I’m using this pinned tweet to keep track of my threads on language and linguistics—mostly focusing on sinograms, historical phonology, and etymology.
Occasionally Pokémon.
Languages: 🇨🇳🇹🇼🇭🇰🇰🇷🇰🇵🇯🇵🇻🇳 etc.
1/ A translation of Totoro into Chinese
2/ A language quiz illustrating principles of sinographic writing
3/ The etymology of Chinese wǎsī 瓦斯 ‘gas’
4/ The development of the Chinese character 得
5/ What can we learn about the history of sinography by writing English in Chinese characters?
6/ The etymology of karaoke
7/ The pronunciation of Korean bibimbap 비빔밥
8/ The history of Chinese 你
9/ The Mandarin names of the letters of the Latin alphabet
10/ The Korean names of the letters of the Latin alphabet
11/ Pokémon names
12/ The Pokémon names Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese
13/ Languages and scripts on Seoul subway signs
14/ The function of Chinese-character “radicals”, and why most innovated Vietnamese Nôm graphs don’t have them
15/ A recitation in Old Chinese
16/ French bakery names in Korea
17/ The morphology (word structure) of Korean bibimbap 비빔밥
18/ More on Pokémon names, featuring Eevee
🇯🇵🇰🇷🇨🇳🇭🇰🇹🇼
#Pokémonastics
19/ A recitation of a Daoist spell in reconstructed Chinese pronunciation of the Later Han Dynasty
20/ A riddle related to the pronunciation of the numeric sign <6> in Korean
21/ On syllable gaps in Mandarin, in particular the history of ga, ka, ha syllables
22/ A humorous restaurant sign with a mysterious four-character phrase
23/ The endpoint that never happened in the development of the Chinese character 得
24/ A sinogram quiz for fun and education.
This set of eleven invented compound sinograms represent words in a variety of languages, based on a variety of reading traditions. Can you decipher any?
25/ On a confounding pair of homophones in Chinese
26/ On the number of radicals in Chinese characters, with a comparison to Egyptian hieroglyphs
[It's the loneliest number 😢.]
27/ On the Chinese character 亼, Lǔ Xùn, and some other related stuff
28/ On Written Cantonese
(Yes, I know that tone mark in the image is wrong, s/b "m4 goi1".)
29/ On a "hot" cognate set
30/ On the 1977 proposed (and then rescinded) second-round simplification of Chinese characters
31/ On the tonal aspect of rhyming in Chinese classical poetry
32/ On the Zhongshan 中山 bronze seal-script inscriptions of the fourth century BCE
33/ On meter in Classical Chinese poetry
34/ On which modern Chinese language is best for reading medieval Chinese poetry aloud
35/ On the linguistic aspects of parallelism in medieval Chinese poetry
36/ A surprisingly unfamiliar form of an ordinary letter
37/ On double borrowings in Korean
38/ On homophones, orthographic differentiation, and Sino-Korean 수도
39/ On jiáng and other weird-sounding second-tone Mandarin syllables
40/ Thread continued: how jiáng came not to be
Thread #41: The peculiar American English pronunciations of "Hyundai" and "Tokyo"
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