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zev handel

@ZevHandel

3 Sep

👋 Hey-hey! After a long summer delay, it’s time for Part 2 of this 🧵 on how medieval Chinese linguistic structure interacts with Tang poetic form — and on how an understanding of that structure can deepen our appreciation of the poetry.

Let's talk about meter! 👏👏👏👏

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1424613117917425665

2/ (The first part of the 🧵, on the interaction between tone and rhyme, is here:

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1424613117917425665

)

3/ One of the most commonly employed poetic devices around the world is meter, or rhythmic structure. Like rhyme, this is an inherently acoustic property of poetry: meter depends on the prosodic elements of pronunciation, such as stress, pitch, loudness, and length.

Read 59 tweets

zev handel

@ZevHandel

9 Aug

1/ Does all this historical linguistics stuff I keep posting about have any actual application—aside from being inherently interesting? 🙊

A thread on how linguistics can—and should—inform our understanding and appreciation of ancient Chinese poetry.

Lets' go! ⏩

2/ I’m a linguist, so I find discussions of language and script inherently of interest. But they can also inform our understanding of many other humanistic aspects of our past, so in this next thread I’d like to offer a glimpse of the utility of my field for analyzing poetry.

3/ I say “thread”, but it will probably have to be a series of threads 🧵🧵🧵, because a linguistically informed introduction to even a single short Tang poem is a surprisingly intricate endeavor.

(Even when over-simplified for Twitter.)

Read 39 tweets

zev handel

@ZevHandel

26 Jul

https://twitter.com/jianhuazi_bot2/status/1419479663915765761

What looking at the second-round simplifications character by character doesn't reveal are the systemic effects they would have had on the script. This character is a great example.

The first-round simplification changed 讓 into 让. That's a savings of 24-5=19 strokes. 1/

https://twitter.com/jianhuazi_bot2/status/1419479663915765761

There's no doubt that writing five strokes takes less time than writing 24. So that's worth something, I suppose.

But ... there are losses too. The simplified character isn't any easier to recognize, indeed it is probably more confusable with other characters, adding a very 2/

slight cognitive burden for the reader. (It's of no practical consequence, but worth mentioning.) The new phonetic element 上 isn't obviously a better match for the pronunciation than was 襄, so there's no improvement there for character learning. 3/

Read 13 tweets

zev handel

@ZevHandel

22 Jul

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1417696909033033734

🔥 Picking this back up 🔥
🧵

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1417696909033033734

Just to switch things up, I’m going to *start* this thread with a digression. We’ll get back to this set of words later.

One of the first things you learn as a student of historical linguistics is that sound change is regular. It’s a mind-blowing thing. 🤯 It’s not at all clear *why* sound change should be regular, but it is.

Read 55 tweets

zev handel

@ZevHandel

19 Jul

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1416973894125199366

Haha, I forgot to do this, didn't I?

Just as well, that other thread really was getting too long.

But I'll do it here. 1/

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1416973894125199366

Here’s the example, and the point of it is just to show that when Cantonese speakers write in MSWC (書面語), it’s not just a matter of choosing more "literary" or "formal" vocabulary words. The grammar is different too. 2/

Consider a sentence meaning ‘He eats faster than me.’

We'll start with the spoken sentences in Mandarin and Cantonese (which, remember are *different languages*).
3/

Read 11 tweets

zev handel

@ZevHandel

19 Jul

I recently wrote a thread in which I emphasized that spoken Cantonese 🇭🇰 and spoken Mandarin are distinct, non-mutually intelligible spoken languages. (They are two of the several dozen distinctly spoken languages that make up the Chinese language family.)
🧵

I wanted to show in that thread that there is a widely used *written* form of the spoken Cantonese language: Written Cantonese.

It's distinct in grammar and vocabulary from Modern Standard Written Chinese (MSWC), so not fully readable by speakers of other Chinese languages.

One claim I made in the course of that thread was disputed by some Cantonese speakers, particularly those living in Hong Kong. I appreciate the feedback and I’ve been ruminating on their comments.

Read 47 tweets

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