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]
Jonathan Lundell said,
November 21, 2024 @ 4:48 pm
Wow, that serif’d K in the Unicode proposal looks wildly out of place.
(Completely unrelated, it’s a constant annoyance that the URI field for commenting here autocapitalizes.)
Frédéric Grosshans said,
November 22, 2024 @ 6:10 am
Actually, a earlier proposal this year included these https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2024/24201-script-hybrid-cjk-block.pdf and other hybrid characters (8 han-latin, 13 han-katakan an one han-hangul), all but one being used in Japanese, and one being used in Korean. The preceding proposal of Gen Kojitani https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2023/23139r-abbrev-ideo-japanese.pdf has more characters, but, due to lack of evidence, they dropped them for now.
As a side remark, the proposal mentions, without more detail, that “similar script-hybrid characters (Han-Latin and Han-Sawndip) have been found in the “Sawndip” (“方块壮字” or “古壮字” in Chinese) writing system used in Zhuang (壮语) [ISO 639-3: zha] and Bouyei (布依语) [ISO 639-3: pcc], which belong to the Kra-Dai languages family (close to Thai and Lao) spoken in southern China”.
David Marjanović said,
November 22, 2024 @ 7:00 am
No, that's your own browser's autocorrupt, which you can switch off in the settings somewhere. No such thing is inbuilt in the site.
Jonathan Lundell said,
November 22, 2024 @ 12:33 pm
URI field: yes & no. Sadly, the default state of autocapitalize differs from browser to browser (Safari & Chrome default to ON, Firefox to OFF), and it's up to a given site to set it appropriately for any given input field. It's further tricky because it applies only to virtual keyboards or voice input.
Chris Button said,
November 23, 2024 @ 8:35 am
@ Frédéric Grosshans
Thank you so much for sharing those other two proposals.
The handwritten examples or playful/stylized signage examples make sense, but it's interesting to see plain, formal signage using some of them. Why not just stick to the official versions in such cases?
Mike Ryan said,
November 26, 2024 @ 11:26 pm
Intersting story. Although most people nowadays are not writing on paper and so rarely have the need for such a stunt.