Language Log

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

“Xizi Qiji 西字奇跡The Miracle of Western Words: Matteo Ricci’s Innovations in Language and Faith,” by Zhaofei Chen.

https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp363_matteo_ricci_xizi_qiji.pdf

'Tis the season of sneezing, and I'm doing a lot of it these days.  At 5 AM this morning, I was awakened by my own sneezing.   It was completely unpremeditated and unexpected.  The sounds that came out were aaah-HOOOOO!!!!!  Low level / high rising.  

The conventional representation of this sound in writing is "achoo".  Other variations include "kerchoo" and "hachao", etc.  In German, I think that the sound of a sneeze is represented as "hatschee" and in Japanese it is "hakushon".

This morning, the sound that I explosively emitted was aaah-HOOOOO!!!!!  Twice.

Since I have a large, Alpine schnoz that acts as an echo chamber, causing the sound to reverberate in my nasal passages, it is extremely loud and ends shrilly.  It can be heard a block away, or all the way down the turn of the corridor from my office to the departmental office about 40 paces distant.

I Used to Know How to Write in Japanese:
Somehow, though, I can still read it
Marco Giancotti, Aether Mug (August 14, 2025)

During the last thirty to forty years, two of the most popular dictionaries for mastering sinographs were those of James Heisig and Rick Harbaugh.  I was dubious about the efficacy of both and wished that my students wouldn't use them, but language learners flocked to these extremely popular dictionaries, thinking that they offered a magic trick for remembering the characters.

The latter relied on fallacious etymological "trees" and was written by an economist, and the former was based on brute memorization enhanced by magician's tricks and was written by a philosopher of religion.  Both placed characters on a pedestal of visuality / iconicity without integrating them with spoken language.

I have already done a mini-review of Harbaugh's Chinese Characters and Culture: A Genealogy and Dictionary (New Haven: Yale Far Eastern Publications, 1998) on pp. 25-26 here:  Reviews XI, Sino-Platonic Papers, 145 (August, 2004).  The remainder of this post will consist of extracts of Giancotti's essay and the view of a distinguished Japanologist-linguist on Heisig's lexicographical methods.

Julesy just keeps getting better and better:

[This is a guest post by Diana Shuheng Zhang]

(click to embiggen)

During my visit to the Luoyang Museum 洛阳博物馆, I found something amazing in its museum store. It is a set of 24 postcards, corresponding to the 24 solar terms 节气 (jieqi) in the traditional Chinese lunar calendar for agricultural purposes. What’s special about this set of cards is the design: every disyllabic lexeme for a solar term is coined into one single Sinitic “character”. I intended to attached multiple photos as examples but the last email was not successfully sent — the “size” was too big as an email. Therefore, here I’m only attaching one photo, that depicts the whole scene of the set of 24 cards.  By clicking on the photograph, you will be able to enlarge it sufficiently to enable you to see the details of the artwork and the writing.

Chris Button saw this bubble tea place at 3:45 PM today in Hollywood:

From the cafe's website:

BOPOMOFO CAFE draws its name from the phonetic Traditional Chinese Alphabets. ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ, and ㄈ [bo, po, mo, and fo] are the “ABCs” of the Mandarin Chinese alphabet symbolizing nostalgia and strength as the building blocks of Mandarin language mastery. Co-founders Eric and Philip, both "American Born Chinese" (ABC), chose the name to reflect their heritage and shared pride in their culture.

[This is a guest post by Mok Ling]

I happen to know a few students (of varying ages and learning experiences) who want to learn (or re-learn, for some of them) Mandarin the "right" way (that is, focusing on speaking and listening before reading and writing, unlike what is prescribed by most HSK courses). Right now, I've got them chewing on the revised Pinyin edition of Princeton's Chinese Primer (which is in pure Pinyin — not a single sinograph until halfway into the course), but they obviously need something outside of a textbook to read.

I'd planned on giving them a Pinyinized Kong Yiji as a "goal text" to read once they have a firm command of the spoken language, but thinking back this seems like a bad idea because of how flowery Lu Xun can get.

Submitted by Charles Belov:

I've been browsing through the proposed Unicode 17 changes, currently undergoing a comment period, with interest. While I don't have the knowledge to intelligently comment on the proposals, it's good to see that they are actively improving language access.

I'm puzzled that some new characters have been added to the existing Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C (6 characters) and Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E (12 characters) rather than added to a new extension. But the most interesting is the apparently brand-new Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J, with over 4,000 added characters.

We've talked about Dungan a lot on Language Log.  That's the northwest Sinitic topolect written in Cyrillic that has been transplanted to Central Asia.  See "Selected readings" below.

For those of you who are interested and would like to hear what it sounds like in real life — spoken and sung by male and female voices — we are fortunate to have a series of ten radio broadcast recordings (here).

Note the natural, easy, undistorted insertion of non-Sinitic borrowings, e.g., "Salam alaikum" (Arabic as-salāmu ʿalaykum  السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ ("Peace be upon you").  That would not be possible in sinographic transcription of northwest Sinitic speech.  This and other aspects and implications of alphabetic Dungan have been extensively discussed on LL.

That's the title of a valuable Wikipedia article.  I have no idea who wrote it, but I'm very glad to have access to this comprehensive article, since it touches on so many topics that concern my ongoing research.

Here are some highlights:

Before British colonisation, the Persian language was the lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent and a widely used official language in the northern India. The language was brought into South Asia by various Turkics and Afghans and was preserved and patronized by local Indian dynasties from the 11th century, such as Ghaznavids, Sayyid dynasty, Tughlaq dynasty, Khilji dynasty, Mughal dynasty, Gujarat sultanate, and Bengal sultanate. Initially it was used by Muslim dynasties of India but later started being used by non-Muslim empires too. For example, the Sikh Empire, Persian held official status in the court and the administration within these empires. It largely replaced Sanskrit as the language of politics, literature, education, and social status in the subcontinent.

Launch of the Journal of Sinographic Philologies and Legacies & Call for Papers

The Institute for Sinographic Literatures and Philology at Korea University (Seoul, South Korea) is proud to announce the launch of the Journal of Sinographic Philologies and Legacies (JOSPL), a pioneering venue in the growing field of Sinographic studies. This quarterly, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal is dedicated to the study of the humanistic heritage of East Asia’s Sinographic sphere—a cultural region where Literary Sinitic (漢文) and Sinographs (漢字) functioned as the cosmopolitan language of government, religious institutions, scholarship, and belles-lettres. JOSPL invites submissions that engage critically with this legacy from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives.

A brief collection of "Chinese words for Adults!", with the last one being "KPI", which I had to look up in English.

In almost perfect Taiwan Mandarin, you can see and hear Song Meina deliver her graduation speech here.  A transcription of her speech may be found in this newspaper article.  The article has four pages, and her speech begins at the bottom of the first page.  It is sprinkled with a small amount of Korean and a bit of Taiwanese, but it is otherwise fluent, idiomatic Taiwan Mandarin.

Particularly noticeable was that the transcription wrote the Mandarin phonetic symbols bo po mo fo ㄅ、ㄆ、ㄇ、ㄈ as the beginning of her learning Mandarin at an overseas elementary school in Korea.  I was also struck by the use of the phonetic symbol "e ㄟ" several times, once as an exclamation and the other times as the Taiwanese grammatical particle indicating possession pronounced ê [e].