My linguistic history

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 was not 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 environment in Standard Chinese due to 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 dialects are 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’,¹ and supplemented with the words, ‹so awkward; definitely not ancient Chinese!› Recently, I read in a comment section, saying the commentator had passionately studied Esperanto but now remembered no more than 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 for paperworks and chatrooms, 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 Bǎidù. This included stumbling upon a vocabulary app; I abandoned it after fewer than 100 words though a child could memorize words effortlessly — a peer gained up to ten thousand without knowing at the same time.² There are many possible reasons — oops, my younger self would say reason means ‘evidence of crime’. The vocabulary app enlists all dictionary definitions, where five means ‘a basketball team’, in means ‘monarch’ (I tried to compose an in in in in as my Buffalo), will means ‘testament’ (finally something real!), and I guess I do not know a word unless I can mouth tens of definitions at once. And well, on that I should not have wasted ink, the primitive design and long memorising period. I have loved the user-posted mnemonics, though one may think O, bhenr tuul tiet! for opportunity so tensive.

One question I recall is what entering tone is. Bǎidù 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 ‹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 linguistic relativism that later prevailed among amateurs. One typical example is Why Chinese is So Damn Hard, which, despite its humour, offers serious insights:

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, Bǎidù’s forum Tiēbā (Tiepba) dominated my long-form reading. While Tiepba had some smart people overall, the language-related forums did not. I joined a QQ group 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 Tiepba, I was already reluctant of it.³

Meanwhile, I found an ebook, Etymology and Explanation of English Word Roots, where I learned the concept of ‘Proto-Indo-European’. I fetched the book after being introduced by some adults the (common but anachronic, as you can say) morphological analysis, which was also featured in Qu Qieptau’s Secret.

Around 2016, I started writing classical poetry, likely influenced by 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.

I was forced to live amongst basketball gurus in high school, so to fit in, I memorized basketball facts and popular players. Pedantic habits made me give players awkward Chinese names based solely on Mandarin phonetics, oblivious to how ill-suited they were (for players) or the rampant metathesis. I named PG-13 (Paul George) Pò Zhīzhuó, ‘soul the outstanding’, and Stephen Curry Xiè Yúnqú. The player I called Páiyáng⁴ 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’), evidently a topographic surname, while lowercase wade was from Old English wadan (‘to advance’). I also mistaked a character from my scarcely believed animé series, named wataru (‘to go through’), as a Wade!

At some point, I discovered ‘Zhīhū linguist’ Sheqwuizrii’s Wikiversity project on forgotten Chinese neologisms. Unlike the stereotypical image of language amateurs, Sheqwuizrii 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 Wénlǐ 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’s book but the vast facts blurred in memory. During a brief hiatus from the 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 ‘hundred flowers’⁵ symposium on language movements, which now seems less about a language’s vitality and more about its despairing cycles continuously changing into another language. Few were thought-provoking, save for the aforementioned New Wénlǐ. The most experimental for me was seriouslly learn German using the unsound ‹applied etymology›, 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. Though neither a theorist nor a polyglot, I feel the urge to carve out space for language matters in my increasingly busy life. Let time prove it all.