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zev handel Profile picture
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12 Mar, 8 tweets, 3 min read
This will be my last follow-up to this earlier thread on Pokémon names. I just want to give a shout-out to some of the researchers and their work on Pokémon names ("Pokémonastics") that I learned about from replies posted to the thread.
Shigeto Kawahara seems to be the dominant figure in the field. He was lead author of this paper that demonstrated, among other things, correlation between the length (in moras) of Pokémon names and the size, weight, and evolution status of the Pokémon.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
And he hosted the 1st Conference on Pokémonastics at Keio University in 2018.

1stpokemonastics.wordpress.com
He's a serious phonetician at Keio University in Japan.

His website is here and you can find him on Twitter too:

user.keio.ac.jp/~kawahara/inde…
Arthur Lewis Thompson researches iconicity in language at The University of Hong Kong. He gave a really interesting poster presentation comparing the frequencies of different methods of Pokémon name creation across languages.

Finally, this massive study of sound symbolism in Pokémon names across six languages was co-written by eleven researchers (including Kawahara).

ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004725
From what I can tell, nobody has systematically studied what I was interested in exploring in my thread: the presence of cross-linguistic borrowed morphological elements in Pokémon names, like Greek roots or Mandarin words in Japanese names; and Chinese words in English names.
The work that's out there is really cool and interesting, so check it out!

/end

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zev handel Profile picture
13 Mar
This is part of a sign in a station on Line #4 of the Seoul subway system.

It’s trilingual.

Um, it is trilingual, right? Or … is it?

Take a moment. Think about it.

It’s in three different scripts, that’s for sure. But is it in three different languages? Sign in subway station read...
When I lived in Seoul I spent a lot of time on the subway. And I spent a lot of time looking at signs in the subway stations. When I looked at signs like this, I thought:

Is this sign in Korean, English, and Chinese ❓

Or maybe … is it in Korean, English, and Japanese ⁉️
And then I thought: Why am I assuming English? Why couldn't "Dongdaemun" be … Dutch? Indonesian? Turkish?

Or even … Korean? 🤔

This raised a thornier question: Is there any way to know for sure how many different languages are being written here?
Read 27 tweets
zev handel Profile picture
11 Mar
Within my thread on Pokémon names posted last week, I talked about the English, German, and Japanese names of the three Pokémon pictured here, which make up an evolutionary family.

Two readers, @CranberryMorph1 and @gyankotsu , made an interesting observation. 1/ The three Pokémon Deino, Zw...
Before I get to their observation, let's review the names of these one-, two-, and three-headed dragon-like Pokémon:

ENGLISH / GERMAN / JAPANESE
Deino / Kapuno / Monozu モノズ
Zweilous / Duodino / Jiheddo ジヘッド
Hydreigon / Trikephalo / Sazandora サザンドラ

2/
Each set of names contains some form of the numbers 1, 2, 3.

The English names: German eins, zwei, drei

The German names: Latinate uno, duo, tri ("tri" could also be Greek, which matches Greek "kephalo")

The Japanese names: Greek mono, Japanese ji and sa/san

3/
Read 10 tweets
zev handel Profile picture
20 Feb
It’s the fourth and final part of our mega-thread on the Chinese second-person pronoun ‘you’. Let’s get this done!
We’ve been exploring the historical relationship between the modern Mandarin word nǐ 你 and the Classical Chinese word 爾 (which is now pronounced ěr and was once pronounced *neʔ).
We’ve seen already that the spoken word nǐ is a colloquial descendant of the Old Chinese spoken word *neʔ. And we’ve seen that the right side of the written character 你 is an abbreviated form of the character 爾, and is also its modern simplified form 尔.
Read 39 tweets
zev handel Profile picture
18 Feb
We've already seen where the Chinese word meaning 'you' (Mandarin nǐ, Cantonese nei5 ~ lei5) comes from: it's a variant form of the Classical Chinese word now pronounced ěr in Mandarin. But where does the written character 你 come from?

This is the second of three unanswered questions from last week’s thread. It’s a circuitous route to the answer: on the way we’ll be discussing looms, balances, Japanese kanji, and 20th-century character simplifications.

We’ll start with the origin of the character for the Classical Chinese second-person pronoun, 爾, which was pronounced something like neʔ in Old Chinese and is ěr in modern Mandarin.
Read 32 tweets
zev handel Profile picture
16 Feb
Ready to pick this up again? I am. I wrote this thread a few days ago, and I left a few unanswered questions.

Here's the first unanswered question. It's an important one. We're not used to seeing a change in the written form of a Chinese word that has a clear, continuous history.

The pronunciation of Chinese words has changed a great deal over the last three millennia, but there is nothing special about Chinese in this regard. Equally dramatic pronunciations take place over that time span in any language.
Read 19 tweets
zev handel Profile picture
13 Feb
I like thinking about familiar things that turn out to have surprising back stories. The modern Chinese second-person singular pronoun 你 (Mandarin nǐ, Cantonese nei5 or lei5) is one of those things. The history of the spoken word and the written character contains surprises. Calligraphic form of the ch...
When I started learning Chinese, the Mandarin words nǐ ‘you’ and nǐhǎo ‘hello’ were in the first lesson’s vocabulary list, and你 was one of the first Chinese characters that I learned to recognize and write.
These words and this character are also among the first that native Mandarin speakers learn as small children.
Read 35 tweets

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