This was on the seat in front of me on a recent flight to Korea:

That’s “着度中에는 安全帶를 매십시오” and “救命胴衣는 座度 밑에 있습니다” in case the image doesn’t show up.

This makes me think two things. 1) I really need to practice my Korean typing again. That took way too long to write. 2) This is probably an old airplane. I’m pretty sure newspapers, even conservative ones like Chosun Ilbo (조선일보/朝鮮日報), stopped using mixed-script in the mid-1990s. I certainly never saw it when I lived there with the exception of a 美 or 大 here and there. Planes get used for a really long time, and this one certainly had some thai cosmetic issues to account for years of service.

There are a number of textbooks that include mixed-script texts for the sake of learning hanja, but little else is currently printed in that way. It’s almost too bad. It’s a nice look, and knowing a few more hanja probably wouldn’t hurt anyone. But then it’s not doing a lot for improved literacy rates this way.

I was a little surprised to see an article this morning about Lyu Xinhua.

At 62, veteran diplomat Lyu Xinhua was given a new job: the spokesman of China’s top political advisory body.

Lyu is not a typo. The Xinhua Agency seems to use this spelling of his family name consistently. Here’s the man himself.

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While in Taipei this past week I ended up at the Islamic Cemetery (回教公墓, المقبرة الاسلامية) near Liuzhangli Station. It’s one of many cemeteries that wrap around the mountain, any one of which could easily take up a full day of wandering around, inspecting inscriptions. There was an interesting mix of Chinese and Islamic cemetery aesthetic. And rather than swamp RSS feed subscribers with a bunch of pictures, here’s a link to a Google+ photo album with a dozen shots of the area.

The most interesting thing was the use of Sini script on a number of the inscriptions, such as that in the photo above. We’ve talked about Sini a little here before. To recap, it’s a form of Arabic calligraphy unique to China’s Muslim ethnic minorities. And without having actually done a lot of research on this particular cemetery, most of the signs pointed to the graves belonging to members of the Hui minority, or rather what would be called Hui in today’s PRC; Many stones had Arabic names that didn’t phonetically match the Chinese names, and a lot of the Chinese family names were 馬, a name common among Hui, originally chosen as a phonetic approximation for earlier generations’ Arabic names.

At any rate, it was nice to see the regular use of Sini, as well as being a good reminder of the wide range of people who came to Taiwan as the Communists took power.

Check the album for more photos.

At the very periphery of what I can get away with talking about here at Sinoglot, I bring you an article which was emailed to me about efforts to save a dying Austronesian language in Taiwan. Go ahead and read the whole article. I’ll wait. Continue…

I was thrilled to get my hands on a copy of Zhu Xiaonong’s book A Grammar of Shanghai Wu today. I was not thrilled with how it began. Below is the first paragraph in full:

Whether Chinese is a single language or a group of languages depends on the judgment criteria applied. The view that Chinese is a single language is reflected in Chinese linguistic literature. In the Western literature, however, Chinese is often regarded as a language sub- family containing separate languages like Wú 吴语, Mandarin 官话, Xiāng 湘语, Gàn 赣语, Kèjiā 客家话 (Hakka), Yuè 粤语 (Cantonese 广东话), Mǐn 闽语 (Hokien 福建话), etc. The linguistic differences between them are admittedly as large as those between, say, English and German or even larger. However, the shared culture, the uniform writing system, the same linguistic norm, and especially the common psychological identification by the speakers of these varieties make the identifying task relatively simple: Chinese is a single language with arguably the greatest linguistic diversity among languages.

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Samuel Purchas died in 1626. He claimed never to have travelled more than 200 miles from his birthplace, in the East of England. In 1613 he published the first edition of Purchas his Pilgrimage. The title page of the fourth edition, published in the year of his death, explains the focus of Purchas’ work:

Relations of the world and the religions observed in all ages and places discovered, from the creation unto this present

Chap. 18, Section VI of that fourth edition offers us a single paragraph on Chinese language. His sources seem to be Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, to whom he admits, somewhat grudgingly, that he is indebted.

I would like to wish all of our readers a very happy and healthy 2013, and offer you Purchas’ account of language in China.

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If you haven’t already, head over to China Digital Times and check out the post on dying languages in China. Obviously it’s a topic close to our hearts here at Sinoglot.

Some highlights:

• Non-han languages: 55 officially designated “peoples” (民族) speak an estimated 130 languages
• Populations: one-half of non-Han languages are spoken by groups that number under 10,000 members, of which 20+ have 1,000 speakers or less
• Endangered languages: Manchu, Tatar, She, Hezhen can no longer be used for conversation; another 20 percent, such as Nu, Yilao, Pumi and Jinuo are approaching that state; and a total of 40 percent are in danger of extinction in the mid-term.
• Manchu: 11 million ethnic Manchus, but only 100 or so can speak fluently and less than a dozen read and write well.

Can Sinoglot readers puzzle out the romanized version of a name of Chinese origins? Chris Waugh writes:

Got an email from a friend about a Malaysian Chinese author whose name is Khor Ewe Pin/许友彬, a bit of googling and google.com.my threw up an article in Bahasa Melayu that gave as his bahasa ‘Kantonis’ and ‘Bahasa Inggeris’ and ‘Bahasa Melayu’. A bit more googling suggested Khor is a possible romanisation of 许 in Malaysia. I made a thoroughly uneducated guess based on that Bahasa: Kantonis that Khor may be Cantonese, but neither of us has managed to find any more…. I was wondering if somebody in the Phonemica or Sinoglot communities might be able to answer this question: what ‘lect is Khor Ewe Pin? Thoughts?

I was asked about this yesterday, and frankly I just don’t know the answer. But someone here might. Wiktionary has a reference in a couple different places of 七 transcribed as shǎng. I asked a couple other people about this but with no luck.

Is there such an alternate pronunciation? Is it a regional thing like 两 as the standard 2 in Wu or 幺 not showing up in Taiwan outside of the military?

Steve pointed out the likelihood that Wiktionary is just wrong. I can accept that. But since it’s in a few different places we thought it might be worth asking about here.

Chinese traces use of the iteration mark (usually〻 or 々) to indicate a repeated character back at least 2900* years or so. A Wikipedia article dates this piece of bronzeware

back to 825 BCE, where you can see something like 二 used to indicate doubling of 子and 孫 to make “子子孫孫寶用” Continue…