Language Log

Planet power, plus dinosaurs and dragons: myth and reality of heaven and earth

May 7, 2024 @ 11:04 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Language and animals, Language and archeology, Language and art, Language and astronomy, Language and biology, Writing systems

Given that we've been discussing astronomy / astrology and their relationship to the alphabet so intensely in recent weeks, I'm pleased to announce this important conference that is about to be convened: “The Power of the Planets: The Social History of Astral Sciences Between East and West”, May 20–21, 2024, Dipartimento di Beni Culturali – Università di Bologna (Ravenna, Italy).

I warmly recommend that you take a close look at the header images of two objects in The Cleveland Museum of Art: Mirror with a Coiling Dragon, China, Tang Dynasty 618-907 (https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1995.367), Drachma – Sasanian, Iran, reign of Hormizd II, 4th century (https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1966.738).

The quality of the photographs is extraordinarily fine and detailed. Using the zoom and expand functions, you can see things not clearly visible to the naked eye. Especially noteworthy is the jagged dorsal fin / frill / spine that runs along the back of the dragon on the Tang mirror and is a conspicuous counterpart of many species of dinosaurs.

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Problems with Japan's writing system, pt. 873

May 5, 2024 @ 6:47 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Writing systems

My, my, my!! Who'da thunk it?

Japanese beef brand faces marketing mess as kanji creates confusion, Japan Today (5/4/24):

The government of Ibaraki Prefecture has hit a marketing snag in the promotion of its local Hitachiwagyu Beef specialty after a survey showed a significant percentage of young Japanese adults cannot read the kanji characters in its name.

Japan boasts numerous wagyu luxury beef variants, most famously the Kobe Beef from Hyogo Prefecture in the country's west. The Hitachiwagyu name refers to Hitachi Province, the pre-1875 name for Ibaraki Prefecture.

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Mix and match Japanese orthography

April 17, 2024 @ 9:24 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Gender, Usage, Variation, Writing systems

Most Language Log readers are aware that the Japanese writing system consists of three major components — kanji (sinoglyhs), hiragana (cursive syllabary), and katakana (block syllabary). I would argue that rōmaji (roman letters) are a fourth component, as they are in the Chinese writing system.

How do people decide when to switch among the different components of the Japanese writing system? Of course, custom and usage determine when to use one and when to use another. (It's a bit like masculine, feminine, and neuter in gender based languages [a frequent and recent topic on Language Log] — you don't ask why, you just do it].) In most cases, convention has fixed which of the three main components of the writing system is used for a particular purpose. On the other hand, since I began learning Japanese half a century ago, I noticed a fairly conspicuous slippage regarding what I had been led to believe were predetermined practices.

Sanae Heist, a senior studying linguistics at Columbia University, brought this whole matter to the surface when she wrote to me as follows:

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Fish-in-fish matryoshka sinoglyph

April 13, 2024 @ 9:07 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Humor, Ideography, Writing systems

Egas Moniz-Bandeira on Twitter/X:

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Two brushes in one hand — virtuoso calligraphy

April 13, 2024 @ 7:10 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Writing, Writing systems

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Polysyllabic sinoglyphs

April 11, 2024 @ 11:32 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Redundancy, Writing systems

From Markus Samuel Haselbeck, responding to Egas Moniz-Bandeira on Twitter/X:

As the discussion of polysyllabic sonography goes on, I want to add a character that I recently discovered in a Chinese restaurant, here in Leuven. I guess it is pronounced Zhōngguó (中國), China? https://t.co/1cc65vq4fC pic.twitter.com/UveFSHK3dz

— Markus Samuel Haselbeck (@CiaoCiaota) April 8, 2024

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Another "variant" character

April 7, 2024 @ 6:35 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Onomatopoeia, Writing systems

If we come upon a glyph that we don't recognize and can't find in any dictionary, especially if we have half an idea what it might mean or what it might sound like, we are apt to call it a "variant character" (yìtǐzì 異體字) or calligraphic form of some standard glyph. It happens all the time, e.g., here — in the comments.

Nick Kaldis sent in this character:

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The Syriac Script at Turfan

April 4, 2024 @ 10:50 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Books, Epigraphy, Writing systems

First Soundings

by Martina Galatello

This is the first book-length palaeographic study of about a thousand fragments in Syriac and Sogdian languages discovered between 1902 and 1914 in the Turfan area on the ancient Northern Silk Roads. This manuscript material, probably dating between the late 8th and 13th /14th centuries, is of utmost relevance for the history of an area that represents a crossroads region of various communities, languages and religions, not least the East Syriac Christian community. Palaeographic factors such as form, modulus, ductus, contrast, spaces between letters and ligatures have been examined. Particularly significant is a peculiar ligature of the letters sade and nun. One important observation that emerges from this research is the almost total absence of monumental script in favour of mostly cursive forms, most of them East Syriac cursive forms. These represent a valuable source for the study of the history of the East Syriac script due to the paucity of earlier and contemporary East Syriac manuscript evidence from the Middle East, at least before the twelfth century. Moreover, this research sheds light on scribal habits that are highly relevant for a better comprehension of the Sogdian and Syriac-speaking Christian communities, for the history of writing between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and for a greater understanding of the social context in which these and other communities in the same area read, wrote, and shared handwritten texts.

This study is part of the FWF stand-alone project "Scribal Habits. A case study from Christian Medieval Central Asia" (PI Chiara Barbati) at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

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Dangerous opportunity

April 2, 2024 @ 7:54 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and psychology, Lost in translation, Writing systems

Lord knows we've encountered many bizarre translations and explanations of the much maligned Mandarin term, weiji (see "Selected readings") below, but this is one of the weirdest crosslingual definitions that has ever come to my attention:

Suicide is usually an attempt to deal with a crisis. The Chinese character for "crisis" translates into "dangerous opportunity." Suicide is a permanent solution, and eliminates other options. So if you're hurting so much that you are willing to pass the pain on to those who care, perhaps you could use this dangerous opportunity to try some other options first.

(Source: Hannah Zeavin, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021), ch. 5, p. 178)

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Sound over symbol (and meaning)

March 31, 2024 @ 7:31 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Names, Transcription, Writing systems

Zach Hershey called to my attention a phenomenon about the relationship between speech and writing (and meaning) that I long suspected might well be true, and I even collected plentiful evidence in support of it, but I was never absolutely certain that it was true, namely, that in many cases speakers of Sinitic languages have in mind sounds over characters. Now, with information provided by Zach, we have proof that Sinitic speakers in some cases are indeed thinking of sounds separately (apart from) hanzi.

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Cucurbits and junk characters

March 30, 2024 @ 11:14 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Writing systems

Christopher Rea came to Penn a few weeks ago and delivered this lecture:

"From Zhuangzi’s Gourd to Cinderella’s Pumpkin: Gua 瓜 as a Vehicle for the Imagination"

(2/22/24)

The Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi tells us that one remedy for a lack of imagination is to take your gourd for a ride. Confucius makes a point about usefulness by comparing himself to a calabash. Gua 瓜—which include gourds, melons, pumpkins, squash, and bitter melon—abound in Chinese philosophy, art, poetry, historiography, and storytelling, notably in late imperial novels such as Jin Ping Mei, Journey to the West, and Story of the Stone. Why? Christopher Rea argues that gua have several qualities that account for their enduring popularity in the figurative imagination, including their sound, shape, seasonality, variety, and abundance.

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Kabbalistic phonetics

March 27, 2024 @ 6:03 am· Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and culture, Writing systems

From Francis Mercury van Helmont, Alphabeti verè naturalis Hebraici brevissima delineatio : quae simul methodum suppeditat, juxta quam qui surdi nati sunt sic informari possunt, ut non alios saltem loquentes intelligant, sed & ipsi ad sermonis usum perveniant, 1667:

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Was rongorongo an independent invention of writing?

March 21, 2024 @ 7:19 pm· Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and archeology, Writing systems

Below is a guest post by Kyle Gorman and Richard Sproat:

Ferrara et al. [1] report on the results of a study of several specimens of kohau rongorongo, the enigmatic, undeciphered texts of Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui). These texts, inscribed on wood—mostly driftwood that washed ashore on the island—may have numbered in the hundreds during the mid 19th century, when the system is known to have been in use. Roughly two dozen inscribed artifacts survive today. Ferrara et al. claim, on the basis of carbon dating, that one of them was inscribed before European contact in the 18th century, and thus represent “one of the few independent inventions of writing in human history”.

Naturally it is this latter point in particular that has attracted attention in the popular science press. See for example here, here, here and here. So, while the actual results of the paper are quite modest in that they establish the dates of one piece of wood that ended up being carved with glyphs, the authors clearly intend a much more sweeping interpretation of these results. And true to form, the popular science press is happy to help spread a story that, in the words of one of the articles linked above, “could rewrite history as we know it”.

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Archive for Writing systems

Planet power, plus dinosaurs and dragons: myth and reality of heaven and earth

Problems with Japan's writing system, pt. 873

Mix and match Japanese orthography

Fish-in-fish matryoshka sinoglyph

Two brushes in one hand — virtuoso calligraphy

Polysyllabic sinoglyphs

Another "variant" character

The Syriac Script at Turfan

Dangerous opportunity

Sound over symbol (and meaning)

Cucurbits and junk characters

Kabbalistic phonetics

Was rongorongo an independent invention of writing?

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