Language Log

The December 17th Economist contains an article entitled "In Search of the World's Hardest Language". Such things usually make me groan, but this one is actually pretty good. At the level of detail one can reasonably expect in such a context, the facts seem to be correct, the range of languages considered is broader than usual, and it recognizes that there are multiple factors involved. There are, however, a few points worth making about this article, as well as inferior examples of the genre.

Back in August, I posted a report about how the Hangeul alphabet had moved beyond the Korean Peninsula.  Now, nearly half a year later, it may be worth taking a look at how things are progressing in this novel attempt to introduce the Hangeul alphabet to members of a 60,000 member Indonesian tribe called the Cia-Cia.

Ben Zimmer called my attention to an article by Jon Herskovitz and Christine Kim entitled "Indonesian tribe turns to Korean to save language" that was made available by the AlertNet of the Thomson Reuters Foundation on December 23 and has appeared elsewhere as well.

There are many ways NOT to learn Chinese characters, but one that I just found out about today is probably the worst, even worse than T. K. Ann's Cracking the Chinese Puzzles.  It was written by Alison Matthews ("a statistician who has worked in the oil, aviation, tourism, medical and software industries") and Laurence Matthews (author of books that claim to help you find Chinese characters fast) and is called Learning Chinese Characters:  A revolutionary new way to learn and remember the 800 most basic Chinese characters.

A friend in Taiwan sent me the following inquiry:

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From an article in the NYTimes:

"Early Thursday, the attackers sent out a wave of spam under the name Cyxymu, which is a Latin transliteration of the Cyrillic name of the capital of Abkhazia, Sukhumi."

By which is meant that Latin Cyxymu is a "transliteration" of Cyrillic  Сухуми (in italics С у х у м u ) .

I think that this is an improper use of the word "transliteration" (to refer to "Sukhumi" as a transliteration of Cyxymu, however, would be correct), but I don't know what to call this rendering of Cyrillic Cyxymu as Latin "Cyxymu".

In a report from the Yonhap News Agency out today under the title "Indonesian tribe picks Korean alphabet as official writing system" comes a stunning story that is sure to warm the cockles of all Hangeul devotees everywhere.  I'll let the report speak for itself:

Yesterday, in a post about a traffic sign, I momentarily mistook the phonophore YOU3 酉 (calendrical symbol) for QIU2 酋 ("chief") in the character JIU3 酒 ("beer").  It turns out that YOU3 and QIU2 are both semantically, graphically, and phonetically related to JIU3 ("beer, alcohol").

YOU3 酉 is actually the original form of JIU3 酒; it depicted a jar full of beer (imagine the bottom as tapered rather than squared).  YOU3 酉 was subsequently borrowed to indicate the 10th of the 12 Earthly Branches (DI4ZHI1 地支, calendrical symbols), with the bleaching of the original meaning ("jar [full of beer]").  But as late as the Shuihudi manuscripts (late 3rd c. BC), the pictograph YOU3 酉 by itself could still signify JIU3 ("beer").  In these recently discovered manuscripts, which include laws of the Qin Dynasty, there are prohibitions against the brewing of beer by peasants.

A reader asks why it is (as it seems to him) increasingly common for Americans to say "August seven" instead of "August seventh" or "August the seventh" for 08/07/09 ("Coming August seven to a theater near you!"). I have done no investigation on this (it would need intensive quantitative corpus study over dated corpora that do not have Google's propensity for collapsing common typographical variants). The reader may be wrong to think the practice has been increasing: the Recency Effect has not been repealed. So I offer nothing but the following observation. For some time there has been a trend toward abolishing typographical clutter in print ("Mr Jones" for "Mr. Jones"; even "ie" and "eg" for "i.e." and "e.g."), particularly though not exclusively in published American English; and American English also idiomatically eliminates various prepositions here and there (as in "See you Tuesday" for "See you on Tuesday"). If such abbreviatory practices led to writing "7" for "7th" or "the 7th", spelling pronunciation might be responsible for the resultant habit spreading in spoken American English.

One thing on which I would appreciate help from a copy editor, if there is a single one still prepared to talk to me after my latest dumb copy editor story, is how to write the name of the worthy profession that I have so cruelly mocked for just occasionally displaying pointless tone-deaf bossiness. I currently write "copy editor". But I notice that some of my commenters (even those claiming to be or to have been copy editors) write "copyeditor", and others "copy-editor". I wouldn't want to be out of step with the literate world. This is basically a spelling convention, and I have no axe to grind, and I'm perfectly prepared to go along with current literate practice, once I know what it is. I did just one quick experiment to see if I was way off base: I searched the familiar 44 million words of 1987-1989 Wall Street Journal files (they have become much beloved of computational linguists for testing parsers and so on since Mark Liberman on behalf of the Association for Computational Linguistics obtained them for scientific use in 1993), and simply counted the hits. The modest results of this 60-second survey work with grep are as follows:

So that looks like an overwhelming, knock-down, drag-out victory for my present policy. (A couple of the 12 hits supporting me seem to be repetitions; but even so, it's a win.) However, perhaps someone has some good, clear evidence that this is misleading data and my spelling should be revised. I am fully prepared to accept guidance.

There was a brief brouhaha this week over the UK government's guidance to schools in a pamphlet called "Support For Spelling" aimed at elementary schools. The familiar spelling rule that says "i before e except after c", according to the document, "is not worth teaching". The reason is supposed to be that it doesn't account for words like "sufficient", "veil", and "their". The discussion about it on Radio 4 was just about the most stupid I have ever heard on a serious national talk station. There was a man who equated abandonment of the teaching of this rule with the abandonment of rules altogether; there was an outright claim that English has no rules at all; there was a woman (a senior lecturer in education) who appeared to think that believe was a counterexample, when of course it complies; there was an interviewer who seemed to be pushing the interviewees to talk about whether spelling should be taught at all…

In discussions of literacy in contemporary China, because of the unreliability of government statistics and the emotional, controversial nature of the topic, it is sometimes good to adopt a more historical perspective.  Consequently, I shall from time to time write blogs drawing on first-hand records from earlier periods.

On July 23, 1845, a British missionary named George Smith visited a mosque in the city of Ningbo, which is a major commercial city on the coast about a hundred miles south of Shanghai.  He recorded the remarkable observations he made on that occasion in his book entitled A narrative of an exploratory visit to each of the consular cities of China (London:  Seeley, Burnside, & Seeley; New York:  Harper & Brothers, 1847), pp. 154-155:

Samuel Johnson has been commemorated on a special 50p coin, as Geoff Pullum notes, but he's not the only linguist (or linguistically inclined scholar) that has been pictured on currency.  Sejong the Great, the 15th-century Korean ruler who developed the Hangul alphabet, can be found on the South Korean 10,000-won banknote.

This is from the most recent series of South Korean currency (the 2006-2007 series), though Sejong has been featured on Korean banknotes in the past. According to Wikipedia, the new note also features text from Yongbieocheonga, the first work of literature written in the Hangul script.

For more about Sejong and Hangul, see Bill Poser's Oct. 9, 2005 post, "Hangul Day." And for more pictures of scientific scholars on paper currency, see the online collection of Jacob Bourjaily.

Scarcely a month and a half ago, we were hearing calls for the restitution of the complex / traditional characters on the Mainland.  Now, I am absolutely stunned to hear that the President of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, himself is calling for the adoption of simplified characters on the island.  Hearing this news is literally as though a bombshell had gone off next to my ears.

The precise formulation of Ma's proposal is interesting:  "We hope the two sides can reach a consensus on (learning to) read standard characters while writing in the simplified ones," Ma told a visiting delegation of US-based Taiwanese community leaders.  This means that the simplified characters would be the dominant, active set and that the traditional / complex (he calls them "standard") characters would be the secondary, passive set.

All right.  Something seems to be afoot.

You will note in the this news story from China that there have lately been calls for a speedy and complete restitution of the complex / traditional (FANTI) characters.  Of course, that won't happen (at least not right away), but if you read between the lines, it does seem that there will be a retrenchment of the simplified (JIANTI) characters.

In the coming weeks, during the leadup to the promulgation of the new list of revised characters, we will see many more articles like this one from today's Economist, "Not as easy as it looks."

For an excellent account of this most contentious issue, I strongly recommend an article entitled "The Chinese Character — no simple matter" from the China Heritage Quarterly of The Australian National University, 17 (March, 2009). Note particularly the link to chinaSmack near the end for netizens' reactions.