Language Log

[This is a guest post by Meme Master Mark (MMM), who says he's honored that I call him that:  "3M is also from Minnesota" (see the first sentence).]

Having spent many of my formative years in Minnesota, "crab raccoon" makes perfect sense.

This was a pretty disturbing tattoo:

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-second issue: "Dramatic Transformations of Sinography in East Asia and the World" (pdf), edited by Victor H. Mair (August, 2024).

Foreword
The three papers in this collection were written for my “Language, Script, and Society in China” course during the fall semester of 2023. All three of them are concerned with radical changes made to Sinographic script during its adjustment to modernity.

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]

New article by Stephen Johnson in Lifehacker (3/24/23):

"These Are the Most Savage Ways to Start or End an Email:

How you start and end your work email says something about your worth as a person"

N.B.:  This is about work email — a very different kettle of fish from personal email, email with friends, and email in general.  You work those things out on your own.  If the solutions you arrive at are suitable, the relationship will persist.  If not, it will wither.

Selections from Johnson's article:

How do you begin your work emails? Do you go with a simple “Hey?” Or are you into formal greetings like “Good afternoon?” or “Salutation, right, trusty, and well-beloved friend?” Or are you one of those absolute animals that just starts—with no foreplay at all? How about the closing? Are you one of those annoying, “Thank you in advance” people? Or are you more like, “Byeeeeee?”

Back in the pre-computer days, this wouldn’t be a question. There were hard-and-fast rules for business correspondence: You started the letter with “Dear, Mr. Jenkins,” and ended it with, “Sincerely yours.” Anything else would mark you as a communist or beatnik.

"Hanmoji" is a portmanteau consisting of the first syllable of hanzi ("Chinese character") and the second part of emoji.

From Bob Bauer:

Have you heard of or seen the book entitled The Hanmoji Handbook: Your Guide to the Chinese Language through Emoji, MITeen Press, published August 30, 2022?

The day before yesterday (Thursday, 2 March 2023) I read a review of this book by Richard James Havis on page B9 in the South China Morning Post. Here is a quotation from the review: “Its authors An Xiao Mina, Jennifer 8 Lee and Jason Li – based in North America – show readers how Chinese characters form their meanings by relating them to the emjois we use every day.” (The number “8” does occur in Jennifer 8 Lee’s name just as written).

I have heard of emoji but know little about them and haven’t paid much attention to them. Does each emoji have a specific pronunciation associated with it like a Chinese character typically does? I’m thinking emojis differ from Chinese characters in this particular area (and probably other areas as well). For example, when I see “”, I don’t pronounce it, but I just think ‘smiley face’. However, when I see the Chinese character 木, I associate two pronunciations with it: Cantonese “muk6” and Putonghua “mù” and its English meaning “tree”.

I often receive anguished inquiries about emojis, emoticons, hanzi, hangul, kana, and similar matters.  I try to answer as many of them as I can, and many of them have important implications for the nature of writing, the relationship between speech and script, cultural interactions and contexts, and so forth.

Back in mid-January, there was some Twitter discussion about a group of mysterious emoji characters (here, here, here, here, and here), and Ben Zimmer played a key role in it:

Why does 🔛 have an exclamation point? Why the arrows? So many questions and so few answers

— Adam Aaronson (@aaaronson) January 18, 2023

So everybody knows what we're talking about:

Baozi (Chinese: 包子), Pao-tsih or bao, is a type of yeast-leavened filled bun in various Chinese cuisines. There are many variations in fillings (meat or vegetarian) and preparations, though the buns are most often steamed. They are a variation of mantou from Northern China.

(source)

Early on in his presidency, Xi Jinping picked this up as one of his nicknames, like Winnie the Pooh, both from his puffy shape.  Both fall under the category of "rǔ bāo 辱包" ("disgracing the dumpling").

It'sssssssssssss finally out!

✨ The Hanmoji Handbook: Your Guide to the Chinese Language Though Emoji ✨ — by me, An Xiao Mina & @jenny8lee, published by @MITeenPress — appears in bookshops across the US and Canada today! pic.twitter.com/sTkudPAwxb

— Jason Li (@jasonli) August 30, 2022

[This is a guest post by Paul Shore.]

    The 2022 book Kingdom of Characters by Yale professor Jing Tsu is currently #51,777 in Amazon's sales ranking.  (The label "Best Seller" on the Amazon search-results listing for it incorporates the amusing mouseover qualification "in [the subject of] Unicode Encoding Standard".)  I haven't read the book yet:  the Arlington, Virginia library system's four copies have a wait list, and so I have a used copy coming to me in the mail.  What I have experienced, though, is a fifty-minute National Public Radio program from their podcast / broadcast series Throughline, entitled "The Characters That Built China", that's a partial summary of the material in the book, a summary that was made with major cooperation from Jing Tsu herself, with numerous recorded remarks by her alternating with remarks by the two hosts:  https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510333/throughline (scroll down to the May 26^th episode).  Based on what's conveyed in this podcast / broadcast episode, I think many people on Language Log and elsewhere who care about fostering a proper understanding of human language among the general public might agree that that ranking of 51,777 is still several million too high.  But while the influence of the book's ill-informed, misleading statements about language was until a few days ago mostly confined to those individuals who'd taken the trouble to get hold of a copy of the book or had taken the trouble to listen to the Throughline episode as a podcast (it was presumably released as such on its official date of May 26th), with the recent broadcasting of the episode on NPR proper those nocive ideas have now been splashed out over the national airwaves.  And since NPR listeners typically have their ears "open like a greedy shark, to catch the tunings of a voice [supposedly] divine" (Keats), this program seems likely to inflict an unusually high amount of damage on public knowledge of linguistics. 

Trying to clear up the confusion between the two is a battle we have been waging for decades, and nowhere is the problem more severe than in the study of Sinitic languages and the Sinographic script.  The crisis (not a "danger + opportunity"!) has come to the surface again this month with the appearance of a new book by Jing Tsu titled Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Riverhead Books, 2022).

The publication of Tsu's book has generated a lot of excitement, publicity, and reviews.  Here I would like to call attention to the brief remarks of an anonymous correspondent (a famous, reclusive linguist) that are right on target:

Reimagining "antiquated" Chinese

Reproduced below is the text of a book review in Science that you may not have seen. It is classified as "Linguistics", though the reviewer is a historian at Cal State Poly, Pomona. Notice that Chinese is assumed to be "antiquated" and in need of being "reimagined"!  There is simply no sign of Science understanding the difference between a human language and a writing system. This is consistent with the way they have always treated linguistics; they have no idea what the subject really is.

To comprehend what's going on in this post, you have to understand the basics of what an "otaku" is.

DEFINITION: 

(fandom slang) One with an obsessive interest in something, particularly anime or manga.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Japanese オタク (otaku, “nerd, geek”), from お宅 (otaku, honorific for “you”), originally the honorific version of 宅 (taku, “home”).  [VHM:  reminiscent of "homebody".]

SYNONYMS:

• geek, anorak

(source)

From the Library of Congress International Collections FB page (Saturday 7/17/21):

Within the last couple of years, some of my students expressed themselves by sticking this emoji — 😂 — at strategic places in their messages to me.  Funny thing is that I never really knew how to interpret it.  It looks like the face of someone who is laughing so hard that they are crying.  Maybe that's not far off in terms of iconographic analysis, but I was never confident that I was correctly comprehending what the students wanted to communicate to me with this emoji.

About a week ago, Zoom forced me — right as I was about to begin a class!! — to update my system.  Naturally, when it was all over with the cursed passwords (which are one of my biggest trials in life these days [within the next few weeks, I have to change ALL of my passwords, which is being forced on me by UPenn]) and multiple stages of downloading, I was late for class, which gave me a huge amount of stress.

With the new Zoom system, I noticed one big change, namely, in the past when I wanted to comment positively on a student's performance, I could choose from a thumbs up sign or clapping hands.  After the download of the new system, I suddenly had more than half-a-dozen reactions, one of which was 😂.  Although I wasn't sure what it meant, I decided to try it out, which led to a confession to the class on my part that I didn't really know what 😂 meant, followed by a brief discussion in which the students tried to educate me.