More Chinese menu shorthand, part 2: the future of the Chinese writing system
« previous post |
From Xinyi Ye:
I was on my way home from HKU (Hong Kong University) and was looking for a dinner place and found this handwritten menu:
(explanations and annotations below)
Xinyi is not a native of Hong Kong, but she has been living there long enough to know the folkways and even to be sufficiently familiar with the local lingo to be sensitive to the special flavor of the menu shorthand on display in the eateries there.
This signboard offers a cornucopia of delicious Hong Kong menu shorthand, starting with the first two items (N.B.: not all items on the board are distinctively Cantonese, but plenty of them are):
1. dòufù 豆付 (lit., "bean pay") for dòufu 豆腐 ("tofu; bean curd")
2. jiāndàn 煎旦 ("fried dawn") for jiāndàn 煎蛋 ("fried egg")
The last character of the title line of the menu, 歺, deserves special attention, which I shall devote to it in the fourth paragraph from the bottom of the post.
The board has a dazzling array of "Mandarin" (h.t. Kirinputra), Cantonese, and who knows what else. It even has an example of digraphia, mentioned in this recent comment on "Language reform and script reform" (12/16/25) and in numerous other LL posts.
One of my favorite items is no. 4, which is a Hakka dish that gives translators heebie jeebies when they get to huájī 滑雞*, which I've seen rendered variously as "smooth / silken / sliding / soy sauce chicken", etc.), but most often, it seems, exasperatedly as just "chicken", though frequently as "slippery chicken", as is the first item at :20 here. If you continue to watch this 2:06 video to the end, you will find a lot of entertaining discussion about some of the tens of colorful entries that are featured in the video.
*A perfect homophone of huájī 滑稽 (also pronounced gǔjī), an adjective meaning "funny; comic(al); amusing; humorous; ridiculous; antic; comical; buffoonery; farcicality; jocularity; waggery; clownery; jesting; pleasantry; droll; witty"; etc., etc. As a noun, huájī 滑稽 signifies (as per Wiktionary):
-
- (historical) a type of ancient wine drinking vessel
- a type of comedic Chinese opera performed in Shanghai, Suzhou, and surrounding areas
- (Mainland China, Internet slang) the smug emoticon on Tieba
The smug emoticon on Tieba
Expanded form: huá tiānxià zhī dàjī 滑天下之大稽 ("to be comical; to be ridiculous; to be laughable", etc. By itself, huá means "slippery; cunning; comical", etc., tiānxià means "all under heaven", zhī has many meanings and functions, but here is an attributive / possessive marker; dà means "big; great; huge; large; major; wide", etc., means "bow to the ground; inspect; check". So the whole expanded idiom means "really funny; extremely ridiculous", etc.
Strangely enough, in Literary Sinitic of the first part of the 6th c. AD, huájī 滑稽 means "eloquent; articulate".
While I would not say that the handwriting on this board is elegant or exquisite, it does appear to me to be competent and confident.
Xinyi says that "it’s actually a whole other world of systems in Cantonese restaurants (which I go to every day now)." They have a very special shorthand system for food. She sent me screenshots of what it looks like. Hong Kong menu shorthand is very developed and very different from "Modern Standard Mandarin". Take a look at this article about it.
Xinyi says she grew up seeing the elderly like her grandparents using a fun mixture of traditional Chinese and èrjiǎnzì 二简字 ("second scheme for simplified characters"), which was never made official) for writing food names. For example, they write 歺 instead of 餐 ("to eat; meal" in their letters. What could be more central to culinary art and affairs than 歺/ 餐?
If you believe in the rationale / efficacy / purpose for the simplification of Chinese characters, there's no reason for not simplifying 餐. I say the same thing about jiāng 疆 ("border; boundary; frontier"), jiē 街 ("street"). and hundreds of other common, but overly complicated, characters.
Psst: I'm not a fan of systematically replacing traditional characters with simplified characters. On the other hand, if you are an advocate of simplification as being superior to traditional characters, then why not go whole hog on them?
I know the reformers who supported èrjiǎnzì 二简字 ("second scheme for simplified characters"), and can tell you that they were sorely disappointed that the government backed down ("wimped out") on them. Now China is betwixt and between on what to do with the sinographic writing system. I think they should have been brave and bold enough to go 三简字, 四简字, 五简字, and kept going till they saw what happened when all the unnecessarily complex characters were simplified. Perhaps they would have ended up with a nǚshū 女書 ("women's writing") streamlined syllabary.
Selected readings
- "More Chinese menu shorthand" (12/16/25) — with plentiful bibliographical references in the previous posts
This comment to the previous post:
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
KIRINPUTRA said,
December 23, 2025 @ 3:22 am
“Future of the Chinese writing system”? These kind of predictions have the worst track record — unfortunately.
But, first, I shared in such delight the other day when some friends & I saw 〓 (⿱艹久) 菜 (KÚ-CHHÀI) on the menu instead of 韮菜 (same), in Takao. And before that at another restaurant up-island where I’d order KÚ-CHHÀI and the person would scribble 久 on their pad.
久菜 for KÚ-CHHÀI is actually pretty well attested in 20th century Taioanese literature — perhaps more so than 韮菜. Is it the future of Taioanese writing? Can’t say, but it is the past of Taioanese writing.
(Taioanese, or Hoklo, writing was largely a commercial invention, and largely remains a commercial phenomenon to this day. This is why the Formosan literati have from the dawn of modernity denied its existence and minimised its past.)
The thing is, usages like 久～ are commercial, and secular. True, they save time & ink. Commercial usages streamline. But “continental” East Asian societies have institutional mechanisms that block commercial ingenuity from going mainstream. The literati control the sacred standards for the written language, with the blessing of the masses (incl. the merchants), for this is The Way Things Should Be & The Way Things Rightfully Have Always Been. Probably even more so than in India, the literati & commerce are mutually exclusive — not literally, but conceptually. And, to keep commerce in its place, the literati non-adopt commercial ingenuity — not only passively, but actively to some extent: They go out of their way to exclude commercial (secular) usage from their sacred standards. At times, the sacred standards also seem to go out of their way to privilege difficult usages — yet another way to disadvantage the sons & daughters of the rich riffraff at exam time. Whenever the literati do decide to streamline, though, they want full credit for it — so commerce-led streamlining is out, anyways & always.
So, elegant commercial (secular) usage will tend to stay in the margins, and even fade: As typing takes the place of handwriting, the literati is ascendant, since typing mechanisms are under the sway of the sacred standards. Secular streamlining can only advance over the dead bodies of the brahmins. This … doesn’t have to be violent, and doesn’t have to be all [of the subcontinent at once] or nothing.
KIRINPUTRA said,
December 23, 2025 @ 3:59 am
Forgot to add: 韮 / 韭 (in Middle Chinese, etc.) is probably cognate to 久 (in the same).
And, katakana ク (KU) and hiragana く (also KU) are alternate forms of 久.
wgj said,
December 23, 2025 @ 4:39 am
All three instances – 付/腐 旦/蛋 歺/餐 – are from the abandoned second/third batch of sinograph simplification, and still being used by some, half a century later.
Peter Cyrus said,
December 23, 2025 @ 5:43 am
So Chinese has a character that pretty clearly resembles a door: its traditional form is 門, and its simplified form is 门; both are pronounced mén in putonghua.
Chinese also has a verb pronounced mén: it means "to stroke or pat". Since it's hard to draw verbs, someone in the past just added the "hand" radical to the door glyph: 捫 or now 扪. So the symbol means "a word which sounds like the word for door, but has something to do with your hand". That's how this system works, and something like 85% of hanzi characters are formed in this way. That's very similar to how Ancient Egyptian and Mayan worked, too: the rebus approach.
We can imagine that at some point, writers might have standardized the phonetic elements so that every word pronounced "mén" would use the same phonetic element. There are only about 1300 syllables, so the result would have been a large syllabary, and maybe with time people would have started using just the phonetic elements without the semantic radicals, as happened elsewhere (albeit when people who spoke a different language tried to adapt the writing system).
I'm not writing to open a discussion of why that didn't happen in China – I'm here to wonder aloud why using "mén" as a phonetic element is "how the system works", but using it without the accompanying radical is a spelling error. The examples above show homophones being substituted, and of course I think that substituting "there" or "their" for "they're" is a spelling error in English. But English doesn't use the rebus approach.
It bothered me enough to comment because it evokes for me an (imaginary) scene where I say "please pass me the cheese", and someone corrects me saying "you mean the grated Parmesan cheese – you can't leave the first part off", while I think that given the context, "cheese" was specific enough. If I said (in Chinese) "I was sitting on my couch, dooring the cat", and someone corrected me saying "you mean stroking the cat", I would think they were an annoying idiot. But not in writing?
martin schwartz said,
December 23, 2025 @ 6:08 am
"Fried dawn" for 'fried egg", how wonderfully poetic!!
Phonics leading to imagistic association!
The sun-up sign for dawn suggests "sunny side up".
@Peter Cyrus: Cool! Yes, Anc. Eg. and Mayan
provide parallels.
Martin Schwartz