Language Log

奥本海默中国大陆版本剪辑情况 pic.twitter.com/Nbjxy5PJ4J

— 小径残雪 (@xiaojingcanxue) September 1, 2023

[link to full tweet here]

This morning in the first class of my course on "Language, Script, and Society in China", I had just spoken about the most frequent morphemes in Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Japanese (the possessive particles de 的, e, and no の) and other common terms that had no fixed characters to write them or had to borrow characters with completely different meanings to be written (de 的 is a prime example).  When I came back to my office, I was greeted with this:

Covering up the の is pretty funny pic.twitter.com/FPWhlIRHEo

— Lawrence Zhang 張樂翔 (@HistorianZhang) August 28, 2023

Sign on a noodle shop in Xindan, Taiwan:

(Via Google Street View)

Screenshots from @泰拳刚猛 on Weibo:

Photo taken outside a casino in Tainan, Taiwan:

From the Wall Street Journal:

‘The Oldest Book in the World’ Review: Also Sprach Ptahhatp

A set of maxims attributed to an adviser of an Egyptian pharaoh may be the world’s earliest surviving work of philosophy.

By Dominic Green

July 6, 2023 6:20 pm ET

What have we?  Philosophy in the Age of the Pyramids?  Philosophy before there were Greek philosophers?

Green launches his review:

In 1847 the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris acquired a 16-page scroll from the antiquarian Émile Prisse d’Avennes (1807-1879). He had bought it from one of the local men then excavating a cemetery near a pharaonic temple complex at Thebes in Egypt. The Papyrus Prisse, as it is known, contains the only complete version of a set of philosophical epigrams called “The Teaching of Ptahhatp.” Recognized upon its publication in 1858 as “the oldest book in the world,” the “Teaching” is attributed to a vizier to Izezi, the eighth and penultimate pharaoh of the Old Kingdom’s Fifth Dynasty, who ruled Egypt in the late 25th and early 24th centuries B.C.

Yuan (?) dynasty (1271-1368) jade seal in the Bristol Museum:

Know what language this is, or even what it says? Yes? Please get back to me. No? Please retweet it until somebody does. (But be aware, it's stumped some quite clever people who've already been asked, so it isn't obvious) Also, advance apologies if it isn't the right way up 1/2 pic.twitter.com/w7ZFggITAs

— Craig Clunas 柯律格💙 (@CraigClunas) June 6, 2023

Shop sign in Budapest:

This exercise video shows a woman repeating the syllable "rua" to describe a move that she makes:

Is it really so?

Uncannily and independently, Apollo Wu* sent me the following note before I made this post:

Hànzì bǐ bù shàng zìmǔ wénzì de guānjiàn lǐngyù zàiyú páixù jiǎnsuǒ hé réngōng zhìnéng děng fāngmiàn. Fùzá fánsuǒ nán xué nán yòng shì dāngqián miàn duì de kùnnán. Hànzì wú xù gěi Zhōngguó wénhuà dǎshàng língluàn de làoyìn!

汉字 比不上 字母文字 的 关键 领域 在于 排序 检索 和 人工智能 等 方面。复杂 繁琐 难学难用 是 当前 面对的 困难。汉字 无序 给 中国 文化 打上 凌乱 的 烙印！

Google Translate:

The key areas where Chinese characters are not as good as alphabetic characters are sorting, retrieval and artificial intelligence. Complicated, cumbersome, difficult to learn and difficult to use are the difficulties we are currently facing. The disorder of Chinese characters marks Chinese culture as messy!

Plus Indic, plus Arabic, Korean, Vietnamese, Hokkien (Taiwanese), Hakka, and Fuzhou (Eastern Min).

For an exciting read / ride, be sure to follow the whole thread, travelling through time and space.

零 originally didn't mean 'zero,' but 'small rain, drizzle.' Makes it easy to learn: Rain 雨 above, pronunciation 令 below (ok, tone is different). 2/ pic.twitter.com/e0fwV6wBdx

— Egas Moniz-Bandeira ᠡᡤᠠᠰ ᠮᠣᠨᠢᠰ ᠪᠠᠨᡩ᠋ᠠᠶᠢᠷᠠ (@egasmb) May 21, 2023

Courtesy of Egas Moniz-Bandeira ᠡᡤᠠᠰ ᠮᠣᠨᠢᠰ ᠪᠠᠨᡩ᠋ᠠᠶᠢᠷᠠ

As we have pointed out countless times on Language Log, if one wishes to learn a Sinitic language, one can concentrate on the characters (writing system), one can rely exclusively on romanization or other phoneticization, or one can devise various means for combining the two approaches.  Here is a clever, fun method for learning Cantonese that tackles the problem head on.

Hongkonger creates colourful Cantonese font to foster language learning

Jon Chui’s new font shows coloured, context-sensitive jyutping for Chinese text. He created it as his partner “had a hard time with the tones” when learning Cantonese.

Mandy Cheng, Hong Kong Free Press (5/16/23)

Jon Chui "has created a new Cantonese font, which combines over 8,000 characters with colourful, Romanised pronunciation guides in order to foster language learning and teaching."

Cantonese Font. Photo: Jon Chiu.

Remixed meme: