Language Log

In "Remember the First 100 Digits of Pi Using This Basic Technique" (mental_floss, 12/11/15), Caitlin Schneider describes a "memory palace" in which one can use letters to recall long strings of numbers.

Our Language Log post on "Kanji of the year 2014", zei 税 ("tax"), was rather extensive, so it should suffice to give an indication of how the selection is made and the nature of the ritual surrounding the public unveiling of the choice.  I won't attempt to duplicate such a full treatment for the kanji that was chosen this year, but will focus on a significant difference between last year's KOTY and this year's.  For additional information concerning this year's selection, I recommend reading this report:

"2015 Kanji of the Year: 'An' Juxtaposes Security and Unease" (12/15/15)

Yesterday afternoon, Liwei Jiao went to a Chinese restaurant in South Philadelphia and ordered three dim sum dishes. Below is a photograph of the order taken down by the waitperson. The restaurant is called Wokano and it is located at 12th St and Washington Ave.

(Click to embiggen.)

Just a few days ago we had this colossal blunder being trumpeted all over China:

Xí Jìnpíng huìjiàn Měiguó zǒngtǒng Àomǎbā 习近平会见美国总统奥马巴 ("Xi Jinping meets American President Omaba")

See "Xi Jinping meets President Omaba in Paris" (12/4/15)

Now Al Jazeera (12/6/15) reports another lollapalooza of a typo in China.  This time the tables were turned on their own president:

"China suspends reporters over Xi 'resigns' typo:  Two reporters and two editors punished for accidentally replacing 'zhici' with 'cizhi' in article on Xi's speech."

Andrew Peters noticed an interesting aspect of the concise little figure in this article:  "Evolution of the first person pronoun in Japanese spoken language" (click to nicely embiggen).  It claims to show which pronouns were in use in various eras (Nara [710–794], Heian [794–1185], Kamakura [1185–1333], Muromachi [1336–1573], Edo [1603–1868], Meiji/Taisho/Showa [1868-1989], and postwar).  What Andrew discovered is that the two casual masculine pronouns ore おれ (俺) (this may even sound rude) and boku ぼく(僕) are, respectively, the oldest and newest pronouns in use today.

The first public sign I noticed after arriving at Hong Kong last week was this one embedded in the floor near the  conveyor belt (visible at the top of the photo):

An article by Tomoyoshi Kubo in The Asahi Shimbun, "Poem on 9th-century wood could provide missing link between kanji, hiragana" (11/27/15), may provide evidence for the development of hiragana (cursive syllabary) from Chinese characters.

…The entire verse of famed tanka poem “Naniwazu” was inscribed in ink on Japanese cypress in an intermediary syllabary between manyogana, one of the earliest Japanese writing systems dating back to the fifth century, and hiragana, the Kyoto City Archaeological Research Institute said on Nov. 26….

The kanji were originally semantic but were read phonetically to suit the Japanese language.

The characters were later simplified and turned into hiragana, but the process of that transformation remains a mystery.

The writing on the latest discovery is neither manyogana nor hiragana, but something in between, the institute said. It is also the first finding of the entire poem written in the intermediary system….

In a 12:05 TED talk filmed in August, 2015, cave art researcher Genevieve von Petzinger asks:

"Why are these 32 symbols found in ancient caves all over Europe?"

I spotted this photograph in an article that I'll describe below:

Periodically, someone will write an article about how the Japanese still are inordinately fond of fax machines, such as this one by Michael Fitzpatrick from the BBC News "Technology of Fiction" section:

Not a word about kanji.

There has been a flurry of reports about a teacher in Sichuan province forcing tardy students to copy a crazy character with 56 strokes a thousand times, e.g.:

"Complex 'character test' facing tardy Chinese students" (10/29/15)

This is the whimsical, whacky character for a type of noodles that is popular in Shaanxi province.

Never mind that some people say the character has 57 strokes, while others say that it has 62 strokes, this zany monstrosity is a bear to write.  Having to copy it a thousand times would indeed be a kind of mindless, mind-numbing torture.  Furthermore, the sound that has been assigned to it — biang — is not part of the phonological inventory of Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) and the ostensible phonetic component of this symbol did not develop naturally as part of the sound system of traditional Chinese characters.

On the DramaFever website, Brendan Fitzgibbons has an interesting article that shows how "New font lets anyone learn Japanese" (10/17/14):

From David Moser:

Just got this spam text, all in pinyin, to avoid spam detectors. The usual spam offering fake certificates and chops, plus their Weixin contact. What's novel is the tone markings, don't see that very often.