Language Log

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-fourth issue:  "Handling Chinese Characters on Computers: Three Recent Studies" (pdf), by J. Marshall Unger (August, 2024).

Abstract
Writing systems with large character sets pose significant technological challenges, and not all researchers focus on the same aspects of those challenges or of the various attempts that have been made to meet them. A comparative reading of three recent books—The Chinese Computer by Thomas Mullaney (2024), Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu (2022), and Codes of Modernity by Uluğ Kuzuoğlu (2023)—makes this abundantly clear. All deal with the ways in which influential users of Chinese characters have responded to the demands of modern technology, but differ from one another considerably in scope and their selection and treatment of relevant information long known to linguists and historians.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-second issue: "Dramatic Transformations of Sinography in East Asia and the World" (pdf), edited by Victor H. Mair (August, 2024).

Foreword
The three papers in this collection were written for my “Language, Script, and Society in China” course during the fall semester of 2023. All three of them are concerned with radical changes made to Sinographic script during its adjustment to modernity.

[This is a guest post by J. Marshall Unger.]

I do not believe it is useful, let alone necessary, to classify every character of a writing system as a phonogram, logogram, syllabogram, logosyllabogram, or any other kind of “gram.” Characters function logographically or phonographically depending on the degree to which they reflect the phonological, as opposed to the lexical, structure of the part of an utterance they are used to represent. One and the same character can function phonographically in one context, logographically in another, and in both ways in yet another. This is a consequence of what Martinet called the double articulation of language, i.e. Hockett’s duality of patterning or Hjemslev’s plereme/ceneme distinction. One may say for convenience that a character that functions logographically in a particular context is a logogram, but to the extent that doing so invites the unwary to think that logograms enjoy some sort of context-free existence in a Platonic universe of symbols, it is a bad idea.

[This is a guest post by Peter T. Daniels, to follow part 1 (7/1/24)]

That, then, is my account of the origin of writing. It might be supposed that my next topic must be the origin of the alphabet. But it is not; for me, the origin of the alphabet is accidental and practically inevitable, given the constellation of circumstances surrounding the event.

No; what must be celebrated, if not explained, is the origin of the abjad. Previously, writers wrote sounds; subsequently, writers wrote parts of sounds. All the evidence in favor of the syllable as the basic unit of speech is also evidence against the like­­­lihood of discovering the segment. The Egyptians didn’t discover the segment, even though they wrote only consonants and didn’t identify the vowels of the syllables of their language; as explained by Alfred Schmitt, Egyptian hieroglyphic signs never ceased to be word signs, even when used strictly for their phonetic value.

[This is a guest post by Peter T. Daniels]

Author's Note

In 1999, Holly Pittman of the University of Pennsylvania invited me to prepare a talk to close an international symposium on early writing systems. The result is before you — essentially unchanged and unupdated (because the planned publication did not materialize), even though I would treat a couple of points differently now. John Noble Wilford covered the event for the New York Times, but in order to accommodate illustrations, his article was cut (from the bottom, as newspapers do), and since he described each contribution in the order it was given, the last several talks went unmentioned! (And weren't restored when a volume of his reporting was published a few years later.) 

A fuller presentation of my understanding of the nature and history of writing may be found in my Exploration of Writing (Equinox, 2018), and in major articles in the 2023 volumes of the journals WORD and Written Language and Literacy.

A Study of Origins
Peter T. Daniels
New York [now Jersey City, N.J.]

closing talk at The Multiple Origins of Writing: Image, Symbol, Script
international symposium, Center for Ancient Studies,
University of Pennsylvania. University Museum, Philadelphia, March 27, 1999

Aside from etymology, one of my favorite language study activities before college was diagramming sentences.  Consequently, I was delighted to be reminded of those good old days by this new (June 19, 2024) article in The Public Domain Review:  "American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century".  This is a magisterial collection of crisply photographed archival works that you can flip through page by page to study at your leisure.

The works collected are the following:

James Brown, The American Grammar (Philadelphia, PA: Clark and Raser, 1831).

Frederick A. P. Barnard, Analytic Grammar; with Symbolic Illustration (New York: E. French, 1836.

Oliver B. Peirce, The Grammar of the English Language (New York: Robinson and Franklin, 1839).

Solomon Barrett, The Principles of Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Metcalf and Co., 1857).

Charles Gauss and B. T. Hodge, A Comprehensive English Grammar (Baltimore, MD: Pan Publication Co., 1890)

Stephen Watkins Clark, A Practical Grammar (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1847).

Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, Higher Lessons in English (New York: Clark and Maynard, 1880).

Oh wow this is an AMAZINGLY FASCINATING find! The 'Chinese characters' seem intractable, but are just phonetically written Mandarin syllables (initial, nucleus, coda):
c(e) 策+ e 額 + (e)ng 鞥 = ceng
Next to it a Manchu transcription: ᡮᡝ᠋᠊ᠩ

I wonder where it comes from? https://t.co/p2T42WANGD pic.twitter.com/z9V2DO5SaC

— Egas Moniz-Bandeira ᠡᡤᠠᠰ ᠮᠣᠨᠢᠰ ᠪᠠᠨᡩ᠋ᠠᠶᠢᠷᠠ (@egasmb) June 4, 2024

[This is a guest post by John Mock]

Query about inscription on crystal from Afghanistan.

Face 1 (actual and reverse):

and finds it!

Back in early February, I asked the Lexicography at Wenlin Institute discussion group if they could help me find a rare Chinese character in Unicode, and I sent along a picture of the glyph.  It won't show up in most browsers, but you can see the character here.  You can also see it in the first item of the list of "Selected Readings" below.  In the following post, when you see this symbol, , just imagine you're seeing this glyph.

On 2/27/04, Richard Warmington kindly responded as follows:

I asked Microsoft Copilot (a chatbot integrated into Microsoft's Edge browser), "Can you tell me anything about the Chinese character ?"

The answer began as follows:

Certainly! The Chinese character is an intriguing one. Let’s explore it:

1. Character Details:
Character:
Unicode Code Point: U+24B25
[…]

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]

To take a step or two back towards the Sad Cripples theme, I had the TV on the other day and the show host — echoing the guest, a dietitian — said this:

“Lán Tâi-oân lâng kóng ‘tāu-leng’; gōa-kok lâng kóng ‘tó͘⁺-nài.’”

(Can't remember if he used Tone 3 or Tone 5 on the last syllable.) This could also be written like this:

“Lán Tâi-oân lâng kóng ‘tāu-leng’; gōa-kok lâng kóng ‘豆奶’ (DÒUNǍI).”

= 咱台灣人講「豆乳」。外國人講『豆奶』（DÒUNǍI）。

Again, he wasn't making a point; he was just summarizing an offhand remark the guest had just made to the same effect. While he seems to be referring to Mandarin speakers as foreigners — and they are, in a meaningful sense — there is no way he meant that. Rather, he & the guest were ultimately both referring to the English word soy milk, but calqued into Mandarin as 豆奶 — also a word in Mandarin, but not generally used in Formosa.

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]

Stunning report from Pinyin News:

"Chinese characters no longer required for Taiwan Aborigine names" (5/21/24)

Last week Taiwan’s legislature passed an amendment stating that members of Taiwan’s tribes will no longer be forced to adopt names written in Chinese characters. Instead, their names can be presented solely in romanization if so desired. Thus, at least in this specialized category, Chinese characters have been stripped of their primacy and romanization is officially allowed to stand on its own (not appear only in conjunction with Chinese characters).

Source: Lìyuàn tōngguò: yuánzhùmín shēnfen zhèngjiàn — kě zhǐ xiě pīnyīn zúmíng (立院通過：原住民身分證件 可只寫拼音族名), United Daily News, May 15, 2024