Language Log

From Bryan Van Norden:

It took me a while to "get" this, but it's very cool, and you can appreciate it even if you have never learned a Chinese character before in your life. It's a contemporary Chinese poem entitled "War Symphony." You only need to read four characters to understand it:

兵 bīng means soldier (you can imagine that the lines at the bottom are the soldier's legs)  [VHM:  The lines at the bottom are actually derived from the pictographic representation of two hands; they are holding an adze (you can see additional examples if you click on the "more" button at the top right of the linked section), the primordial tool-weapon, which is what the earliest form of the character actually stood for.  It was later used by metonymy to mean "soldier".  For a powerful woodcut (artist Dan Heitkamp) inspired by the oracle bone form of the glyph, see the title page of Victor Mair, tr. and intro., The Art of War:  Sun Zi's Military Methods (Columbia University Press, 2007).]

乒乓 pīng pāng is Ping Pong, but individually the characters are used to represent the sounds "ping" and "pang" (like the sounds of metal weapons clanging)

丘 qiū is a mound, like a funeral mound

A lengthy, important article by Michael Erard recently appeared in the New York Times Magazine:

"How the Appetite for Emojis Complicates the Effort to Standardize the World’s Alphabets:  Do the volunteers behind Unicode, whose mission is to bring all human languages into the digital sphere, have enough bandwidth to deal with emojis too?" (10/18/17)

The article brought back many vivid memories.  It reminded me of my old friend, Joe Becker, who was the seminal designer of the phenomenal Xerox Star's multilingual capabilities in the mid-80s and instrumental in the organization and foundation of the Unicode Consortium in the late 80s and early 90s.  Indeed, it was Becker who coined the word "Unicode" to designate the project.

Article by Sarah Cascone in Artnet (October 16, 2017):

This Artist Gathered 2,000 Words for Women—and Now, She Wants You to Walk All Over Them:  Lin Tianmiao's installation at Galerie Lelong puts contemporary language on top of antique carpets."

Here's an example of Lin's work:

Bilibili (bīlībīlī 哔哩哔哩; B zhàn B站 ("B site / station") "is a video sharing website themed around anime, manga, and game fandom based in China, where users can submit, view, and add commentary subtitles on videos" (Wikpedia).  When you register for this site, you're supposed to declare whether you're M(ale) or F(emale), in which case your posts will be referred to respectively as "tā de 他的" ("his") and "tā de 她的" ("hers").  If you do not specify your gender, your posts will be referred to as "ta的" or "TA的", i.e., neither M(ale) (tā de 他的) nor F(emale) (tā de 她的).

Ever since people started inputting Chinese characters in computers, I've had an intense interest in how they do it, which systems are more efficient, and why they choose the particular ones they adopt.  For the first few decades, because all inputting systems presented significant obstacles and challenges, I remained pretty much of an onlooker because I didn't want to waste my time struggling with cumbersome methods.  It's only after I discovered how simple and fast it is to use Google Translate as my chief inputting method that I became very active in entering Chinese character texts.

Photo taken in Hangzhou by Nikita Kuzmin's Chinese teacher:

Josh Horwitz has a provocative article in Quartz (9/27/17):  "SAY MORE WITH LESS:  In Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, 140 characters for Twitter is plenty, thank you"

The thinking here is muddled and the analysis is misplaced.  There's a huge difference between "characters" in English and in Chinese.  We also have to keep in mind the difference between "word" and "character", both in English and in Chinese.  A more appropriate measure for comparing the two types of script would be their relative "density", the amount of memory / code space required to store and transmit comparable information in the two scripts.

Article in South China Morning Post (9/19/17) by Jasmine Siu:

"Activist fined HK$3,000 for binning Hong Kong public library books in ‘fight against cultural invasion’ from mainland China:  Alvin Cheng Kam-mun, 29, convicted of theft over dumping of books printed in simplified Chinese characters"

A radical Hong Kong activist was on Tuesday fined HK$3,000 for dumping library books in a bin in what he said was an attempt to protect children from the “cultural invasion” of simplified Chinese characters.

Tattoo on the shoulder of a marcher in Charlottesville on Saturday, August 12:

Source: "A lot of white supremacists seem to have a weird Asian fetish," Vice News, Dexter Thomas (9/12/17)

Jonathan Benda posted this on Facebook recently:

Reading [Jan Blommaert's] _Language and Superdiversity_ in preparation for my Writing in Global Contexts course in the fall. Does anyone else think the following conclusions about this sign are somewhat wrongheaded?

If you use the right tools, that is, as explained in this Twitter thread from Taylor ("Language") Jones.

A brief thread on how kids have it (in this case, language learning) easier these days.

When I first studied Chinese in college… 1/

— Language Jones (@languagejones) August 17, 2017

Rule number 1:  Use all the electronic tools at your disposal.

Rule number 2:  Do not use paper dictionaries.

Jones' Tweetstorm started when he was trying to figure out the meaning of shāngchǎng 商场 in Chinese.  He remembered from his early learning that it was something like "mall; store; market; bazaar".  That led him to gòuwù zhòngxīn 购物中心 ("shopping center").  With his electronic resources, he could hear these terms pronounced, could find them used in example sentences, and could locate actual places on the map designated with these terms.

From a long blog post on contemporary Chinese religious art and architecture: