More Chinese menu shorthand
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From surya:
I took this at the Grand Street Skewer Cart in Manhattan.
In particular the shorthand is interesting (for example kǎo mántou 考曼头 [lit., "examine long / extended / graceful / etc. head"] instead of kǎo mántou 烤馒头 ["baked steamed bun"] for CRISPY STEAM BUN). Is the dropping of the radicals a systematic practice for quick handwriting? Maybe only if the pronunciation is the same?
surya's surmise is fundmentally correct. Compare the shorthand here with that of our many examples in previous posts on Chinese restaurant shorthand.
All of which goes to show, as John DeFrancis demonstrated in Visible Speech and elsewhere, that the Chinese writing system is in large part phonetic, and, as I have pointed out on many occasions, the radicals / semantophores are basically superfluous.
Selected readings
- "Chinese restaurant shorthand" (9/22/16)
- "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 2 " (11/30/16)
- "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 3 " (2/25/17)
- "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 4" (4/21/17)
- "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 5" (5/15/19)
- "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 6" (6/17/19)
- "Hong Kong-specific characters and shorthand" (3/15/15), with links to relevant websites for restaurant shorthand characters
- "General Tso's chikin" (6/11/13), especially in the comments
- "Writing: from complex symbols to abstract squiggles" (6/11/19)
[Thanks to Jing Hu]
wgj said,
December 17, 2025 @ 9:26 am
The hypothesis that the radicles aren't really needed was the organizing principle of the second/third round of sinograph simplification. Obviously it failed, but it's unclear whether the failure proves the hypothesis wrong, or how much the failure has to do with this central hypothesis.
Sarah Jenkins said,
December 17, 2025 @ 10:13 am
This is a fascinating observation regarding the 'kǎo mántou' shorthand. It really highlights how context drives efficiency in handwritten scripts, especially in high-paced environments like restaurants. The dropping of radicals seems very similar to how cursive scripts evolve in other logographic systems where speed takes precedence over orthographic completeness. Thanks for sharing this field example!
Mark D. said,
December 17, 2025 @ 11:02 am
It makes perfect sense in this specific context. Since the setting is a skewer cart, the ambiguity is resolved immediately. No customer would expect to 'take an exam' (kǎo 考) regarding a bun; they expect it 'roasted' (kǎo 烤). Context eliminates the need for the semantic radical.
Victor Mair said,
December 17, 2025 @ 11:10 am
Through extreme simplification, rhomboidization, removal of semantophores / radicals, etc., the genius women of Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, south central China created a syllabary of less than a thousand symbols.
When the Chinese central government initially became aware of this phonetic script, they thought it was some sort of subversive cipher and treated it with great circumspection. During the 80s, I brought several practitioners of the script to America, around the same time I was introducing the Dungan phonetic script (written with the Cyrillic alphabet) to academia in America (many Language Log posts feature / mention Dungan).
"Women's writing: dead or alive" (10/2/20)
"Women's Romanization for Hong Kong" (8/17/19)
Nüshu 女書
wgj said,
December 17, 2025 @ 12:00 pm
@Sarah: Your observation on the contextual scope is very on point, because that, or more precise the reverse, is exactly how the characters got their radicles in the first place.
During the Qin-Han period, as a nearly modern bureaucracy emerged, wood and bamboo scrolls proliferated, the clerical script developed, and the total amount of written text exploded in China, characters that had been once phonetic borrowings of older oracle script characters (much like how Egyptian hieroglyphs went from originally ideographic to mainly phonetic) found themselves in new and complex mixed contexts, which required them to be differentiated from their homophonic – and therefore hitherto identical (because of borrowing from the same source) – twins. And the way to achieve that differentiation is to give them different radicles.
Bamboo scrolls discovered in archaeological sites from that period attest to this process: Many characters are recorded in versions with their modern radicles, as well as in versions without, sometimes even within the same text. Because proliferation of writing led to longer texts with higher complexity and complicated context, radicles were invented as a tool of disambiguation. (And it is correct to say that in the brief period between late Qin and early Han, Chinese writing was phonetic to a large proportion, because so many characters were phonetically borrowed, and still without semantic radicles.) Therefore, in any situation where the environment is reversed, meaning limited amount of text in a clearly demarcated, narrow context, the radicles can be left out as their original raison d'être goes away.
Victor Mair said,
December 17, 2025 @ 4:18 pm
I was hoping that readers who know standard Chinese reasonably well would spot a few other non-standard / shorthand usages.
Here's another one: for "squid stick", they wrote 尤鱼 instead of 鱿鱼，Again, the radical 鱼 was dropped.
I'll keep my eyes open.
~flow said,
December 17, 2025 @ 6:59 pm
I like the many small 串 which basically need no translation being so pictorial.
Victor Mair said,
December 17, 2025 @ 7:11 pm
Language Log photographs are famous for being embiggenable if you click on them.
ds said,
December 17, 2025 @ 7:35 pm
I do see an interesting place of "over-complication" — CHICKEN GIZZARD being written as 鸡+[月肾]。yes, take a closer look at the second Chinese character after 鸡 (chicken), it's a 月 "meat" radical on the left and 肾 "kidney" on the right. The correct Chinese writing should just be 肾 itself — and the person wrote it correctly. However, the writer chooses to add a redundant "meat" 月 semantophore (radical) on the left of 肾, creating a non-existent bipartite character. Why? We don't know, but this "addenda" is interesting in how some writers (when semi-literate) would perceive the Chinese characters as a means of writing or a signifier of "literacy", then attempt to complicate them (in unnecessary ways) for the sake of either hyper-clarification or "just making it structurally complex/condense".
Jonathan Smith said,
December 17, 2025 @ 8:43 pm
@ds interesting, I guess because san2 in Cantonese means 'gizzard', whereas as far as I can tell 'kidney' is always (?) san6 i.e. no "tone change" (?) 6 > 2. So this character [月肾] could be an ad hoc way of writing the distinct lexeme 'gizzard'.
Chris Button said,
December 17, 2025 @ 10:33 pm
This makes me think of all those old missionary orthographies that ignored prosodic distinctions such as tone. A native speaker can stumble through them. A second-language learner doesn't stand much of a chance.
~flow said,
December 18, 2025 @ 2:56 am
I don't think the character in question is ⿰⺝肾, rather I believe the entry reads "CHICKEN GIZZARD 鸡肉肾 $2[.]50" even if that's a little strange? I guess?, but the entries right above it all read "鸡肉串", "猪肉串", "羊肉串" and so on.
BTW, I do know you can famously embiggify images on LanguageLog. I don't know what kinds of screens other people work on but in my case (laptop) this invariably results in a picture-in-picture display that is actually smaller than the one embedded in the text, so (PRO tip!) I always right-click and select "open image in new tab".
Douglas said,
December 18, 2025 @ 4:09 am
Not sure whether this is correct, but i wonder if these dropped radicals is intentional? The handwriting looks kind of… childish? I write like this (Chinese second language learner). The 烤 / 考 switch is typical of a learner who makes mistakes. Do we know if the owner of the stall is native speaker?
Jonathan Smith said,
December 18, 2025 @ 7:45 am
that's what I thought @~flow but character "肉" throughout is clearly distinguished from "月" radical including in [月肾] as one can see after copious embiggifying
Victor Mair said,
December 18, 2025 @ 8:58 am
From Yixue Yang:
The handwriting on this menu is pretty cute. Probably 尤（鱿）鱼 for squid stick. But the 尤 looks like 犬.
yóu尤 ("especially")
quǎn 犬 ("dog")
Victor Mair said,
December 18, 2025 @ 8:59 am
"Chinese words and characters for 'gizzard'" (1/7/15)
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=16913
Victor Mair said,
December 18, 2025 @ 9:02 am
From Yijie Zhang:
I think what they wrote for “squid stick” is “尤鱼” (instead of “鱿鱼”), which further supports your point that the radicals/semantophores in Chinese are often superfluous. This case might be a bit more confusing than “考曼头,” partly because of the misleading handwriting: it almost looks like “犬鱼,” which can refer to pike (literally, “dog fish”).
Another item that caught my attention was what they wrote for “chicken gizzard,” as I can’t quite tell what the second character is meant to be. It should be “鸡胗,” but I have no idea why it was written in this way (it’s neither the traditional nor the simplified form of “胗”). A similar issue appears with the third character in what they wrote for “fish tofu,” which should be “鱼豆腐.”
surya said,
December 18, 2025 @ 9:43 am
There are some better quality pictures on Google Maps: here. (you can scroll in and out to greatly enlarge the image of the sign)
By the way, the owner is definitely a native speaker, but I don't know whether he originally spoke Cantonese or Mandarin or something else. He regularly speaks to customers in Mandarin though.
Philip Taylor said,
December 18, 2025 @ 4:47 pm
Wow, that really is an impressive level of zoom. I just hope that "Chinese hot dog" is not what I fear it might be …
Jerry Packard said,
December 18, 2025 @ 5:31 pm
‘Chinese hot dog’ is 香肠 ‘sausage’
Philip Taylor said,
December 19, 2025 @ 5:18 am
Thank goodness for that, Jerry !
Victor Mair said,
December 19, 2025 @ 6:44 am
Glad y'all enjoyed this marvelous offering of Chinese menu shorthand. After a couple of posts on Northeast topolecticisms, I will come back with another installment of menu shorthand.
Jerry Packard said,
December 19, 2025 @ 7:54 am
Although, Philip, the word for dog meat is the euphemistic and similar 香肉xiang1rou4 ‘fragrant meat’