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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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’.
This thread features a Chữ Nôm graph with an unusual structure.
On our journey we will bump into the Portuguese word for ‘moon’ and discover some 17th-century Middle Vietnamese sounds that are now lost. 🇻🇳🇵🇹
1/🧵
2/ The Chữ Nôm graph we’re going to seek to understand is 𢁋. (If the graph isn’t rendering for you properly: its structure is ⿱巴陵).
It’s an even more unusual graph than it appears at first glance! (We’ll get to why in a bit.)
3/ Chữ Nôm 𡨸喃 (just Nôm for short) developed around the 14th century. It’s an adaptation of the mainstream Chinese-character script used for writing the Vietnamese language. Earlier, in the first millennium, the Chinese script was also adapted to write Korean and Japanese ...