Language Log

"Jingyuan Digital Platform: Font Making and Database Development for Shang Oracle Bones (Part 1)", Peichao Qin, The Digital Orientalist (9/17/24)

If you're wondering what "Jingyuan" means, it's a fancy, allusive way to say "Mirrored contexts [for thorough investigations]" ([gézhì] jìngyuán [格致]鏡原) (source), just a means for the creator of the platform to give it a proprietary designation.

A goodly proportion of Language Log readers probably have some idea of what oracle bone inscriptions are, but just to refresh our memories and for the benefit of new and recent readers who are not familiar with the history of Sinographic scripts, I'm going to jump right into the third paragraph of Qin's article, which is like a basic primer of oracle bone inscription studies.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-first issue:  "Placing Western Coins Near the Deceased in Ancient China: The Origin of a Custom," by Pin LYU:

ABSTRACT: This article traces the custom in ancient China of placing Western coins in proximity to corpses during burial. Academic attention has focused on the origin of the custom since Marc Aurel Stein initially connected the finding in Turfan of Western coins placed in the mouths or on the eyes of the corpses with Charon's obol, the ancient Greek coin that, similarly placed, paid Charon to ferry the dead to the underworld. Some scholars agreed with Stein's proposal, while others suggested that it was instead a traditional Chinese funerary ritual, unrelated to Greece. This article moves away from over-reliance on written sources and aims at uncovering the patterns underlying this custom, through the collection and analysis of available archaeological material. Results indicate that the custom possibly originated in the Hellenistic practice of Charon's obol and then traveled to China with Sogdian immigrants, developing into a regional funeral ritual in Turfan.

Victor Mather, "Microsoft Word’s Subtle Typeface Change Affected Millions. Did You Notice?", NYT 2/28/2024:

When you read — a book, a traffic sign, a billboard, this article — how much do you really notice the letters? If you’re like most people, the answer is probably not at all.

I'm mostly like most people, though there are font and size limits to my tolerance (e.g. …)

And @ellecordova's skit about the default typeface change is definitely funny, even if many of the participant fonts are not in my "really notice" category:

Most people care about their typefaces

Appearances matter, especially whether fonts have serifs or not.

"Font Wars Spread After State Department Replaces Times New Roman with Calibri

"'I'm banging my head against the wall;' camps divided in fallout from government efforts to make documents easier to read"

By Katie Deighton, WSJ (3/14/23)

One wonders whether it is a matter of functionality and efficiency or esthetics and taste.  Whatever motivates the confrontation, one thing is evident, and that is that people have deeply held opinions in favor of / against one side or the other.

What sounds like a typeface tempest-in-a-teapot has boiled over in the U.S. and U.K., where changes in document requirements have set off a war of words among cantankerous font factions.

The State Department announced in January that Calibri would replace Times New Roman on official documents to make them easier to read. U.K.’s Home Office, for similar reasons, x-ed out the 83-year-old Times New Roman, which has the wings and feet on letters known as serif style.

…

New article by Nyri Bakkalian in Unseen Japan (9/17/22):

"New App Promises Greater Convenience in Reading Old Japanese Cursive:

Kuzushiji, the 'crushed letters' found in historical Japanese documents, have long been the bane of scholars. A new app may change all that."

The author bemoans:

During my graduate education in Japanese history, interpreting handwritten primary source material from the 19th century and earlier was one of my greatest challenges. Typeset historic documents exist, especially in my period of focus during the Bakumatsu-Meiji transition. But the further back in time one’s research focus is situated, the rarer these documents become. There is a plethora of handwritten documents, written in historic cursive, but learning how to read them is a significant investment of time and resources beyond the means of most people who might otherwise have the inclination to learn.

Sunday Fun
Why Font Choice Matters pic.twitter.com/VoRnOkUCTY

— I Love Typography (@ilovetypography) August 21, 2022

(Source)

New article by Brian Ng in Rest of World (9/6/21):

"Revolutionary type: Meet the designer decolonizing Chinese fonts

Julius Hui, who has done custom work for companies like Tencent, wants to radically rethink Chinese fonts."

I find this article to be curiously counterintuitive:  Julius Hui, the font designer, wants to revolutionize Chinese typography by hearkening back to a time before modern (say, the last four or five hundred years) fonts for typesetting.  That would be like telling designers of modern fonts for northern European languages to go back to the 4th-century pre-Gothic script of Ulfilas (or Wulfila) to develop a "revolutionary" new script for English or for designers of modern fonts for southern European languages to go back to the uncial majuscule script of roughly the same time period that was used for Greek and Latin.

Brian Merriman ran into this article and device when researching electronic typewriters from the 1980s:

Francois Lang sent in this menu from YU Noodles Cafe in Rockville, MD:

[The following is a guest post by Nathan Hopson]

The results are in from the 11th Kanji Creation Contest (Sōsaku Kanji Kontesuto), sponsored by Sankei Shinbun newspaper and the Shirakawa Shizuka Institute of East Asian Characters and Culture at Ritsumeikan University. Out of a total of over 26,000 entries in the general, high school, and elementary and middle school divisions, the overall winner was a very 2020 take on the character 座 (za, “to sit”).

Example 1

Fig. 1 Standard (left) and prizewinning creative kanji for “to sit.”

The character (in both its standard and creative forms) is made up of three elements:

1. 广
2. 土
3. 人

Of these, it is the last that is subtly manipulated here. That element, also an independent kanji in its own right, means “person.” By moving the two “people” apart, the contest winner expressed the idea of “sitting apart,” or social distancing.

Final panel of this New York Times article:  "What You Can No Longer Say in Hong Kong" (9/4/20), by Jin Wu and Elaine Yu:

E-mail message from my son, Thomas Krishna:

I'm using the voice recognizer to write you this message. When you do take your truck in for service at Toyota place, ask them if an exterior cleaning is included. Having visited you over the years I know that where you park a lot of tree debris falls onto your vehicles! This is no big deal, except for one thing, you don't want stuff to fall on top of your vents right in front of where the windshield is. I had this problem with my truck under the crepe myrtles at Lacey's house. For a while I tried using cardboard cutouts to cover them up but they did not last very well in the Sun and rain. I know that at your place things dropping off the trees is almost a continuous problem whereas for me it was only in the fall. So just thinking maybe you should try to find something that can cover those vents for when your truck is parked there.

This is the logo of Legco, the Legislative Council of Hong Kong:

It is a stylization of the "lap⁶ 立" ("set up; erect; establish; enact") of:

Hoeng¹gong² dak⁶bit⁶ hang⁴zing³ keoi¹ lap⁶faat³ wui⁶ (Jyutping)

Hēunggóng dahkbiht hàhngjing kēui laahpfaat wúih (Yale)

Xiānggǎng tèbié xíngzhèng qū lìfǎ huì (Hanyu pinyin)

香港特別行政區立法會

now written in PRC simplified characters as

香港特别行政区立法会

"Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region"

or, for short:

Laap6faat3 wui5 (Jyutping)

Laahp faat wúih (Yale)

Lìfǎ Huì (Hanyu pinyin)

立法會

now written in PRC simplified characters as

立法会

"Legislative Council"