Language Log

From Xinyi Ye:

I was on my way home from HKU (Hong Kong University) and was looking for a dinner place and found this handwritten menu:
(explanations and annotations below)

Xinyi is not a native of Hong Kong, but she has been living there long enough to know the folkways and even to be sufficiently familiar with the local lingo to be sensitive to the special flavor of the menu shorthand on display in the eateries there.

This signboard offers a cornucopia of delicious Hong Kong menu shorthand, starting with the first two items (N.B.:  not all items on the board are distinctively Cantonese, but plenty of them are):

1. dòufù 豆付 (lit., "bean pay") for dòufu 豆腐 ("tofu; bean curd")

2. jiāndàn 煎旦 ("fried dawn") for jiāndàn 煎蛋 ("fried egg")

[Preface:  The nitty-gritty questions about pronunciation discussed below are expressed in common spelling (not a phonetic alphabet) because the people who have written them down here are non-phoneticians.  What they have recorded are their best approximations of how they think they are saying "Canton".]

After reading "'Cant-idates'" (11/12/25) and "Can't even" (11/13/25), I submitted this comment:

As for "can't", there are quite a few "Cantons" in America. I'm from the one in Stark County Ohio, and some of the people there pronounce the name not as "Can-ton", but as "Cant-un".

This prompted Mark Liberman to ask:

Is that your way to representing [ˈkænʔn̻], i.e. the second syllable as a glottal-onset syllabic nasal?

From Mok Ling:

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 Hunminjeongeum 훈민정음 / 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.