We have mentioned the Dungan people and their unique language many times on Language Log. How did it happen that we at Penn have a connection with the Dungans, a small group (less than a hundred thousand) of Sinitic speakers who have lived in the center of Asia (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) since the latter part of the 19th century? They fled there from northwest China, many of them dying along the way, after revolting against the Manchu Qing government.
On Language Log and in Sino-Platonic Papers, we have often focused on the rise of romanization for Sinitic languages, especially as engendered by the Jesuits and other Catholic orders. In this post, I would like to introduce an Italian Ph.D. thesis that does a commendable job of surveying what transpired in this regard during the 16th through 18th centuries:
The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (TPC) was first planted by British missionaries in Tainan, which later expanded to all southern parts of Taiwan, constituting the present Southern Synod of TPC. The most important pioneer among them was the Scottish missionary Rev. Thomas Barclay who worked in Taiwan-Fu (the present Tainan). He was born in Glasgow, and matriculated at the University of Glasgow. While there, he studied under Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin [according to Wikipedia]. The celebrated Lord Kelvin reminds me of the absolute zero degree in physical chemistry and the electric cable equation as the underpinning of the Transatlantic cable as well as the conduction of electric impulses along nerve fibers.
Today I'm bringing you this short article for LL. A Korean pop idol, Solar — that's her stage name, Mandarinized as 頌樂; her real name is 김용선 (Hanja: 金容仙), romanized Kim Yongsun) — has made headlines for speaking very fluent Mandarin after just 7 months of learning it. She has also released a full song in Mandarin with Taiwanese artist 9m88 and taken countless interviews with Taiwanese media in Mandarin as well (see this "What's in My Bag" interview with Vogue Taiwan.)
BOPOMOFO CAFE draws its name from the phonetic Traditional Chinese Alphabets. ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ, and ㄈ [bo, po, mo, and fo] are the “ABCs” of the Mandarin Chinese alphabet symbolizing nostalgia and strength as the building blocks of Mandarin language mastery. Co-founders Eric and Philip, both "American Born Chinese" (ABC), chose the name to reflect their heritage and shared pride in their culture.
We've talked about Dungan a lot on Language Log. That's the northwest Sinitic topolect written in Cyrillic that has been transplanted to Central Asia. See "Selected readings" below.
For those of you who are interested and would like to hear what it sounds like in real life — spoken and sung by male and female voices — we are fortunate to have a series of ten radio broadcast recordings (here).
Note the natural, easy, undistorted insertion of non-Sinitic borrowings, e.g., "Salam alaikum" (Arabic as-salāmu ʿalaykum السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ ["Peace be upon you"]). That would not be possible in sinographic transcription of northwest Sinitic speech. This and other aspects and implications of alphabetic Dungan have been extensively discussed on LL.
In almost perfect Taiwan Mandarin, you can see and hear Song Meina deliver her graduation speech here. A transcription of her speech may be found in this newspaper article. The article has four pages, and her speech begins at the bottom of the first page. It is sprinkled with a small amount of Korean and a bit of Taiwanese, but it is otherwise fluent, idiomatic Taiwan Mandarin.
Particularly noticeable was that the transcription wrote the Mandarin phonetic symbols bo po mo fo ㄅ、ㄆ、ㄇ、ㄈ as the beginning of her learning Mandarin at an overseas elementary school in Korea. I was also struck by the use of the phonetic symbol "e ㄟ" several times, once as an exclamation and the other times as the Taiwanese grammatical particle indicating possession pronounced ê [e].
In 1444, an associate professor (bujehag 부제학副提學) in the Hall of Worthies, Ch'oe Manli (최만리 崔萬里; d. October 23, 1445), along with other Confucian scholars, spoke out against the creation of hangul (then called eonmun). See here for the Classical Chinese text and English translation (less than felicitous, but easily available) of Ch'oe's 1444 protest against the reforms leading to Hangul. As we all know, King Sejong (1397-1450; r. 1418-1450) nonetheless promulgated Hangul in 1446, so I wondered whether anything unfavorable happened to Ch'oe as a result (note that he died the year after delivering his protest and the year before the promulgation of Hangul). Ross King kindly replied to my inquiry on this matter as follows:
After visiting the massive National Museum of Korea in Seoul, I was eager to go to the National Hangeul Museum nearby. Alas, it is under renovation, so I was unable to enter it this time, but I will go back on some future occasion when I travel to Korea. I did, however, manage to buy two facsimile versions of the Hunminjeongeum훈민정음 / 訓民正音 ("The Correct / Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People), a 15th-century manuscript that introduced the Korean script Hangul, one for the populace and one for the literati.
Several of the comments to this post, "How to say 'Seoul'" (5/12/25), prompted me to think some more about a problem that had perplexed me from the time I did a review of The Korean Buddhist Canon: A Descriptive Catalogue, by Lewis R. Lancaster, in collaboration with Sung-bae Park (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979). That was nearly half a century ago, but I still remember keenly how difficult it was to romanize the titles and the proper nouns. The hardest part of that was dealing with what happened at syllable boundaries. It was obvious that different authorities romanized the sounds in discrepant ways.
