This story strikes me as an urban legend, but a Google search was fruitless. In Nicholas Poppe’s memoirs Reminiscences ed. Henry G. Schwarz (Western Washington University, 1983), the great Altaic linguist recounts his family’s evacuation from Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War and then adds: The Russo-Japanese war was a complete disaster for Russia both on [...]
The guesthouse I’m staying at in Bishkek has a large pile of random paperbacks left by travelers, and today I was flipping through Gavin Menzies’ 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (London: Bantam Books, 2003). It is Menzies’ thesis that the great fleet launched by the Chinese emperor Zhu Di on 8 March 1421 [...]
A discussion over at sci.lang alerted me to several materials about the reconstruction of earliest stages of Chinese. Jacques Guillaume’s Introduction to Chinese Historical Phonology is, for all its lecture-note brevity, a fine presentation of the basics of the field. William Baxter’s Etymological Dictionary of Common Chinese Characters contains many Middle Chinese reconstructions. Finally, the [...]
Like Zhao Yuanren, whose poem “The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” I presented here several months ago, the linguist Y.R. Chao also composed several Chinese works written only with characters that are (excepting tones) homophones in Mandarin and therefore would ultimately make no sense if read aloud. Here’s an example: 西溪犀、喜嬉戲。嵇熙夕々携犀戲。嵇熙細々習洗犀。犀吸溪、戲襲熙。嵇熙嘻々希息戲。惜熙嘶々喜襲熙。 Using Pinyin transliteration, [...]
I’ve been doing more with Indo-European within my university studies now, enough that it is starting to seem like “work”, so in my free time I’ve been reading more about other language families. I’ve stumbled upon an fascinating connection between Athabaskan, an American Indian language family, Chinese, and Vietnamese, concerning the development of tones. In [...]
Some years ago, when I first began a course in Mandarin Chinese at Defense Language Institute, I was highly sceptical that a language with such a great number of homophones could possibly work effectively. In the Chinese-English dictionary I received, meant for students and with a rather meagre word stock, the Pinyin-romanized syllable ‘shì’ (IPA [...]