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.

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1550475068933033984

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.

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:

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1534515279644205064

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

Ready to solve a puzzle?

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.)

I imagine that, like me, you’ve been spending some time lately hanging out with Jay Park and IU, listening to their sweet R&B hit song GANADARA. Say, that makes me wonder: Why does Hangul alphabetical order start with ga-na-da ㄱ ㄴ ㄷ?

For that matter, why is the Latin alphabet ordered A B C?

🤔 I feel a thread coming on! 🧵

[Spoiler alert: We’re not going to be able to answer the second question.]

I ask you: Who doesn’t love the Korean alphabet? 💖

✍️ Let’s check out a bit of Hangul history! 한글🧵
🇰🇷🇰🇵 2/ If you’ve learned even a little Korean, you’ve probably noticed that the names of most Korean Hangul letters conform to a pattern.

For example:
ㄴ is named ni-ŭn / ni-eun 니은
ㅂ is named pi-ŭp / bi-eup 비읍
ㅍ is named p’i-ŭp / pi-eup 피읖

🎉 Happy New Year! 🥳

Did you know? All three basic Mandarin pronouns have irregular historical developments.

More interesting: All three give the appearance of being frozen in time — preserving ancient pronunciations.

Let’s check it out! 2/ These are the guys we're talking about:

1sg: wǒ 我 ‘I, me’
2sg: nǐ 你 ‘you’
3sg: tā 他* ‘she/he/it, her/him’

*(also written 她/它/牠/祂 etc.)

Some time ago I thought up an English word game that has some parallels to this.

👉 List as many homophonous triplets as you can that all have different orthographic forms. In other words, these are distinctly written words that are pronounced identically.

Example: to, too, two

https://twitter.com/JPRidgeway/status/1448921140341231662

As far as I know there are no on-line tools that can help with this, you have to do it using your own brain.

Results will differ to some extent depending on the dialect of spoken English you use as your basis for determining homophony.

1/ Let’s talk about butter in Korean.

Not this one. 2/ Hope you're not too disappointed.

I was thinking more maybe this one.

Parallelism!

This is the third and final 🧵 on how linguistics can—and should—inform our understanding and appreciation of ancient Chinese poetry. 2/ We’ve been using the well-known Tang poem 送友人 Sòng yǒu rén by 李白 (701–762) (M. Lǐ Bái / Lǐ Bó, Cant. Lei5 Baak6) as an exemplar, and we’ll stick with it in this last installment.

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

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

)

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.

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/

🔥 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.

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/

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.

Time to give some much-deserved attention to #Cantonese #廣東話 #粵語 🇭🇰! I know! How about a thread on Written Cantonese? Yes, it’s the written language that is widely used by millions of people but largely invisible outside its community of users!

2/

If you grew up in America, you may be familiar with the 4-H youth development organization. The four Hs from which the organization takes its name are Head, Heart, Hands, and Health. This 🧵 isn’t about 4-H, but it is about two of those H words: “head” and “hand”.