Language Log

[This is a guest post by ChatGPT]

Write a Language Log blog post by Victor H. Mair

Title: "The Wonders of the Chinese Language"

As one of the world's oldest and most complex languages, Chinese has captivated linguists and language enthusiasts for centuries. From its unique writing system to its vast vocabulary and intricate grammar, Chinese is a fascinating and challenging language that continues to surprise and delight those who study it.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Chinese is its writing system. Chinese characters are visual symbols that convey meaning, and they are used in both written and spoken language. Unlike the phonetic alphabets used in many other languages, Chinese characters do not correspond to specific sounds, but rather to concepts or ideas. This makes the learning process much more complex, as students must memorize thousands of characters and learn their meanings and pronunciations.

From Jenny Chu:

Knowing your interest in multi-modal writing systems, I thought you might be amused by the attached screencap. It is from a WhatsApp group chat of S6 (final year) students in Hong Kong; one of them is asking the others what they would like to do on the afternoon of their last day of classes:

The 4,000-year-old tablets reveal translations for 'lost' language, including a love song.
(Image credit: Left: Rudolph Mayr/Courtesy Rosen Collection. Right: Courtesy David I. Owen)

From:

Cryptic lost Canaanite language decoded on 'Rosetta Stone'-like tablets

Two ancient clay tablets from Iraq contain details of a "lost" Canaanite language.

By Tom Metcalfe, Live Science, Jan. 30, 2023

[This is a guest post by Chris Button]

Below are my reconstructed Old Chinese onsets lined up with the 22 "tiangan dizhi"* calendrical signs ("ganzhi"). To be absolutely clear, the reconstructions are based on evidence unrelated to the ganzhi. It's just a very interesting coincidence that they happen to line up so well. Pulleyblank was clearly onto something! I'm not including the Middle Chinese reflexes here, but I have worked them out in detail and can send that over if there is interest. Two things not noted in the list are that an s- prefix caused aspiration (e.g., st- > tʰ–) and that the voiced stops alternated with prenasalized forms (e.g. b ~ ᵐb).

[*VHM:  "ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches"]

A #StableDiffusion model trained on images of Japanese Kanji characters came up with “Fake Kanji” for novel concepts like Skyscraper, Pikachu, Elon Musk, Deep Learning, YouTube, Gundam, Singularity, etc.

They kind of make sense. Not bad! https://t.co/ibegk4XszN pic.twitter.com/qkNcA9AAWb

— hardmaru (@hardmaru) January 6, 2023

Long article by Josephine Quinn:

Alphabet Politics:
What prompted the development of systems of writing?

The New York Review (1/19/23 [online 12/19/22])

This is a detailed review of these two books:

The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present

As we were strolling through a mall on the outskirts of Dallas, this sign caught my son's attention:

[This is a guest post by Bernhard "번하드" Riedel from Munich]

Many innocent observers have been snookered by the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme and the relatively small amount of characters that were reduced in the number of strokes with which they were written or were abolished outright.  Indeed, celebrated professors of Chinese are calling for still more characters to be added to the humongous total (at least 100,000) that already exist (e.g., see here).

There were about 5,000 different characters on the oracle bones, the first stage of Chinese writing roughly 3,300 years ago, but only around 1,200 of them have been identified with any degree of confidence.

The first major dictionary of individual characters, Shuōwén jiězì 說文解字 (lit., "discussing writing and explaining characters" [there are different interpretations of the title]), completed in 100 AD, contained 9,353 glyphs.

The Kāngxī Zìdiǎn 康熙字典 (Compendium of standard characters from the Kangxi period), published in 1716, which was the most authoritative dictionary of Chinese characters from the 18th century through the early 20th century, had 47,035 glyphs.

Here are the ten top places in this year's event:

(source)

*VHM:  Instead of a slash, there should be a comma between ikusa and tatakau, plus three more Japanese-style readings:  ononoku, soyogu, and wananaku.  There should be a slash before ikusa, preceded by the Chinese-style reading sen in front of the slash.

Photograph of a political billboard in Taiwan (from AntC):

(more images here)

That's the title of this YouTube video (12:39; 4,572 views  Nov 18, 2022) by ABChinese (34K subscribers):

The Latinization of Chinese characters will ultimately prove to be one of the most important developments in the history of writing.  We usually attribute this epochal achievement to the Italian Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), but he was assisted in that monumental endeavor by several individuals.  One of the most important of these was the Jesuit Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628), whose Xīrú ěrmù zī 西儒耳目資 (An Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati) helped to establish the alphabetization of Sinitic on a solid footing.

In "Printed Editions of the Xiru Ermuzi", Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko, no. 79 (2021), 1-32, TAKATA Tokio has carried out a detailed codicological study of all editions and copies of Trigault's text.  In the process, he has brought to light two hitherto unknown editions of Xiru Ermuzi, greatly enhancing our understanding of the development of this vital work.  Takata's study is extremely detailed and heavily footnoted.  Here I present his Introduction and Concluding Remarks.