Sino-Roman hybrid characters, part 2
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Part 1 of this post appeared on 8/26/16. The first two paragraphs read as follow:
Founded in 1858, Keio is the oldest university in Japan and one of the best, also ranking high in world ratings. Its name is written 慶應 in kanji. That's a lot of strokes to scribble down every time you want to write the name of your university, so Keio people often write it this way: 广+K 广+O (imagine that the "K" and the "O" are written inside of the 广). That makes 6 strokes and 4 strokes instead of 15 strokes and 17 strokes respectively, 10 strokes total instead of 32.
In these character constructions, "K" and "O" are functioning as phonophores, and Kangxi radical 53 广 ("dotted cliff" or "house on cliff") is functioning as the semantophore.
Interested persons are strongly urged to read part 1 for additional information.
The Han-Latin hybrid form of KO has now become a formal proposal to Unicode, as described here.
Selected readings
- "Sino-Roman hybrid characters" (8/26/16)
- "Oldest manuscript of the Confucian Analects discovered in Japan" (10/2/20) — at Keio University
- "cactus wawa: the strange tale of a strange character" (11/1/14) — Language Log has featured many other hybrid and polysyllabic graphs
- "Cactus Wawa revisited" (4/24/16)
- "Pinyin for phonetic annotation" (10/22/18)
- "Phonetic annotation of Chinese characters" (10/15/12)
- "Pinyin for the Prez" (10/25/18)
- "The uses of Hanyu pinyin" (5/22/16)
- "Phonetic annotations as a welcome aid for learning how to read and write Sinographs" (4/26/19)
- "Ask Language Log: The alphabet in China" (11/6/19)
- Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)
- Helena Riha, "Lettered Words in Chinese: Roman Letters as Morpheme-syllables" (pdf)
- "Zhao C: a Man Who Lost His Name" (2/27/09)
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 3" (11/25/18)
- "The actuality of emerging digraphia" (3/10/19)
- "Sememic spelling" (3/27/19)
- "Polyscriptal Taiwanese" (7/24/10)
- "The Roman Alphabet in Cantonese" (3/23/11)
- "Love those letters" (11/3/18)
- "Acronyms in China" (11/2/19)
- "Writing Sinitic languages with phonetic scripts" (5/20/16)
- "Sinitic languages without the Sinographic script" [3/5/19])
- "Official digraphia" (9/13/18)
- "The actuality of emerging digraphia" (3/10/19) — with a very long bibliography
[Thanks to Christian Horn]