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zev handel Profile picture
@ZevHandel
Mar 27, 2021 • 42 tweets • 11 min read • Read on X
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30/ On the 1977 proposed (and then rescinded) second-round simplification of Chinese characters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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More from @ZevHandel

zev handel Profile picture
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
zev handel Profile picture
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
zev handel Profile picture
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
zev handel Profile picture
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
zev handel Profile picture
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
zev handel Profile picture
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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