Then you might respond the same way folks did to the 1977 proposed-but-never-accepted “second round” character simplifications. I mentioned these a couple of posts ago in response to a hand-painted sign that used one of the rejected simplifications (仃 for 停).

Apparently the nu speling wasn’t well received.

Thanks to Zev Handel, who volunteered his scans in the comments, we now have a fuller picture of what was proposed. In the pics below, the simplifications are on the left and the original(s) on the right in brackets. Continue…

One of my grittier walks in Beijing meanders through crooked streets where the most common sign advertises, in glorious neon, “成人用品24h” [chéngrén yòngpǐn / Adult Products]. So when I stumbled across this No Parking sign*…

… 禁止仃车 (jìnzhǐ tíng chē), in which the third character is 仃 instead of the proper 停, I immediately assumed it was an uneducated mistake propagated by one of society’s fringe characters.

But it turns out to be a fringe character of a different sort. Continue…

Most of what follows is the product of several discussions I have had over the past few weeks with Naxi scholar Dr Li Jingsheng 李静生, former researcher at the Dongba Culture Research Centre here in Lijiang.

When we think of Chinese character classification, I guess it’s normal to think mostly of the preface to Xu Shen’s  许慎 Shuowen Jiezi 说文解字.

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This is part two of a series. Part one is available here.

In my last post I went over a number of contractions for which characters have been encoded into Unicode as well as discussing some of the inherent limitations in encoding methods. In this post, I’ll be explaining why this matters.

The technical limitations imposed by having a finite number of glyphs aren’t something that affects only the writing of topolects. It’s also an issue for the development of modern Mandarin as the creation of new terminology for new concepts is likely to be severely limited in the future by the lack of flexibility in the written language. Of course, this is a limitation that we may never be aware of in future years, much like one cannot truly be aware of other paths one’s life may have taken. And granted, there are thousands upon thousands of characters that we’ll never see outside of character tables or the 康熙字典, but it’s still a major limitation as far as being Mandarin is a living language.

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Despite what any beginning Mandarin student will tell you, there’s a severe limitation on the number of available characters, and it’s an historically recent occurrence. Though it’s only been a short time in the history of the language since any real systemic effort towards standardisation has occurred (秦始皇 mythology aside) I believe it to have had a significant impact and a potentially greater impact in the future.

There was once great variety in the written language even during the later stages of modern simplification. Up until recently the only real limitation was the ability to carve a block for printing. Even today some regional characters exist (e.g. 俺 ǎn), though they’re not used in any formal settings, although in at least a couple cases the simplification process took advantage of these regional variations or pronunciations1. Continue…

Each of Masha Bell’s entries at her spelling-reform oriented site, English Spelling, reads a bit like this:

… he covered himself with his buckler, couched his lance, charged at Rozinante’s full gallop and rammed the first mill in his way. He ran his lance into the sail, but the wind twisted it with such violence that it shivered the spear to pieces, dragging him and his horse after it and rolling him over and over on the ground, sorely damaged.

I love a good tilt at the windmill, and part of me believes in the righteousness of the fight, so I keep reading, even though I’m pretty sure I know how it ends. The blog is also fun because nearly every entry could be written practically identically for Hanzi. In fact, just for kicks, here’s her latest entry with a few substitutions: Continue…

Lazily borrowing everything from Language Log, I offer up “mistakeholders” for contemplation:

The people who have come to rely on features that are actually implementation errors are called ‘mistakeholders’.

My assertion: there has GOT to be an example of a Chinese character created in error through mis-copying, mis-remembering, what-have-you, that subsequently was accepted into the realm of legitimate hanzi. The existence of such would make us (users of the script) all mistakeholders.

Sounds like a job for a hound of hanzi history. Anyone?

Consider the use of profanity quotative here. To take it directly from the definition in the ABC Dictionary:

cèi v. <coll.> (1) smash to pieces (2) attack; beat the shit out of

Emphasis mine. Maybe it’s only fair that the ABC doesn’t mince words — the description seems rather appropriate for this morning’s character venture.

All I wanted to do was to write the everyday word cèi, meaning to smash/shatter. The process of finding the appropriate hanzi is usually simple enough:

1. Look up the pinyin in the open-sourcish CE Dict (which, while not always reliable, has lots of stuff and is conveniently available through MDBG‘s interface)
2. If that fails, get up and find cell phone and type it into the incomparable Pleco, where I’ve got at least four dictionaries at my disposal.
3. I almost never have to consider a step 3 at this stage in my hanzi (il)literacy, since I find almost everything I want. But see below for details.

Not today. Continue…

A bit late to the party on this one, but a few days ago Danwei had a great translation from Hecaitou’s blog on the futility of blocking dirty words. Creative stuff:

Hecaitou originally wrote: 不 矢口 亻十 么 日寸 候 ， 亻奄 口斤 言兑 矢豆 亻言 也有 辶寸 氵虑 敏 感 字 节 白勺 言兑 氵去 ， 于 是 ， 亻奄 学 会 了 扌斥 字 ……后 来, 亻奄 米青 礻申 分 歹刂 鸟~”

Danwei translation: “I don’t know when it was that I heard that mobile phones are also being filtered for sensitive words, therefore, I learnt to split characters… later on, I became schizophrenic”

For those still wondering what’s going on, Hecaitou takes characters that can be broken into parts which are also characters in their own right — and he simply breaks them up. The result is visually clear but hard for an unsophisticated character/phrase-blocking program to understand. Compare

Original: 不 矢口 亻十 么 日寸 候 (9 characters, meaningless gibberish)

Read as: 不知什么时候 (6 characters) Continue…

An article in the Lijiang Weekly News (丽江新闻周报) recently caught my attention: party secretary of the municipal party committee Wang Junzheng 王君正 has stressed the need to avoid the “eight legged news report” style of journalistic writing.

“Eight legged news reports” 新闻八股文 are a play on the eight-legged essays 八股文, a style of essay employed in the imperial examinations during the Ming and Qing that has become synonymous with pedantry and lack of innovation.

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