnam has jettisoned chữ Hán for the Latin alphabet; North Korea has switched exclusively to hangul; South Korea now uses very few hanja; the Japanese script currently consists of draconically limited kanji, many of which are simplified, often in ways that are different from the simplified characters adopted by the PRC, plus two types of syllabaries and roman letters; the PRC itself now uses radically simplified and limited characters and the Latin alphabet, not to mention that all of the hundreds of millions of students in China learn English, which is a primary index of success for rising in the world of education, and entering sinographs into computers and other digital devices is overwhelmingly accomplished through the alphabet (with resultant amnesia eroding the characters they do learn); while the ephemeral Sinoform scripts of Inner Asia (Tangut, Jurchen, Khitan) disappeared around a millennium ago; Sinitic Dungan speakers write their language in Cyrillic….  For those who are advocates of the sinographic script, naturally all of this would be cause for alarm.

IA sent me this article (in Chinese) about a new translation of George Orwell's 1984.  It begins:

Yīngguó zuòjiā Qiáozhì Ōuwēiěr de míngzhù `1984' chūbǎn yuē 75 nián, jìnrì yíng lái shǒubù Táiwén bǎn. Yìzhě Zhōu Yíngchéng shuō, zhè shì tuīdòng `Táiyǔ zhèngchánghuà'de chángshì, ràng Táiyǔ mǔyǔzhě bùbì tòuguò Zhōngwén yìběn, yě néng jiēchù shìjiè jīngdiǎn wénxué

英國作家喬治‧歐威爾的名著「1984」出版約75年，近日迎來首部台文版。譯者周盈成說，這是推動「台語正常化」的嘗試，讓台語母語者不必透過中文譯本，也能接觸世界經典文學。

1984, a famous novel by British writer George Orwell, was published about 75 years ago and recently had its first Taiwanese version. Translator Zhou Yingcheng said that this is an attempt to promote the "normalization of Taiwanese" so that native Taiwanese speakers can access world classic literature without having to rely on Chinese translations.

IA points out that, as in the following quotation from the translator, "Zhōngwén 中文" (lit. "Chinese writing"), refers not only to written language but spoken as well:

Tā shuō:`Dāngshí zài guó wài jiǎng zhōngwén, chángcháng bèi dàng zuò zhōngguó rén, yúshì wǒ kāishǐ sīkǎo zìjǐ gēn táiwān de liánjié shì shénme, dé chū de jiélùn shì tái yǔ. Dàn wǒ tái yǔ bùgòu hǎo, yǒu shí wǒmen xiǎng jiǎng qiāoqiāohuà,(jiǎng zhōngwén) pà biérén tīng dǒng, jiù huì qiēhuàn chéng tái yǔ, dàn yòu méi bànfǎ wánzhěngde shuō

他說：「當時在國外講中文，常常被當作中國人，於是我開始思考自己跟台灣的連結是什麼，得出的結論是台語。但我台語不夠好，有時我們想講悄悄話，（講中文）怕別人聽懂，就會切換成台語，但又沒辦法完整地說」。

He said: "When I was speaking Chinese abroad, I was often mistaken for Chinese, so I began to think about what my connection with Taiwan was, and I concluded it was Taiwanese. But my Taiwanese is not good enough. Sometimes when we want to whisper, we are afraid that others will understand (what we are saying in Chinese), so we switch to Taiwanese, but we can't speak it completely."

These are remarks by Ron Vara from here:

ᱮᱞᱚᱱ ᱨᱤᱣ ᱢᱩᱥᱠ ( /ˈiːlɒn/ EE-lon; ᱡᱟᱱᱟᱢ ᱡᱩᱱ ᱒᱘, ᱑᱙᱗᱑) ᱩᱱᱤ ᱫᱚ ᱢᱤᱫ ᱵᱮᱯᱟᱨᱤᱭᱟᱹ ᱠᱟᱱᱟᱭ ᱚᱠᱚᱭ ᱫᱚ ᱩᱱᱤᱭᱟᱜ ᱢᱩᱲᱩᱫ ᱵᱷᱩᱢᱤᱠᱟ Tesla, Inc., SpaceX, ᱟᱨ ᱴᱩᱭᱴᱚᱨ (ᱡᱟᱦᱟᱸ ᱩᱱᱤ ᱮᱠᱥ ᱞᱮᱠᱟᱛᱮ ᱧᱩᱛᱩᱢ ᱵᱚᱫᱚᱞ ᱮᱱᱟ) ᱨᱮ ᱵᱟᱰᱟᱭᱚᱜ ᱠᱟᱱᱟ᱾

This is the first sentence in the article Elon Musk in Santali alphabet (Ol Chiki). Yes, it's an alphabetic writing system, not an abugida. What makes the Santali alphabet really elusive is that it resembles the shapes of the undeciphered Indus Valley script. Soviet archaeologists once tried to decipher IVC seals using Santali alphabet. Sounds ridiculous, but it's a sad truth that Santali is a unique language with little to no academic attention having been paid to it.

Some folks seem to think so, but not Benjamin James who wrote this letter to the London Review of Books, 47.6 (April 3, 2025), p. 4:

Simple Script

In his fascinating article on the recent decipherment of Linear Elamite, Tom Stevenson finds it difficult to accept that 'the Latin or Greek writing systems are simpler or "more precise" than mostly logographic writing systems like written Chinese' (LRB, 6 March). Does he really believe Chinese script is just as suited as Latin to the rendering of foreign words? 'Tom Stevenson' is far simpler and more phonetically precise than 汤姆•史帝⽂森，'Tangmu Shidiwénsen', which adds two syllables, six tones and six individual character meanings. The Committee for Language Reform in China acknowledged the relative simplicity of the Latin script as one of the factors behind its abandonment in 1956 of the attempt to develop a phonetic script based on Chinese characters.

The Japanese writing system consists of three major components — kanji (sinographs), hiragana (cursive syllabary), and katakana (block syllabary).  I would argue that rōmaji (roman letters) are a fourth component.  We have rehearsed and rehashed their different lexical, morphological, and grammatical functions so often that I don't want to waste time going over them again now.  Since we are focusing on katakana in this post, I will merely mention that their main roles are the following:

• transcription of foreign-language words into Japanese
• the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo)
• emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia
• for technical and scientific terms
• for names of plants, animals, minerals
• often for the names of Japanese companies

(Wikipedia)

Cuneiforms: New digital tool for translating ancient texts, University of Würzburg, ScienceDaily (March 26, 2025)
   
Summary:    Major milestone reached in digital Cuneiform studies: Researchers present an innovative tool that offers many new possibilities

We usually associate cuneiform (Classical Latin cuneus [“wedge”] + fōrma) with Sumerian and Akkadian, but this logo-syllabic script was actually used for many languages in the ancient world:  Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Urartian, Palaic, Aramaic, Old Persian.  In this post, we focus on its use for writing Hittite, the first Indo-European language, as described in the article cited above.

Which do you think is harder — reading and writing Taiwanese with characters (sinographs) or with romanization?

I maintain — and I have tried to show over the years — that it's much easier to read Taiwanese written with roman letters than with Chinese characters.  The same is true of all vernacular Sinitic languages.

It is relatively easy for a speaker of Taiwanese to become literate in roman letters, not at all so in characters.  See the posts under "Selected readings" below.

Want a Million Dollars? Get Busy Deciphering This Ancient Script.  A prize offered by an Indian state leader is intended to shed light on a Bronze Age civilization — and settle a cultural battle.
By Pragati K.B., NYT (2/1/25)

The Indus Valley civilization, also called the Harappan civilization, is seen by experts as on a par with the better-known ones of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China.

One of the earliest, it flourished on the banks of the Indus and Saraswati Rivers during the Bronze Age. It had planned townships, water management and drainage systems, huge fortified walls and exquisite pottery and terra cotta artistry.

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra.]

By now we know. The secret is out. The “Chinese character” is not as different as 人 thought it was. We know sinographs don’t transcend the plane of sound — not quite like math symbols, anyway, or the man-woman bathroom icons, or stoplights.

How deep is the entanglement, though, between sinographs and sound? In contemplation of this, I present a fun-sized platter of puns and related matter from a seaborne sliver of the Sinosphere thought by some to be a living showcase of peak sinography: Formosa.

In particular, I want to spotlight a subconscious reading mechanism that guts the good of sinography and bends it to shady ends.

Let’s start with Sioumazang Yakiniku, Japanese barbeque chain. Sinographically, the name is 燒肉衆. The Mandarin reading, or name, is straightforward: Shāoròuzhòng. The Taioanese name is more or less undefined, despite the possibilities — for reasons that should be clear by the time we get to the other side of this.

In several recent posts, we've been exposed to a few Japanese speakers who tried to write their language without recourse to kana (the two Japanese syllabaries), i.e., kanji only.  I myself thought it was ridiculous / laughable and didn't work well at all.

Now we come across an even more quixotic quest, one where some folks combine Japanese, Chinese, and English languages (lexicons and grammars) and scripts to create a hybrid linguistic amalgam.

Below, I will show several examples of what the resultant combinations look like.  I will not translate or transcribe the sample texts, because — even if you don't know all three languages and scripts, you will be able to get an idea of how this experiment works .  I will only give a paraphrase of what portions of the texts mean, especially the fourth one, because it is the most overt in declaring its modus operandi.

In actuality, that was my original intention, but I ended up paraphrasing all of the passages, although I'm not entirely certain that I caught the nyuansu ニュアンス ("nuance") of each and every word.

For all the samples, I have endeavored to smooth out the three languages and three scripts into a single English rendering.

／
「日本で最古」の“文章”か…高知・南国市の遺跡から発掘の弥生土器に文字…2世紀後半〜3世紀中ごろに作られた「刻書土器」文章としては最古の歴史を塗り替える可能性も
＼https://t.co/rRJbBB2jgj#高知 #ニュース #テレビ高知 #KUTVニュース #KUTV #NEWSDIG

— KUTVテレビ高知@開局55周年 (@kutv_tvkochi) January 23, 2025

Marco Rubio has been named Secretary of State by newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, swiftly and unanimously approved by the United States Senate, and promptly sworn in by Vice President JD Vance.  When it comes to China, our most formidable foe, however, there is a hitch — Rubio is under a travel ban by the Chinese government.

Zěnme bàn 怎么办？("What to do?")

Clearly this will not do.  Even China knows that, so their Foreign Ministry has thought of a devilishly clever way to circumvent their own ban.

Beijing changes Rubio’s Chinese name, perhaps to get around travel ban
Changes to official translations are approved at a high level, and could be a way to ease sanctions indirectly.  By Yitong Wu, Kit Sung, and Chen Zifei, rfa
2025.01.21

China's morphosyllabic script confronts the world, and itself — with unique challenges.

Beijing has changed the rendering of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s name in Chinese, sparking speculation that officials might want to get around their own travel ban, in an apparent olive branch to President Donald Trump, analysts said on Tuesday.