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.
Enhypen Alphabet
Enhypen Alphabet (‘empirical nominal hyperlingual notation’) is a language-neutral spelling system for Chinese characters, specifically for Chinese-derived proper names. It bears less prejudice from Mandarin, as compared to Yuen Ren Chao’s General Chinese and Professor Gu Qian’s Common Sound Systems of Chinese Dialects, where the bias is more or less dedicated.
It serves as a startpoint to ‘Sinicize’ respective for tacit perceptions of characters, which is barely possible for natural languages, stubborn for previous works, and Shidinn leads to the other extreme.
Which character for inbound passengers?
During the climax of COVID-19 lockdown, the news bulletin was flooded with the phrase lai x faan x renyuan
(inbound passengers of x) or similar, where x is a monosyllabic short name of a geographic unit. The short names for units other than provinces has been far less common at present than the first half of the last century, when you are expected to read in columns. A critique that time states that the short names are so irrecognisable that writers need to annotate the full names, as in across Ping (Peiping), Tsin (Tientsin)…
(from memory, I cannot find the source by now).
I crawled recent announcements for this post. I did not discern the full name actually denoted in the context, making the data noisy. Regions with insufficient data were omitted.…