zev handel Profile picture
Mar 13, 2021 38 tweets 8 min read Read on X
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?
Maybe the sign is entirely in Korean, represented in three different written forms: in the Roman alphabet, the Hangul alphabet, and Hantcha (i.e. Chinese characters).

So maybe it’s not trilingual at all, but monolingual and *tri-scriptal*! 🤯
A Korean word or proper name made up entirely of Sino-Korean components can be written in all three scripts. You can’t necessarily tell by looking at the outward form what spoken language is represented by it.
Let me illustrate a bit more what I mean. If we have a full sentence or even just a phrase, we can identify the language because we can inspect the words and grammar.

1. 사과를 먹어
2. eat apples
3. 吃蘋果

There’s no doubt that those sentences are Korean, English, and Chinese.
On the other hand,

“sagwa-reul meogeo”

has to be Korean, even though it’s written in the Roman alphabet.

So when we see:

동대문 / Dongdaemun / 東大門

It could be Korean-English-Chinese, or Korean-Korean-Korean, or Korean-English-Korean, or Korean-Korean-Japanese, …
And it got me thinking … is there any way I can determine which languages are being written here?

Is it even plausible that the signage is entirely Korean? What would be the point of writing the same Korean name three times in a row, in different scripts?
I think it is plausible. After all, adding romanized Korean allows users of languages written in the Roman alphabet to recognize and identify stop names. And adding Korean written in hantcha allows users of the Chinese and Japanese scripts to recognize and identify stop names.
It's also plausible that the signs would be in Korean, and also in English (the most commonly recognized language in the world), and either Japanese or Chinese (because so many visitors to Seoul are from China, Taiwan, and Japan).
But how to decide which of these two plausible possibilities is actually the case?

I started inspecting more signs to see if I could resolve my question, and the answer soon became clear.

Here are a few more signs. See if you can figure it out. Sign in subway station read...Sign in subway station read...
Did you figure it out?

Look at the first photo. Take another look at this:

미아삼거리 / Miasamgeori / 彌阿삼거리 Closeup of sign showing tex...
"彌阿삼거리" is clearly neither Chinese nor Japanese, since neither of those languages is ever written in Hangul.

It’s gotta be Korean!

It's mixed-script Korean.
The Sino-Korean components are written in hantcha. The native Korean components like geori ‘road’ have to be written in Hangeul because modern mixed-script Korean only permits Chinese components to be written in Chinese characters.
So the third script isn’t Chinese or Japanese. It’s a mixed hantcha-hangeul written form of Korean.

Kind of crazy, right? Why write Korean twice?

We'll come back to that question in a bit.
Although we've resolved the question of the the third language on the signs, we still can’t tell if the second language is English or romanized Korean. “Miasamgeori” could be either. Repeat of part of sign read...
But this sign seals the deal. We've finally found a location name that disambiguates the languages for us. Subway sign reading "동...
동서울터미널 / Dongseoul Bus Terminal / 東서울터미널

The second language is clearly English, and the third is clearly Korean. The Korean name “Dong-Seoul Teomineol” has only one Sino-Korean component, namely dong ‘east’. So that’s the only part that can get written in hantcha.
(Seoul is very unusual. As far as I know it's the only modern city name in Korea that is native Korean instead of Sino-Korean.)
Maybe you're asking this question:

Does the written form “東서울터미널” help a Chinese or Japanese tourist find their way around?

It's a fair question. My answer is:

Probably not.
But 동서울터미널 is an outlier; the majority of Korean place names are mostly or entirely made up of Sino-Korean roots, so the Seoul subway signage system works pretty well overall for Chinese and Japanese tourists.
Here, for example, is a sign that works really well for users of a Chinese-character script, because the mixed hantcha-hangeul written form is entirely in hantcha:

주변지역 안내도 / Neighborhood Map / 周邊地域案內圖 Close-up of title of map in...
The whole map is fun to look at and compare the three ways of writing each location. Neighborhood map in the Wor...
So now, assuming consistency in signage, we can go back to the sign we started with and say confidently:

It's bilingual (Korean-English-Korean)

and

tri-scriptal. Sign in subway station read...
It’s yet another reminder that script and language are not the same, and can intersect in surprising ways, as I illustrated in this language quiz from a few months ago:



/end
I should have made this clear from the beginning: These photos are from 2007.

The signage today has changed, as @dailykoreanfact helpfully pointed out.

Now there are unambiguously four languages in four scripts:

1. Korean in Hangul
2. English in Roman alphabet
3. Mandarin in simplified Chinese characters
4. Japanese in Katakana
There's a fine line between translation and transliteration when it comes to proper names.

The English translation of Tōkyō 東京 is "Tokyo".

The normal way to translate "Tōkyō-ni sundeiru 東京に住んでいる" into English is "I live in Tokyo", not "I live in the Eastern Capital".
Translations of proper names are typically sound-based borrowings or transliterations, not calques.

Two more examples: Máo Zédōng 毛泽东 in English is "Mao Zedong", not "Shining-East Fur". Düsseldorf in English is "Dusseldorf", not "Dussel Village" or "Dusselthorp".
For place names with transparent etymologies and no widely accepted English form, whether a proper translation should be a calque or a transcription is an open question.

Is the English translation of Dongdaemun 동대문 "Dongdaemun" or "East Gate"? I can imagine either one.
But I find the choice made in this sign odd. I would probably have gone with "East Seoul" not "Dongseoul". Image
There's an added twist when the place name is made of Sinitic elements with known Chinese characters, and the languages involved are Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and/or Vietnamese.
This is because sinogram-based orthographic transliteration is more or less the same as etymological calquing, and is a viable alternative to strict translation and to strict transliteration.
To give an example. Suppose you want to translate Korean anneido 안내도 "guide map" into Standard Written Chinese. You have three choices, unlike the two choices available if you were to translate into English. Image
1. You could *translate* it into the Mandarin word with the most similar meaning, dǎolǎntú 导览图.

2. You could *transliterate* it into Mandarin syllables approximating Korean pronunciation: ānnèidǒu 安内斗.
3. You could identify the Chinese characters that represent its etymological origin (案內圖), adjust them into the simplified script (案內图), and then pronounce them in their conventional Mandarin readings (ànnèitú).
Sometimes this yields a word that exists already in the target language, sometimes it doesn't. But because the morphemes have recognizable semantics, the process usually "works" for language users, with an intelligible result.
This third option is kind of like if you were to translate German Düsseldorf into English "Dusselthorp". We just don't do this sort of thing with any regularity outside of the Sinographosphere.

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More from @ZevHandel

Jul 31
What’s my new book about?

📖🧵 Cover of book Chinese Characters across Asia
It may seem obvious from the title — Chinese Characters across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese — but that’s just part of the story. There’s a lot more happening in these pages.

2/
Before I got any further, let me just say that although this is a sophisticated book but it’s most definitely NOT a technical book. It’s meant to be readable and understandable by just about anybody, without being dumbed down or inaccurate.

3/
Read 22 tweets
Jan 16, 2023
1/ Hey, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Well, I’m back!

🧵

#Cantonese 🇭🇰
2/ At long last, here is the third and final part of this thread, which is about Cantonese and the outer ring planets.

Or … is it?

3/ Recall that in Part 1, we established that you are a linguist in the year 3022 (that's you in the image). And you are working on reconstructing Cantonese as spoken 1,000 years in your past! You’ve got an excellent textual source to help you, a dictionary.
Cartoon image of a silly-looking futuristic robot linguist
Cover of dictionary titled 广州音字典:普通话对照 published by 广东人民出版社
Read 25 tweets
Aug 16, 2022
At long last, Part 2 of this thread. We’re thinking about how much we could reconstruct of late 20th-century spoken Cantonese from a vantage point 1,000 years in the future ... if this dictionary were our only available source of information. Cover of dictionary titled 广州音字典:普通话对照
2/ Here’s the setup: The year is 3022, you’re a linguist, and you’ve stumbled across a precious document: a dictionary of Cantonese. The existence of the language was already known, but no direct documentary evidence was known to be extant: until now.
3/ You undertake a systematic analysis of the dictionary data. This is the book you eventually proudly publish: a reconstruction of the ancient language Cantonese from ten centuries ago! Image of book cover with title in flowery red script: “Old
Read 47 tweets
Jul 22, 2022
Let’s do a little thought experiment about Cantonese (Gwong²dung¹waa² 廣東話).

To be precise: A historical-linguistic thought experiment about modern-day Cantonese.

Ready to expand your mind?
🧠🧐
2/ The year is 3022. A calendar showing days and...Cover of the 1955 science f...
3/ You’re a historical linguist.

Maybe you’re a robot historical linguist.
Maybe you’re a mutant historical linguist.
Maybe you’re an alien historical linguist. A robot (Sinclair 2K, from ...A mutant (Fry in a disgusti...An alien (Lord Nibbler, fro...
Read 24 tweets
Jun 11, 2022
In a thread I posted a few days ago, I explained that the Mandarin name Yālù and the Korean name Amnok not only refer to the same river, but are in fact historically the same name.

I also made this claim about the etymology:
2/ One of the great things about sharing these ideas on Twitter is that more knowledgeable people point out mistakes or provide additional information.

I got some very informative feedback/pushback on the Manchu etymology: the “twist” in that thread. Photo of a cruller (twisted donut pastry; 꽈배기)
3/ The hypothesis I presented about the etymology is widely circulated. For example these popular web sites in English, Chinese, and Korean repeat the Manchu-origin hypothesis.
Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalu_Rive…
Baidu: baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%B8%AD…
Namu Wiki: namu.wiki/w/%EC%95%95%EB…
Read 31 tweets
Jun 8, 2022
1/ This is the river that divides the Korean peninsula from continental East Asia. It runs along the current border between North Korea and the People’s Republic of China.

What is its name? Depends on which side of the river you are on. Photograph of the Yālù/Amno...
2/ When I first learned that the Yālù River and the Amnok River were the same river, I assumed that these Mandarin and Korean names must be different, unrelated names.

YALU ≟ AMNOK
3/ Later, after I’d become more sophisticated about Chinese and Korean language history, I realized that they are historically the same name: the Mandarin and Korean pronunciations of 鴨綠/鸭绿 meaning ‘duck green’.
Read 37 tweets

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