There's a new exhibition on "Writing: Making Your Mark" at the British Library. Judging from the homepage and all that I've heard about it, this is an exciting, informative, comprehensive display of more than a hundred objects and forty different systems pertaining to the history of writing during the past five millennia and drawn from around the world. Since it's open until Tuesday, August 27, 2019, if you're in the vicinity it would be worth your while to stop by and take a look.
There's also an excellent article by Kristina Foster about the exhibition in Hyperallergic (6/7/19):
"A History of Writing, from Hieroglyphs to Squiggles: An exhibition at the British Library powerfully delves into the personal and political complexities of writing, driving home that it’s not only one of humanity’s greatest inventions, but born out of the strongest human motivations."
I’m a frequent reader of Language Log, and I’ve been particularly interested in the debate about the usefulness / limitations of the Chinese script in modern society. As the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre approaches, I remembered an anecdote about the limitations of Chinese characters presented in Louisa Lim’s book The People’s Republic of Amnesia. It describes the way jailed activists communicated in prison after the crackdown on Tiananmen in 1989:
Two days ago, in "Difficult languages and easy languages, part 2" (5/28/19), we listed scores of languages from easiest to hardest to learn. Spanish came out overall as the easiest widely spoken language for many people to learn, while Arabic and Turkish struck many people as quite difficult to master.
Klaus Nuber writes: "Sometime ago I saw the sign of this 'Asia Palast' with the logo consisting of the two chairs and the round dingus between. Is this logo just cute or has it a hanzi background?"
A friend was visiting in Lijiang, Yunnan Province (southwestern China) earlier this week. She stayed in Yuhu 玉湖 village where Joseph Rock (1884-1962; the famous Austrian-American explorer, geographer, linguist, and botanist) lived nearly a century ago at the foot of Yulong 玉龙 Mountain. The area around Lijiang has become a famous tourist destination, not only for the beauty of its natural scenery, but for the richness of its local culture (more about that below). While in Lijiang, my friend was surprised to come upon signs for unisex toilets:
In several recent posts, we've been discussing the most efficient, least painful way to acquire facility with hanzi / kanji / hanja 漢字 ("Sinographs; Chinese characters"). Lord knows there are endless numbers of them and they are so intricately constructed that it is an arduous task to master the two thousand or so that are necessary for basic literacy.
It would be so much easier to learn the Sinographs if language pedagogues would provide phonetic annotations for each character. Better yet, the phonetic annotations should be divided into words with spaces between them according to the official orthographic rules.
For the first time in my life, I closely observed someone inputting Korean on a cell phone. (I was sitting behind the person doing it on the train ride to the city this afternoon.) Of course, I don't know exactly how it works, but what I observed was very interesting.
First of all, the young woman's phone had a special feature I've never seen in any other type of inputting. Namely, she could use a little, built-in, popup, electronic magnifying glass to hover over a particular syllable block that she had composed to inspect it carefully to see that she had formed it correctly. She did this fairly often.
Next, she seemed to spend a lot of time typing and retyping individual syllable blocks to make sure she got them right.
