Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon

[sovay]

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 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!")

Comments

[isis]

...you can read cuneiform? How do you even? (I suppose the Rosetta Stone line of language learning tools would be appropriate here!)

[sovay]

...you can read cuneiform? How do you even? (I suppose the Rosetta Stone line of language learning tools would be appropriate here!)

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.

[larryhammer]

This sounds like a death rebus, but in terms of absolute complexity is not actually worse than several systems in operation today.

Including hanzi/kanji.

Japanese writing as a whole is even worse, though.

[sovay]

Japanese writing as a whole is even worse, though.

How so? I know something about kanji and kana (hiragana, katakana), but probably not much more than that.

[larryhammer]

Both kana syllabaries have regular pronunciations, so those are relatively straightforward, with the added fillip that inflected words are usually written kanji (stem) + hiragana (inflection).

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.

[sovay]

Almost all kanji have multiple possible pronunciations

Thank you for this explanation!