Language Log

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.

It's a subject that won't go away.

When I was in high school, I concocted an embarrassingly sophomoric signature:

I wrote that iteration of my youthful signature on the front flyleaf of my beloved Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1960), which, from that year till today has been one of my most precious possessions.

When I went away to college in 1961 and ever since, I adopted a signature that was the exact antithesis of that early one:  

It was / is mechanical and measured, with no flourishes whatsoever.

Most people I know have one of three basic types of signatures:

1. extravagant, fast, illegible — these are usually "important" people who have to sign their signature scores of times each week; doctors; lawyers; executives; entertainers….

2. beautiful, well-composed, flowing, legible — my sisters, most women

3. crotched, cramped, crooked, angular, unesthetic, slow — my brothers and me, engineers, scientists, who write with what I call "chicken scratches"

Xu Wenkan is well known to readers of Language Log, both because he was memorialized in an obituary here — "Xu Wenkan (1943-2023)" (1/10/23) — and because he was cited in many posts on IE languages (especially Tocharian), Sinitic lexicography / lexicology, and the Sinographic writing system.  Today he was featured in a Chinese newspaper article, two years after his passing, and that reminded me of another important aspect of his language skills and activities.  Namely, without any doubt whatsoever, he was the most prolific letter writer I have ever met.

This is a truly impressive form of calligraphy, the likes of which I've never seen before:

What won't they think of next as means for writing sinographs?

"Mysterious tablet with unknown language unearthed in Georgia", by Dario Radley, Archeology News (12/4/24)

Tablet with inscription in an unknown language, discovered in Georgia.
Credit: R. Shengelia et al., Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology

New article in Antiquity (05 November 2024):  "Seals and signs: tracing the origins of writing in ancient South-west Asia", by Kathryn Kelley, Mattia Cartolano, and Silvia Ferrara

Abstract

Administrative innovations in South-west Asia during the fourth millennium BC, including the cylinder seals that were rolled on the earliest clay tablets, laid the foundations for proto-cuneiform script, one of the first writing systems. Seals were rich in iconography, but little research has focused on the potential influence of specific motifs on the development of the sign-based proto-cuneiform script. Here, the authors identify symbolic precursors to fundamental proto-cuneiform signs among late pre-literate seal motifs that describe the transportation of vessels and textiles, highlighting the synergy of early systems of clay-based communication.

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 J. Marshall Unger.]

I do not believe it is useful, let alone necessary, to classify every character of a writing system as a phonogram, logogram, syllabogram, logosyllabogram, or any other kind of “gram.” Characters function logographically or phonographically depending on the degree to which they reflect the phonological, as opposed to the lexical, structure of the part of an utterance they are used to represent. One and the same character can function phonographically in one context, logographically in another, and in both ways in yet another. This is a consequence of what Martinet called the double articulation of language, i.e. Hockett’s duality of patterning or Hjemslev’s plereme/ceneme distinction. One may say for convenience that a character that functions logographically in a particular context is a logogram, but to the extent that doing so invites the unwary to think that logograms enjoy some sort of context-free existence in a Platonic universe of symbols, it is a bad idea.

The article is in Japanese, but you should be able to get an idea of what's going on from the videos and stills.

iPad書道はいいぞ pic.twitter.com/P4hregIAl1

— 書きちらし (@kakichirashi) June 29, 2024

[This is a guest post by Peter T. Daniels, to follow part 1 (7/1/24)]

That, then, is my account of the origin of writing. It might be supposed that my next topic must be the origin of the alphabet. But it is not; for me, the origin of the alphabet is accidental and practically inevitable, given the constellation of circumstances surrounding the event.

No; what must be celebrated, if not explained, is the origin of the abjad. Previously, writers wrote sounds; subsequently, writers wrote parts of sounds. All the evidence in favor of the syllable as the basic unit of speech is also evidence against the like­­­lihood of discovering the segment. The Egyptians didn’t discover the segment, even though they wrote only consonants and didn’t identify the vowels of the syllables of their language; as explained by Alfred Schmitt, Egyptian hieroglyphic signs never ceased to be word signs, even when used strictly for their phonetic value.

[This is a guest post by Peter T. Daniels]

Author's Note

In 1999, Holly Pittman of the University of Pennsylvania invited me to prepare a talk to close an international symposium on early writing systems. The result is before you — essentially unchanged and unupdated (because the planned publication did not materialize), even though I would treat a couple of points differently now. John Noble Wilford covered the event for the New York Times, but in order to accommodate illustrations, his article was cut (from the bottom, as newspapers do), and since he described each contribution in the order it was given, the last several talks went unmentioned! (And weren't restored when a volume of his reporting was published a few years later.) 

A fuller presentation of my understanding of the nature and history of writing may be found in my Exploration of Writing (Equinox, 2018), and in major articles in the 2023 volumes of the journals WORD and Written Language and Literacy.

A Study of Origins
Peter T. Daniels
New York [now Jersey City, N.J.]

closing talk at The Multiple Origins of Writing: Image, Symbol, Script
international symposium, Center for Ancient Studies,
University of Pennsylvania. University Museum, Philadelphia, March 27, 1999

Elegant writing by hand has always been a trial for me.  The harder I try to make my handwriting presentable, the more it turns out looking like chicken scratches.  I'll never forget how my second grade teacher, Mrs. Kiefer, was in despair over my poor penmanship, almost to the point of crying.  "Vicky," she would say, "you are such a good student in all other respects, why can't you write better?"  It's the same way with my brother Denis.  Watching him write, and seeing the product as it emerges on the page, it is obvious that forming letters on the page is a kind of suffering for him.  And yet, both Denis and I prefer to compose whatever we really care about on paper — be it a poem, an essay, or just random thoughts.

I'm a super fast typist, and I can spew out things on a computer screen almost as fast as I normally talk.  It's easy as abc.  When I do so, however, I'm not thinking, I'm just gurgitating.