Language Log

Posted on Twitter by Xi Van Fleet (click on the "X" in the black circle at the top right of the photo to see the whole sign):

Shameless propaganda street sign by CCP. It is roughly translated as “You can pay back your parents for raising you. You will never be able to pay back the Party for what it has done for you”. pic.twitter.com/9RwegwIYwk

— Xi Van Fleet (@XVanFleet) February 24, 2022

how many ways to write #teochew 潮州話? some time ago we joked about this, but didn't really explain it. in this thread we'll give an overview of different ways people write/have written Teochew/Chaozhou/Teo-swa/Chiu-chow! https://t.co/FFZ2m4loG4

— learn-teochew (@LearnTeochew) February 20, 2022

[This is a guest post by Bob Ramsey]

Museum of Chinese Writing near Anyang*, in North China:

*First stable capital of the Shang / Yin Dynasty (c.1600-1046 BC) and the site of the discovery of the largest cache of oracle bone inscriptions (beginning of the Chinese writing system).

As documented here (2009), here (2010), here (2013), and here (2017), it's controversial whether the Indus Valley (IV) inscriptions are really a "script" or something more like a set of logos.  Many people have tried, but it hasn't been definitively cracked.  Now computer scientists are making new attempts to unlock its secrets.

"An ancient language has defied decryption for 100 years. Can AI crack the code?

Scholars have spent a century trying to decipher ancient Indus script. Machine learning may finally help make sense of it all."

By Alizeh Kohari, Rest of World (2/8/22)

This is a long article.  Since it is on a subject that has intrigued me for half a century, plus I personally know some of the key players in the drama and, moreover, I believe that it is innately of great interest and importance, I will provide generous quotations from this substantial piece.

The article begins on a hopeful note:

Jiaming Luo grew up in mainland China thinking about neglected languages. When he was younger, he wondered why the different languages his mother and father spoke were often lumped together as Chinese “dialects.”

Photograph of a menu board outside a Chinese restaurant:

(From an anonymous contributor)

A Rest of World article from November that I missed when it first came out, but am posting on now because it speaks to the comments on several recent Language Log posts (e.g., here and here):

"Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia. Here’s why:

Keyboards weren't designed for Khmer. So Cambodians have just decided to ignore them", By Vittoria Elliott and Bopha Phorn (12 November 2021)

The first four paragraphs of this longish article

In 2018, the team at Facebook had a puzzle on their hands. Cambodian users accounted for nearly 50% of all global traffic for Messenger’s voice function, but no one at the company knew why, according to documents released by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

One employee suggested running a survey, according to internal documents viewed by Rest of World. Did it have to do with low literacy levels? they wondered. In 2020, a Facebook study attempted to ask users in countries with high audio use, but was only able to find a single Cambodian respondent, the same documents showed. The mystery, it seemed, stayed unsolved.

The answer, surprisingly, has less to do with Facebook, and more to do with the complexity of the Khmer language, and the way users adapt for a technology that was never designed with them in mind.

Dieter Maue, a specialist on Old Uyghur, Tocharian, Sanskrit, and Brahmi script, wrote to ask:

The simile 'like the moon of the third day' (tertium comparationis: delicate, graceful; curved (eyebrows)) is currently occupying my mind. Attested in Tocharian A and in Uigur, it sounds, but it doesn't seem to be, Indian.

Tentatively I have translated Uig. üč yaŋıdakı ay täŋri ‘third day’s moon god’ into Chinese word for word; but sān rì yuè 三日月("moon of the third day") is not found in the dictionaries. In the Chinese Tripitaka, there is just one suitable instance. Elsewhere, the moon of the third day seems to be called éméi yuè 蛾眉月 ("moth eyebrow moon" — only poetically?). According to Giles (ChinEnglDict s.no. 7714 ): “ éméi 蛾眉 moth eyebrows, – alluding to the delicate curved eye-markings of the silkworm moth … moth-eyebrows is used figuratively for a lovely girl.   Also wrongly explained as referring to the small curved antennæ of the silkworm moth. ­ Éméi yuè 蛾眉月‚ the crescent moon’. “  The antennae of Bombyx mori are clearly visible, while I cannot find anything which corresponds to  the “eye-markings”. Do you have an idea how to solve the problem?

From Connected (2/4/22), a publication of the Peabody Essex Museum:

"Phillips Library digitizes dictionaries from Vietnam and unlocks stories of museum founders and their travels", by Kathlene Baldanza

The blog post is accompanied by beautiful images of pages from the dictionaries.  Here are the first three paragraphs:

Two recently digitized manuscript dictionaries in the Phillips Library collection are once again sparking conversation. In 1819, John White, a lieutenant in the US Navy, received dictionaries from an Italian Catholic priest named Joseph Morrone in Saigon and deposited them with the East India Marine Society in Salem. The members of the East India Marine Society were the founders of what is today the Peabody Essex Museum. Published in the US in 1838, the dictionaries fueled a trans-Atlantic debate about the nature of Asian languages. Catholic missionaries, their Vietnamese interlocutors, and Salem mariners made the initial connections that allowed for the scholarly conversation that played out in the pages of journals including The North American Review, The Foreign Quarterly Review, and The Canton Register.

Last week, a master's student went to the board to write the Chinese character for "nose" (bí 鼻), but forgot how to do so.  There is no simplified version.  The form of this character differs slightly between China and Japan:  in China it is 鼻 and in Japan it is 鼻.  Can you spot the difference?

Believe it or not, the top part of the character depicts a nose.  Here's the small seal script form, about two millennia ago (the bottom part is the phonophore, which was added long after the top part was invented):

Glyph origin

Phono-semantic compound (形聲, OC *blids): semantic 自 (“nose”) + phonetic 畀 (OC *pids).

自 (OC *ɦljids) originally meant “nose” but came to be used to mean “self”, so the sense of “nose” has been replaced by 鼻 (OC *blids). Some scholars interpret 鼻 (OC *blids) as a combination of a nose (自 (OC *ɦljids)) and two lungs (畀 (OC *pids)).

From Dotno Pount:

I received this poster in Chinese and thought you would enjoy it! It captures the Catch-22 of talents and careers very nicely, I think.

From S. Robert Ramsey:

The Naxi Story of Creation and the Great Flood

Trying to clear up the confusion between the two is a battle we have been waging for decades, and nowhere is the problem more severe than in the study of Sinitic languages and the Sinographic script.  The crisis (not a "danger + opportunity"!) has come to the surface again this month with the appearance of a new book by Jing Tsu titled Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Riverhead Books, 2022).

The publication of Tsu's book has generated a lot of excitement, publicity, and reviews.  Here I would like to call attention to the brief remarks of an anonymous correspondent (a famous, reclusive linguist) that are right on target:

Reimagining "antiquated" Chinese

Reproduced below is the text of a book review in Science that you may not have seen. It is classified as "Linguistics", though the reviewer is a historian at Cal State Poly, Pomona. Notice that Chinese is assumed to be "antiquated" and in need of being "reimagined"!  There is simply no sign of Science understanding the difference between a human language and a writing system. This is consistent with the way they have always treated linguistics; they have no idea what the subject really is.

One of the first Pekingese colloquialisms I learned (by now I know scores) was taught to me half a century ago by Iris Rulan Chao Pian (1922-2013), daughter of the distinguished linguist, Yuen Ren Chao (1892-1982).  It sounded like "der", sometimes with a trill at the end, and meant "scram; skedaddle".  Like many authentic Pekingese colloquial expressions, it was impossible to tell for sure how to write it in Sinographs.

Recently, I asked around to see if people of a younger generation (in their 20s and early 30s) knew this expression, what it meant, how to write it, and how to pronounce it.  Most of my informants, even those who had grown up in Beijing / Peking, told me that they had never heard it.