Alphabetic "Mr." and "Mrs. / Ms." in Chinese
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Before this phenomenon was called to my attention by .Gábor Ugray, I had never seen or heard of it before, so I had to do a bit of research to figure it out.
My conclusion is that 'r stands for "Mr." and that 's stands for "Mrs. / Ms.". This site was helpful.
As for the sign, it says:
Bǎnmiàn chūzū
版面出租
"Space for rent"
One more step for the alphabetization and Englishization of Sinitic.
Selected readings
- "The Englishization of Chinese enters a new phase" (8/8/24)
- "YouCool" (3/7/08)
- "Too cool!" (5/4/16)
- "Creeping English in Chinese" (1/23/17)
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 5" (7/6/23)
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 4" (12/15/18)
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 3" (11/25/18) — includes a very long (but not complete) list of previous Language Log posts on Romanization, Englishization, digraphia and diglossia, biscriptalism and multiscriptalism, bilingualism and multilingualism
- "Nerd, geek, PK: Creeping Romanization (and Englishization), part 2" (3/5/13)
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese" (8/30/12)
- "The Westernization of Chinese" (9/6/12)
- Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)
[Thanks to Zhaofei Chen and Jing Hu]