Language Log

Archive for Writing systems

Microsoft Copilot goes looking for an obscure sinograph

June 2, 2024 @ 6:14 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Artificial intelligence, Language and computers, Writing systems

and finds it!

Back in early February, I asked the Lexicography at Wenlin Institute discussion group if they could help me find a rare Chinese character in Unicode, and I sent along a picture of the glyph. It won't show up in most browsers, but you can see the character here. You can also see it in the first item of the list of "Selected Readings" below. In the following post, when you see this symbol, , just imagine you're seeing this glyph.

On 2/27/04, Richard Warmington kindly responded as follows:

I asked Microsoft Copilot (a chatbot integrated into Microsoft's Edge browser), "Can you tell me anything about the Chinese character ?"

The answer began as follows:

Certainly! The Chinese character is an intriguing one. Let’s explore it:

1. Character Details:
Character:
Unicode Code Point: U+24B25
[…]

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Mixed script writing in Taiwan, part 2

May 29, 2024 @ 1:51 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Transcription, Translation, Writing systems

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]

To take a step or two back towards the Sad Cripples theme, I had the TV on the other day and the show host — echoing the guest, a dietitian — said this:

“Lán Tâi-oân lâng kóng ‘tāu-leng’; gōa-kok lâng kóng ‘tó͘⁺-nài.’”

(Can't remember if he used Tone 3 or Tone 5 on the last syllable.) This could also be written like this:

“Lán Tâi-oân lâng kóng ‘tāu-leng’; gōa-kok lâng kóng ‘豆奶’ (DÒUNǍI).”

= 咱台灣人講「豆乳」。外國人講『豆奶』（DÒUNǍI）。

Again, he wasn't making a point; he was just summarizing an offhand remark the guest had just made to the same effect. While he seems to be referring to Mandarin speakers as foreigners — and they are, in a meaningful sense — there is no way he meant that. Rather, he & the guest were ultimately both referring to the English word soy milk, but calqued into Mandarin as 豆奶 — also a word in Mandarin, but not generally used in Formosa.

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"Lord of Heaven" in ancient Sino-Iranian

May 28, 2024 @ 12:50 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Etymology, Language and religion, Phonetics and phonology, Writing systems

[This is a guest post by Chris Button about xiān 祆 (usually defined in English as:

Ahura Mazda, god of the Zoroastrians

祆：胡神也。

From: Shuowen Jiezi, circa 2^nd century AD

Xiān: húshén yě. [Pinyin]Xian is the god of the foreigners.

(source)

The two components of the 祆 glyph are shì 示/礻 ("show, reveal, manifest; spirit") and tiān天 ("sky, heaven, celestial").

Although hugely important in the history of religions in China, the etymology of xiān 祆 is highly elusive. Through close attention to the phonology of the glyph and its components, Chris aims to ferret out the source of a possible loanword.]

============

I've been pondering over 祆 EMC xɛn "Ahura Mazda, Zoroastrianism" for a while and its possible relationship with 天 EMC tʰɛn "heaven" (compare 忝 EMC tʰɛmˀ with 天/祆 as phonetic in the top half).

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Mixed script writing in Taiwan

May 24, 2024 @ 5:50 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Romanization, Writing systems

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]

Something happened* a few days ago that some of your readers might find surprising. It reflects a mood change that's set in over the last few years in Formosa.

[*VHM: The content of the Facebook post linked here may not be available at this time, but you can still get the gist of what it was about from the remainder of this post.]

My apologies — the link has been set to private. But the incident has spawned a new Facebook group that anybody can view.

So this guy posts a message in mixed-script Taioanese (sinographs & romanization, mixed inline) in a pro-motorcyclist Facebook activist group…. The message was aligned with the views of the group, but the first few waves of comments were almost all reactions of disgust at the post not being in Mandarin; some group members blocked the guy right away. Some of the reactions were specifically against the romanized elements, but the reaction to the sinographic elements was pretty disparaging too….

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A crack in the hegemonic edifice of hanzi

May 23, 2024 @ 6:01 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Language reform, Writing systems

Stunning report from Pinyin News:

"Chinese characters no longer required for Taiwan Aborigine names" (5/21/24)

Last week Taiwan’s legislature passed an amendment stating that members of Taiwan’s tribes will no longer be forced to adopt names written in Chinese characters. Instead, their names can be presented solely in romanization if so desired. Thus, at least in this specialized category, Chinese characters have been stripped of their primacy and romanization is officially allowed to stand on its own (not appear only in conjunction with Chinese characters).

Source: Lìyuàn tōngguò: yuánzhùmín shēnfen zhèngjiàn — kě zhǐ xiě pīnyīn zúmíng (立院通過：原住民身分證件可只寫拼音族名), United Daily News, May 15, 2024

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Perso-Arabic script for Mandarin, Pe̍h-ōe-jī for Taiwanese: sad cripples?

May 11, 2024 @ 5:44 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Romanization, Transcription, Writing systems

We have been intrigued by Iskander Ding since encountering him on X/Twitter a while back, several posts from his account having made it onto Language Log (see "Selected readings").

With a handle like his, where Iskandar is the Persian form of the name of the king Alexander the Great (256–323 BC) and Ding has an unmistakable Sinitic / Hannic ring to it, we suspected from the start that he is a Hui (Chinese Muslim). So far, though, we have not been able to track down the sinographs for his full Hannic name, which is a bit unusual, where even Mongols, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other non-Sinitic people are compelled to take Sinographic names.

Iskandar Ding is currently writing a Ph.D. dissertation on Yaghnobi linguistics and culture at SOAS in London (see this page for basic information about him).

Yaghnobi is an Eastern Iranian language spoken in the upper valley of the Yaghnob River in the Zarafshan area of Tajikistan by the Yaghnobi people. It is considered to be a direct descendant of Sogdian and has sometimes been called Neo-Sogdian in academic literature.

(source)

Here is a 53 second video of ID announcing a talk on Perso-Arabic-script Hannic.

Here is the 43.44 talk ("Xiao’erjing – Writing Chinese with Perso-Arabic Letters" – Iskandar Ding | PG 2022) as it actually happened. IA comment: "What he said throughout the talk was pleasing now and then — saying 'Eastern Turkistan' in Uighur for example…".

Here is a 1 hour 22 minute interview with ID. If you click the link it will open at the 18:11 mark, where he speaks of Perso-Arabic-script Hannic . That part ends at 22:40.

The above is based largely on information provided by IA, and the following quotes IA directly:

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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: