Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon
Tonight in unexpected numismatics: identifying two kinds of coins in five different writing systems for my mother. The former had classical-looking pomegranates on the obverse and were obviously Israeli because they said so in Hebrew, English, and Arabic; they turned out to be Israeli pounds or lirot issued between 1967 and 1980 and the design of a triple branch of budding pomegranates looked familiar to me because it was patterned after the shekels issued in the first year of the First Jewish Revolt (66–67 CE). My grandparents almost certainly brought them home from their visit to Israel in the mid-1980's. The latter were very worn, thin copper or brass cash and I thought Chinese, which meant the latest they could have been issued was 1911; they turned out to have been struck in Guangdong in the reign of the Guangxu Emperor, specifically between 1890 and 1908, and the script I didn't recognize on the reverse was Manchu. We have no idea where they came from. I really appreciate the role the internet played in allowing me to stare at images of different kinds of cash until I recognized enough characters to narrow my search parameters, because I don't actually read either Chinese or Manchu. I mean, I know now that the Manchu for "coin" is boo and it looks like this and the Chinese inscription on the obverse of that issue is 光緒通寶 which simply means "Guangxu currency" (Guāngxù tōng bǎo) and the reason it took me forever to track down two of those characters turns out to be the difference between Traditional and Simplified Chinese, but seriously, without the internet, that would have just been a lot of interesting metal to me.
(Me to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch: "This is ridiculous. If I can read cuneiform, I should be able to read Chinese. I feel incredibly stupid." Rob to me: "You can't call yourself stupid if you're teaching yourself Chinese!")
(Me to
spatch: "This is ridiculous. If I can read cuneiform, I should be able to read Chinese. I feel incredibly stupid." Rob to me: "You can't call yourself stupid if you're teaching yourself Chinese!")
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That's just the kind of scavenger hunt I adore. Long ago, I did some quotation hunting for the English translator of a French scientist's autobiography. He had a blithe way of writing, "as Shakespeare says," or "as Plato says," or "as Li Bo says," followed by an impressionistic French version of the lines. No citations. No internet back then. Since you can't back-translate Shakespeare (or whoever), my job was to trace the actual author and actual passage, and provide a reference to a standard edition. As I recall, the Greek turned out to be something like the Axiochus of Pseudo-Plato.
Nine
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Thank you! It was fun. I was a little sorry the cash did not turn out to be Vietnamese only because it would have been thematic (and because the possibility got the English translation of a Vietnamese folk poem stuck in my head), but hey, I learned something about Manchu.
As I recall, the Greek turned out to be something like the Axiochus of Pseudo-Plato.
But that's so much less pithy than "As Plato says . . ."!
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Nine
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I knew it was a language, but (a) I didn't think of it when I was looking at the coins (b) I'm not sure I knew it had a written form. It is apparently very endangered as a spoken language and I hope it's not lost.
What a pretty script (and I am delighted to see how many letters are required to render the word 'Manchu' pronounceable in French!
Yes!
It looks more like Tengwar than any non-invented language I've ever seen.
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Ah, not just me, then? Phew!
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Totally not just you! I was surprised to run a cursory internet search and not see anyone discussing at least the possibility of a link.
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Being able to read cuneiform pretty much disqualifies you from 'stupid'!
And it's not as if Chinese and Cuneiform are remotedly related scripts.
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But my brain says, "Yes, but you learned cuneiform more than ten years ago when your mind actually worked and you hadn't yet destroyed or thrown away all your natural talents, nowadays it doesn't count." Which is why I write out things like this post for myself to remind my brain is wrong.
And it's not as if Chinese and Cuneiform are remotedly related scripts.
This is true. But written Chinese is a combination of ideograms and phonetic values, which is the same sort of mix I needed to wrap my head around in order to read Akkadian, so it feels on a kind of continuum.
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That is **amazing** that you have that Chinese coin. So cool. And I remember seeing Manchu script. It looks sort of like vertical Arabic.
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They turned up with the Israeli pounds in a small weather-damaged bag in the summer kitchen. Most of my grandmother's coin collection was either U.S. oddities or currency from countries she visited with my grandfather, but since they never visited China and in any case I'm pretty sure imperial cash wouldn't have been legal tender for years, their provenance is completely unknown. They are totally worthless in collector's terms, but since I don't want to get rid of them, that's fine!
And I remember seeing Manchu script.
That's neat! Where were you?
It looks sort of like vertical Arabic.
My father actually asked if it was Arabic when my mother first brought out the coins. I didn't think so, but then I didn't know what it was instead. Now I know.
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Grad school--there were some students doing Manchu. (Not me though!)
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Word.
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Also, the thing where you read MULTIPLE LANGUAGES written in cuneiform.
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I only read Assyrian and Babylonian and they are both Akkadian! I know some Sumerograms, but that's not the same as being able to read Sumerian.
. . . Larger point taken.
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Okay.
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It was fun! My mother wants to point me at the rest of my grandmother's coin collection now.
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It was a nice way to wind up an evening!
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Rob is not wrong.
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Thank you. I'm working on it!
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Hee. I learned it in grad school. Cuneiform itself is a logosyllabic script which was developed for Sumerian, an agglutinative language isolate first attested around 3000 BCE—what I can read in it is Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian), a slightly younger Semitic language which went extinct even in its written form in the first century CE and was rediscovered and deciphered from inscriptions starting in the late eighteenth century and accelerating into the mid-nineteenth, after which we had the field of Assyriology. The script is polyvalent, meaning that any given sign can be read one of four ways: logographically, phonetically, as a determinative (classifying the noun it precedes), or as a phonetic complement (adding a grammatical element to a logogram); context allows the reader to sort out which is which. This sounds like a death rebus, but in terms of absolute complexity is not actually worse than several systems in operation today. It also helps that I own this very handy sign list compiled by René Labat and was not expected to have memorized every sign in the literature, although twelve years ago when I was actually staring at this stuff on a day-to-day basis I did have a working recall of a respectable number.
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Including hanzi/kanji.
Japanese writing as a whole is even worse, though.
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How so? I know something about kanji and kana (hiragana, katakana), but probably not much more than that.
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Almost all kanji have multiple possible pronunciations: one or usually more "Chinese" readings (on), the Japanese approximation of a Chinese pronunciation at the time the hanzi was adopted/readopted;* one or frequently more "Japanese" readings (kun), which is the stem of a native Japanese word with an approximate meaning of the hanzi when it was adopted/readopted; and multiple "Name" readings, special alternate pronunciations that can be used when the kanji is part of a name. Much but no means all of the time, when the kanji is part of a non-name compound, an on reading is used, and which of multiple possiblies is used can depend on which of multiple possible senses is intended. Contrariwise, most native Japanese words can be written with multiple possible kanji, all pronounced with the same kun reading, and in many cases the kanji used can shade the meaning. When a kanji is used alone, it typically is pronounced with a kun reading, except when the Chinese word has been nativized (as in cha for tea).
* To order pronunciation drift since then, anyway.
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Thank you for this explanation!
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I take it this was a popular reader question?