Before the FSF40 gathering, William Goodspeed checked my blog when receiving my inquiry email. When I opened the same website in person, he asked: ‘Are you into linguistics?’ I wasn’t sure what expectations an English major might have by ‘into linguistics’, so I awkwardly avoided answering.
The other day, I read a reflection on their linguistic journey from a linguistics guru. This guru’s encounter with language began with academic competitions and has since woven a marvelous double helix of career and language, an achievement I can hardly imagine. Their article, however, debunked my ‘single-origin hypothesis of the linguistics community’, as I had assumed the entire language circle stemmed from discussions on a BBS forum in the early 2000s. This prompted me to reflect on the role language and linguistics have played in my life.
Nothing noteworthy happened ere the Great Muqliong Gang. I grew up in a monolingual Mandarin environment due to my family’s relocation. Leading a reclusive life, I had little exposure to languages around me and missed the chance to learn another native tongue or two. Perhaps those in multilingual environments develop a more agile linguistic intuition, but I often feel trapped in ‘monolingual curse’, my mental model still coping with a single language. For instance, when Copilot was malfunctioning earlier, I blurted out, ‘zhuàngluǎn!’.
In my childhood of dictionary definitions, I encountered Muqliong. Gossip and rumors travel fast among kids, whether it was attempt to explain helicopter mechanics, taking the scientific backdrop of Jurassic Park seriously, or the classic claim that ‘my dialect is ancient Chinese’. Our parents’ generation are not long ago trendsetters, seemingly obsessed in composing classical poetry until yesterday. When Yuulim’s father played with us, he shared his college experience learning ‘ancient Chinese’, and supplemented with the words, ‘so awkward; impossible to be ancient Chinese!’ Recently, I read in a comment section that someone had passionately studied Esperanto but now only remembered the word Esperanto and mi estas. We will all eventually depart, returning the fleeting joys we have taken explicitly from the world. By the way, I knew the name ‘Esperanto’ a few years before these stories, from a relative’s encyclopedia of youth. Under Mocsieng’s leadership, Muqliong once tried to invent an official language, but aborted.
The internet should have been a gateway to a new world. Many peers were inquisitive and well-read, but I was not that curious and squandered the most knowledge-sensitive age. Though, for specific topics like paradoxes, I did exhaustively search Baidu. This included stumbling upon a vocabulary software; a child could memorize words effortlessly but I abandoned it after fewer than 100 words. One question I recall is what entering tone is. Baidu told me that entering tone refers to syllables ending in -h, -p, -t, or -k, where -h shortens the syllable and is ‘easier’ to pronounce, while the others, like the -p in the English word stop, forms the mouth shape without vocalizing. A generous explanation. However I could not grasp how ‘forming the mouth shape’ differed from the sound not existing, but I quietly forgot the question. ‘Forming the mouth shape’ is itself another classic rumour, a frequent guest in childhood English classes and cram schools. The study of popular linguistic views among the ti’yčir class of the Nacirema tribe is indeed an enduring thesis. I also read lengthy discussions on handling entering tones in reading ancient poetry, escalating to the failure of education, yet concluding with the so-called but untrue ‘short and abrupt departing tone’, phrased as ‘it is OK to be oblique but not entering’.
Yes, many online discussions about language exist, but some use language as a pretext for racialism or regionalism, and some as a joke. The former includes various ‘innate deficiency’ theories, while others adhere to the relativism that later dominated linguistics amateurs. A typical example of the latter is Why Chinese is So Damn Hard, which, despite its humour, offers serious insights, such as:
Here’s a secret that sinologists won’t tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place.
Proponents of Jyutcitzi, the Cantonese phonetic square writing, pointed out this suggests Chinese character-based reading is not a typical reading process.
From 2012 to 2014, Baidu’s forum Tieba dominated my long-form reading. While Tieba had some smart people overall, the language-related forums did not. I joined a QQ group called ‘Built for Traditional Characters’, where childish activities like rewriting texts prevailed. The only noteworthy thing was a manuscript predicting the rise of retina displays, stating that ease of display as the only advantage of simplified characters would be nullified by ‘computer technology’ advancements. By then, forums like b/ChineseCharacter, b/TraditionalCharacter, b/SimplifiedCharacter, b/SecondSimplifiedCharacter, and others had lost their spark, as the peak of the simplified-traditional debate was around 2007. By the time I found them, most posts were forgotten and new arguments were repetitive. Their resolve to change language remained superficial, as if altering character forms alone, while keeping all other aspects of language static, was their ideal language. Before I decided to quit Tieba, I was already reluctant of it.
Meanwhile, to learn English, I found an ebook, Etymology and Explanation of English Word Roots, where I learned the concept of ‘Proto-Indo-European’.
Around 2016, I started writing classical poetry, likely influenced by two charming boys, Muc’heaq and Zeng Siaotiem, on a student platform ceased next year. My earliest ‘works’ were posted on that platform and a poetry app, but now I only recall fragments, which are barely readable. I did not learn about poetic meter until the following year, and for a long time, my understanding was limited to knowing it existed and using a printed rhyme table at school. When I tried explaining the connection between rhyme categories, stitches, and phonetic components, I was inevitably wrong.
My high school peers were basketball enthusiasts, so to fit in, I memorized basketball facts and popular players. My pedantic habits surfaced again, and I gave players awkward Chinese names based solely on Mandarin phonetics, oblivious to how ill-suited they were or the rampant metathesis. I named PG-13 (Paul George) Pòzhīzhuó and a rule-breaking player Xièyúnqú. The player I called Páiyáng was nearing retirement without becoming a meme, and I translated his Dear Basketball in the style of Chén Dúxiù’s Gitanjali translation. My too embarrassing to share. This makes me hypersensitive to others’ equally awkward creations.
When Dwayne Wade announced his retirement, I drew a commemorative comic but made a foolish mistake: I did not know that capitalized Wade and lowercase wade were different words. You can guess what I drew. Capitalized Wade comes from Old English wæd (ford, crossing), evidently a topographic surname. I had also mistakenly linked it to the Japanese word wataru via an anime character. (Possibly I was one of those who believe all foreign countries speaks English.)
At some point, I discovered ‘Zhihu linguist’ Sheqwuizrii’s Wikiversity project on forgotten Chinese neologisms. Unlike the stereotypical image of language amateurs, Sheng Weishi presented themselves with highly filtered photos, which I found oddly approachable. The Wikiversity project had collected 60,000 words, serving as a pixel-level language-learning tool for me (later, community projects like the Minecraft Wiki also relied on this data). Later, Sheqwuizrii’s stance shifted due to social issues, eventually focusing on the Europeanized New Wenli scheme, which I consider a worthwhile (hopefully not just) toy.
Though the Pavilion’s operations failed, it gave me immense emotional connection and even undue praise. I hadd spend an hour on the phone every weekend, a physical feat for someone who finds resonance exhausting. I was drawn into the ‘QQ linguistic amateurs’, piecing together scattered impressions. I memorized every detail of ʈiʊŋ kʷó xàn ŋiɤ́ ŋiɤ́ ɹim kɑ̀w ɖiɤŋ, though my understanding of Medieval Chinese came years later through deliberate research. I browsed Zhengzhang Shangfang’s book on a borrowing app, but the vast facts blurred in memory. During a brief hiatus from Lingyan Pavilion, exotic dialects and stories of Cantor and Turing fueled my distant fantasies, though academic pressures ultimately grounded them.
After that came the rainbow and receding flood, a time no longer mysterious. As evident, my engagement with language has always been tied to its social aspects, especially script reform and language in social change. I have also reflected on subcultural dynamics (dating back to the Clover vs EXO-L wars), akin to constructed languages. I can briefly discuss my involvement in both. In 2019, I read Lojban for Beginners, published on Tieba in the early 2000s, still describing xorlo as the latest update. In early 2021, I joined the Shidinn community, contributing to a derived language and some infrastructure. With peers, I discovered Toki Pona via a Firefly translation. After watching LangFocus’s introduction, I translated Living in a Tree by lookup without recalling vocabulary, memorizing most words. Language-building communities are a respite from chaotic reality, with tangible creations and distant, noble goals. ‘Neo-Chinese’ is often background noise online. I scoured CADAL’s ‘Hundred Flowers’ collection, which now seems less about a language’s vitality and more about its despairing cycles in its development. Few were thought-provoking, save for the aforementioned New Wenli. The most experimental for me was seriouslly learn German using the obscure ‘Sinicized German’ by Sky Darmos.
Even after engaging in these language-related matters, I felt no need to learn languages. But my memory is fading, likely beyond recovery. The monolingual curse affects all my creative work. If I should carve out space for language in my increasingly busy life, both theory and language matter. Let time prove it all.
(26 May 2025) in Beijing ╱ retrospection