Language Log

This morning I received the following link without any accompanying explanation:  link is embedded here.  As soon as I started to read through the text, it seemed as though it were Hindi-Urdu, or some other northern Indic language, but it was so jumbled with English and jargon that I couldn't really make full sense of all that it was saying.  Moreover, it was written in romanization, not Devanagri or Perso-Arabic.  I had studied a summer of Hindi-Urdu about 60 years ago, but that was in the two native scripts, and I had become quite proficient in Nepali from having lived in the eastern Himalayas from 1965-67. Nepali was also written in Devanagari and was full of Indic cognates, but also had plenty of Persian and Arabic borrowings.

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.

This is a follow-up to "How to pronounce the name of the ruler of the PRC" (10/26/25).  Surprised by the amount of dissension over how to pronounce his name and how to represent the pronunciation in romanization, I decided to try another approach.  I asked all of the students (undergrads and grads) in my Fiction and Drama and in my Language, Script, and Society in China classes to write down the best way that could think of to transcribe Xi Jinping's in roman or Cyrillic letters — other than the official Hanyu Pinyin version, Xi Jinping.

Only two of the students were linguistics majors, about a dozen were East Asian Languages and Civilizations majors.  The remainder were drawn from a wide variety of disciplines and fields (humanities, sciences, and social sciences) across the university.  About 90% had a Chinese background (ranging in ability from minimal acquaintance to full fluency).  There were a couple of students from Taiwan, a few from Cantonese and other topolect areas, one had a Korean background, and two or three had no prior exposure to any East Asian languages.

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:

Emanuele Raini, "I Sistemi di Romanizzazione del Cinese Mandarino nei Secoli XVI-XVIII"

Sapienza – Università di Roma, Facoltà di Studi Orientali, Studi Asiatici, XXII ciclo, 2009/2010, published 2012

How Chinese Characters Almost Died 

Once again, Julesy tells it like it is.

Julesy tells it like it is: "The Impossible Chinese Typewriter"

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-third issue:

“Xizi Qiji 西字奇跡The Miracle of Western Words: Matteo Ricci’s Innovations in Language and Faith,” by Zhaofei Chen.

https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp363_matteo_ricci_xizi_qiji.pdf

One of my favorite photographs shows Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) teaching the alphabet to citizens:

Thirty-five or so years ago, Allyn Rickett (1921-2020), my old colleague at Penn, referred to a certain person as "pópomāmā 婆婆媽媽" ("mawkishly maudlin" [my translation of Rickett's Mandarin]; "old-lady-like").  This is such an unusual expression, and it so perfectly characterized the individual in question, that it's worth writing a post on it.

In the years around the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Rickett ("Rick") was in China doing research for his doctoral dissertation on the Guǎn Zǐ 管子 (Master Guan), a large and important politicophilosophical text reflecting the thought and practice of the Spring and Autumn period (c. 770-c. 481 BC), though the received version was not edited until circa 26 BC.  Rickett was accused of spying for the US Office of Naval Intelligence and imprisoned by the PRC government.  There he underwent four years of "struggle sessions".  Call them what you will, he had ample opportunity to become familiar with such colloquial terms as "pópomāmā 婆婆媽媽".

I should also note that Rickett, who was a student of the distinguished Sinologist, Derk Bodde (1909-2003), was an outstanding scholar in his own right, and his densely annotated translation of the Guan Zi is a monumental achievement, one that he worked on for most of his professional life.

Stumbled upon an earliest surviving partial bible translation into Japanese made by Manuel Barreto in 1591 (known as バレト写本 or Reg. lat. 459), here's the first paragraph.

Scans can be found here:https://t.co/pW2nH8Udtj pic.twitter.com/HMehP0F6qd

— Maxim Persikov (Panates) (@gyankotsu) December 5, 2024

Which do you think is harder — reading and writing Taiwanese with characters (sinographs) or with romanization?

I maintain — and I have tried to show over the years — that it's much easier to read Taiwanese written with roman letters than with Chinese characters.  The same is true of all vernacular Sinitic languages.

It is relatively easy for a speaker of Taiwanese to become literate in roman letters, not at all so in characters.  See the posts under "Selected readings" below.

Marco Rubio has been named Secretary of State by newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, swiftly and unanimously approved by the United States Senate, and promptly sworn in by Vice President JD Vance.  When it comes to China, our most formidable foe, however, there is a hitch — Rubio is under a travel ban by the Chinese government.

Zěnme bàn 怎么办？("What to do?")

Clearly this will not do.  Even China knows that, so their Foreign Ministry has thought of a devilishly clever way to circumvent their own ban.

Beijing changes Rubio’s Chinese name, perhaps to get around travel ban
Changes to official translations are approved at a high level, and could be a way to ease sanctions indirectly.  By Yitong Wu, Kit Sung, and Chen Zifei, rfa
2025.01.21

China's morphosyllabic script confronts the world, and itself — with unique challenges.

Beijing has changed the rendering of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s name in Chinese, sparking speculation that officials might want to get around their own travel ban, in an apparent olive branch to President Donald Trump, analysts said on Tuesday.

[This is a guest post by Mok Ling.]

I recently paid a visit to the oldest Chinese temple in the city of Tangerang in Indonesia, Boen Tek Bio (文德廟 ["literary virtue"], note the Dutch-influenced spelling) which was renovated some time in September this year. I was very pleased to see they did a pretty good job restoring all the inscriptions and pieces of calligraphy.

I noticed some (very old) custodians of the temple were handing out talismans (fú 符), and very helpfully, a hand-drawn diagram explaining each part of the talisman (see the attached diagram) — notice the ad-hoc Mandarin romanizations and Indonesian translations of each element).