Language Log

Heaven forbid!

"When Greece Was About to Swap the Greek Alphabet for Latin", Philip Chrysopoulos, Greek Reporter (1/17/25)

It seems unthinkable.

In the mid 1970s when Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis proposed changing the Greek alphabet to Latin and making the Greek language phonetic, the minister of culture and a Parliament member threatened to resign.

I don't know why anyone would say the Greek alphabet is not phonetic.  In general, its letters correspond to consistent sounds, making pronunciation of its words relatively predictable.  Both in Ancient Greek and in Modern Greek, most letters of the alphabet have a stable symbol-to-sound relationship.

The unusual idea of the conservative PM came as a shock to those who learned of his proposal. It was quite unexpected coming from him.

[This is a guest post by Chris Button]

[Guest post by Frank Chance in response to my latest post.  Gives me hebi-jebies.]

Reading  your recent Language Log post on turtles (mostly about Kucha) on New Year’s Day made me wonder whether there should be a Language Log post on snakes.  There are two very different characters used for snake in Japanese – 巳 mi, used almost exclusively for the zodiac sign and in counting (it is a homonym for three ), and　蛇  hebi., also read as ja, particularly in such compounds as 大蛇 daja, also read as Orochi.  That name is known to giant monster fans from 八岐大蛇  Yamata no Orochi, the eight-forked (and hence eight-headed) great snake mentioned in Nihonshoki, the oldest Japanese history text.  Tea aficionados and dance fans know it from a type of umbrella with a red dot where the spines meet, called a 蛇の目傘 janome-gasa or snake-eyed parasol. Janome was in turn a corporate name for a maker of sewing machines.

Post by @ProfundumPhoto@toot.community

View on Mastodon

The PRC uses hànyǔ pīnyīn 汉语拼音 ("Sinitic spelling") for phonetic annotation, Taiwan uses zhùyīn fúhào 注音符號 ("phonetic symbols") for the same purpose.  Since we are well acquainted with pīnyīn, but not very familiar with zhùyīn fúhào, I will focus on the latter in this post:

Mark Swofford, "If you ever find yourself stuck on how to pronounce English", Pinyin News (5/7/23):

Here are some lyrics from a popular song, “Count on Me,” by Bruno Mars, with a Mandarin translation. The interesting part is that a Taiwanese third-grader has penciled in some phonetic guides for him or herself, using a combination of zhuyin fuhao (aka bopo mofo) (sometimes with tone marks!), English (as a gloss for English! and English pronunciation of some letters and numbers), and Chinese characters (albeit not always correctly written Chinese characters — not that I could do any better myself). Again, this is a Taiwanese third-grader and so is someone unlikely to know Hanyu Pinyin.

"Oldest Alphabet Discovered in Ancient Syrian Tomb Redefines History of Writing", by Chrissy Newton, Debrief (November 21, 2024)

A research team at Johns Hopkins University has discovered evidence of the world’s oldest alphabetic writing, carved onto finger-length clay cylinders, outdating other scripts by 500 years. 

Recovered during excavations in a tomb in Syria, the writing is believed to date to around 2400 BCE. This new finding disrupts how archaeologists understand where the alphabet originated, and how it was shared across civilizations, societies, and cultures, leaving anthropologists with new questions about what the findings mean for early urban civilizations.  

“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite,” said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders in a statement. “Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated.”

“And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now,” he added. Schwartz will share details of his discovery on Thursday, Nov. 21, at the American Society of Overseas Research’s Annual Meeting. 

Part 1 of this post appeared on 8/26/16.  The first two paragraphs read as follow:

Founded in 1858, Keio is the oldest university in Japan and one of the best, also ranking high in world ratings.  Its name is written 慶應 in kanji.  That's a lot of strokes to scribble down every time you want to write the name of your university, so Keio people often write it this way:   广+K 广+O (imagine that the "K" and the "O" are written inside of the 广).  That makes 6 strokes and 4 strokes instead of 15 strokes and 17 strokes respectively, 10 strokes total instead of 32.

In these character constructions, "K" and "O" are functioning as phonophores, and Kangxi radical 53 广 ("dotted cliff" or "house on cliff") is functioning as the semantophore.

Below are two lists of nominations for Japanese buzzword of the year.  Each has 30 entries, and from each list one will be chosen as the respective winner.  Since the two lists are already quite long and rich, I will keep my own comments (mostly at the bottom and focusing on phoneticization) to a minimum.

"From cat memes to Olympians with too much rizz, these are Japan's 2024 buzzword nominations"
The topics nominated for this year’s buzzwords of the year ranged from new banknotes and Olympian quips to political scandals and rice shortages.  By Yukana Inoue, The Japan Times (Nov 5, 2024)

Japan's 2024 buzzword nominations focused on money and the Paris Olympics, according to a list of nominations released by the organizer of the annual event Tuesday.

News on “uragane mondai” (slush fund scandal) dominated headlines this year after Liberal Democratic Party factions were found to be underreporting the sales of fundraising party tickets.

Other money-related terms included “shin shihei” (new banknotes) — the country recently redesigned the ¥10,000, ¥5,000 and ¥1,000 notes for the first time in 20 years — and “shin NISA” (new NISA investments), a tax-exempt investment program launched this year that aims to entice people to move money from savings to investments. NISA stands for the Nippon Individual Savings Account.

This is a story we've been following for well over a decade (see "Selected readings").  Improbable as it may seem that the Korean alphabet might be adaptable for writing an Austronesian language of Indonesia, there are some promoters of this idea who continue to push it enthusiastically:

"An Indonesian Tribe’s Language Gets an Alphabet: Korea’s
The Cia-Cia language has been passed down orally for centuries. Now the tribe’s children are learning to write it in Hangul, the Korean script."  By Muktita Suhartono, NYT (Nov. 4, 2024)

These fourth graders are not studying the Korean language. They are using Hangul to write and learn theirs: 

Cia-Cia, an indigenous language that has no script. It has survived orally for centuries in Indonesia, and is now spoken by about 93,000 people in the Cia-Cia tribe on Buton Island, southeast of the peninsula of Sulawesi Island in Indonesia’s vast archipelago.

Perhaps as early as 1640, decipherers have tried practically everything to decode the maddeningly frustrating Voynich manuscript.  So far it has resisted all efforts to identify the language in which it was presumably written.  About the only way to make further progress in cracking the code is to apply some new technology.  As described in the following reports, it seems that a type of digital enhancement has become available and been used to fill in some of the gaps in the manuscript.

The first is the primary document, "Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript", which appears on Lisa Fagin Davis' blog, Manuscript Road Trip (9/8/24).  She begins with an explanation of what the technology consists of.

[This is a guest post by Brian Pellar]

. . . the consonants are the letters or ciphers which assemble around the vowels to form the words, just as the constellations assemble around the Sun, image of the Divinity, and compose the community of stars over which it presides.                                                                        — Hebreu Primiti

The Consonants of Command

Dear Professor Mair,

In regard to your question, “Is there some sense in which we could think of the 12 aspects/signs/symbols of the alphazodiac as comprising/encompassing the basic sounds of the universe?” I’ve dabbled a bit with some intriguing answers in my papers. For instance, in my very first paper, SPP 196, I placed in the endnotes a very interesting reference from the Gospel of the Egyptians (a Nag Hammadi text) that I feel might bear a relationship to the structure and the underlying “sacred” vowels that comprise the Logos/Word — the breath of God — of the alphazodiac. More specifically,

the “three powers” (the Father, Mother, and Son) give praise to the unnamable Spirit — and the “hidden invisible mystery” that came forth is composed of seven sacred vowels (i.e., the Son “brings forth from the bosom/the seven powers of the great / light of the seven voices, and the word/[is] their completion”), with each of those seven vowels repeated exactly twenty-two times (“iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii[iii]/ ēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēē /oooooooooooooooooooooo/uu[uuu] uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/aaaaaaa[aaaa]aaaaaaaaaaa/ ōōōōōōōōōōōō ōōōōōōōōōō”) (Robinson 1990: 209–210). [SPP 196, pp. 38-39].

Wherein we embark upon an inquisition into the divine proportions of the dodecahedron and its congeners, take a peek at the history of accounting, explore the mind of Leonardo da Vinci, and examine the humanistic physics of Werner Heisenberg*.

[*Heisenberg's father was a professor of medieval and modern Greek studies at the University of Munich in Germany. Heisenberg had more a “humanistic” education, i.e. more Latin and Greek than in natural sciences.  One morning the young Werner Heisenberg discovered reading Plato's Timaeus a description of the world with regular polyhedra. Heisenberg could not understand why Plato being so rational started to use speculative ideas. But finally he was fascinated by the idea that it could be possible to describe the Universe mathematically. He could not understand why Plato used the Polyhedra as the basic units in his model, but Heisenberg considered that in order to understand the world it is necessary to understand the Physics of the atoms. (source)  He contributed to atomic theory through formulating quantum mechanics in terms of matrices and in discovering the uncertainty principle, which states that a particle's position and momentum cannot both be known exactly. (Britannica | Apr 23, 2024)

—————

We have had an exciting, joyful journey through dodecahedra land, from the archeological discovery of a new specimen in England, to deep, dense discussions about the meaning and purpose of these mysterious objects, to scampering through and clambering over a playground installation of a related form.  In this post, I would like to return to the essential twelveness of the dodecahedra.