Language Log

A little over a month ago, I wrote a blog about what I called "Character Amnesia." Today, half a dozen readers have called my attention to an Aug. 25th article by Judith Evans for Agence France-Presse entitled "Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan" (and other titles) that refers to "character amnesia" and quotes from an interview with me on August 9.  The article is also being sent around on Facebook and other sharing services, so it is getting a lot of coverage.  I cannot guarantee that I coined the expression "character amnesia," but it does seem to be meeting a need.

Reader JH's wife texted from the playground

She's so tired though… may come home Zionist

This was not an example of the role of fatigue in political identity formation, but rather a cupertino, created when her iPhone helpfully corrected (some spelling of) "soonest" to "Zionist".

SMS messaging and cellphone email must be a rich source of cupertinos, since autocompletion and spelling correction are always (?) on, and the input methods are very error-prone.

Because of Hong Kong's colonial heritage and topolectal position, students here are forced to juggle three languages (English, Cantonese, and Mandarin) and two scripts (Roman alphabet and Chinese characters), the so-called policy of “biliterate trilingualism (兩文三語)” for schools and the Civil Service since the handover to the People's Republic of China in 1997.  In terms of the best schools to get in, parental expectations, government demands, and entry and exit examinations, the linguistic challenges faced by Hong Kong students are daunting.

Having just returned to Hong Kong after a whirlwind trip to Taiwan, I find myself stunned by the multilingual, polyscriptal creativity of the people on that "renegade island" (formerly known as Ilha Formosa, Portuguese for "Beautiful Island").  One thing that could not escape my notice is the widespread use of English letters for English words as well as for Taiwanese morphemes and Mandarin words.  A fair amount of Japanese also gets thrown into the mix, but I shall not discuss that in the present post.

The first Internet domain names using non-Latin characters are being rolled out, a plan put into motion after approval from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Arabic-speaking nations are the first to reap the orthographic benefits, with new country codes available for Egypt (مصر), Saudi Arabia (السعودية), and the United Arab Emirates (امارات). The Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, previously online at <http://www.mcit.gov.eg/>, is blazing the trail with its new URL:

<وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر>

Not everything is fully worked out with the new system, though. Browsers that aren't caught up to speed on the non-Latin domain names will see the addresses rendered as Latinized gobbledygook. The Egyptian Communication Ministry's Arabic-script URL, for instance, currently resolves to <http://xn—-rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/>. That's not very communicative.

[Update: See the very helpful comments below for an explanation of the Latinized encoding.]

BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth program for 4/20/2010 deals with relations between Mandarin and English.  Victor's segment of the program is about the role of pinyin.  LL commenters may find a nit or two to pick with the program's online self-description, but Victor thinks they did a good job in weaving the interviews together to create the program:

Chris Ledgard looks at the Chinese and English languages, and the meeting point between the two. Will the Chinese language be affected by the growing influence of English? Pinyin is the Chinese method of writing Chinese characters in our alphabet. It produces a simplified version of Chinese for children to learn, and is also used for texting, slang and to make it possible to type on a keyboard. It also helps the rest of the world to understand Chinese words. Beijing is a pinyin word, for example. Will the use of Chinese characters eventually die out as the influence of pinyin and English is felt there? And we hear about the language war raging in Singapore, the only country in Asia with English as its first language, between standard English and Singlish, the local variant. Contributors include William Zhou, Chen "Cathy" Liu,"Pinyin Joe"- Joe Katz, Victor Mair and Singaporean podcaster extraordinaire "mr brown", aka Kin Mun Lee.

Unfortunately, the online version of the program will only be available for a few more days. (Why? I have no idea.)

Many people have written to me about the proposed ban of roman letter acronyms in China that was recently featured in a number of newspaper reports (e.g., here and here).

Since this fits right in with my recent posts on the ineluctability of "Q" and on the proposal by the Chinese chairman of the International Federation of Translators, Huang Youyi, to purify Chinese of English expressions (the proposed ban is probably the first step in an attempt to implement Huang's purification policies), as well as with a forthcoming post on the question of the inevitability of romanization (or at least some form of alphabetization), I will comment briefly on the current proposal to forbid the use of English acronyms in Chinese.

The title is from the subject line of a message sent to me a few days ago by Anne Henochowicz.  Anne was puzzled by the expression ruǎn Q (軟Q) that occurs on a package of "Japanese style" cakes (mochi) made in Taiwan:

At the very hour when, a few days ago, Victor Mair was posting his piece about Valentine's Day in Japan (I Tiger You), I was at ground zero for the event: the candy section of the biggest department store in Tokyo's Ginza district. I have never seen anything like it. Excited young women by the thousand buying up all the chocolate and other candy that industry could pack into pink and white heart-bedecked boxes and bags. What an incredible coup the candy manufacturers have made out of this celebration of girlfriendhood and boyfriendhood. The ratio of refined sugar and teenage girls to oxygen had reached danger level in the confined space of the department store basement, and I fled from this stampede of candy lust, escaping into the cold afternoon air. I'll tell you a secret: I simply cannot bear Tokyo.

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:

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".