Leaving old posts up here. I’ll be doing new posting over at Bluesky, look for zevhandel there. Check out my new book from @UWAPress at the link below.
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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/ 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.
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.
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).
Say, that makes me wonder: Why does Hangul alphabetical order start with ga-na-da ㄱ ㄴ ㄷ?
2/ These are the guys we're talking about:
2/ Hope you're not too disappointed.
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. 
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.
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!