Zev Handel

And there's a typo I made in the Korean title in the post above. That should of course be:

동아시아의 한자: 중국 문자의 차용과 변용

Korean cover of 동아시아의 한자: 중국 준자의 차용과 변용, a translation of Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script, by 제브 핸델 (Zev Handel)

My 2019 book Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script has just been published in Korean. I'm deeply grateful to Prof. LEE Yong 이용 (University of Seoul) and his team for the incredible effort that went into translating this work with care and accuracy.

동아시아의 한자: 중국 준자의 차용과 변용

Is it the default ampersand/et symbol in Irish Gaelic orthography? How is it pronounced?

Thank you for introducing me to the exotic Tironian ampersand ⁊ ! I did not know about it.

Do you know how extensively it is used today?

Anyway, do drop by to see me talk if you are in the neighborhood Tuesday afternoon, and stick around to say hi to me. I'd love to meet you.

bsky.app/profile/zevh...

... it can't represent the sound sequence hé in any other Mandarin words (like hé 'river', hé 'nucleus', etc.).

The ampersand has many other fine qualities besides being a Chinese-character-like logograph. Its shape and name both have a fascinating historical origin.

... it can't represent the sound sequence [ænd] in any other English word (like "sand", never written s&).

Compare a Chinese character like 和. It only writes the Mandarin word hé 'and'. It can't represent other Mandarin words with the same meaning (like gēn, yǔ, tóng, yìqǐ, etc.), and ...

I'm very fond of the ampersand.

Like most Chinese characters, it is a logograph (or, if you want to be more precise, a morphograph). As the slide illustrates, it writes only the word "and". It can't represent other English words with the same meaning (like "with", "also", "plus", etc.), and ...

This is one of the slides from my upcoming book talk at Barnes & Noble in the U District, Seattle (this Tuesday, 5:00pm). I often use the English ampersand as an example to help those with no knowledge of Chinese understand how Chinese characters function in Standard Written Chinese.

Wow, 小篆 seal script (based on Shuō wén jiě zì 說文解字) is going to be separately encoded for inclusion in Unicode 18.0!

Proposal document here: www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n53...

Oh no! I had hoped a 5:00pm start would avoid conflicts for most people.

Cover of the book Chinese Characters Across Asia by Zev Handel (University of Washington Press, 2025)

Like the book, this talk will be accessible to everyone—regardless of whether you have any knowledge of Chinese characters or East Asian languages. All are welcome and guaranteed to have a good time.

If you are in the Seattle area, come see me on February 3 at the Barnes and Noble UW Book Store. I'm holding a talk, reading, and book signing for my book Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.

stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/978006...

Front cover of Zev Handel’s book _Chinese Characters across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese_.

Just finished reading _Chinese Characters Across Asia_ by @zevhandel.bsky.social l. It’s the clearest introduction I have read about how the Chinese writing system works—dispelling common, long-held misunderstandings—, and how the script was adapted to Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Zhuang.

How interesting. The code point is for a digraph of L followed by a raised dot.

The ij digraph is presumably for Dutch?

I can see why cigarettes and alcohol are 迷惑, but jack-o-lanterns? They seem pretty harmless.

Are you sure that’s what it is an image of? It doesn’t look like much of anything to me.

I can see how it gives that impression.

There's also a great set of new digitized Nôm tools here at the Digitizing Vietnam project: www.digitizingvietnam.com/en/tools

/end of references

© VNPF 1999 - 2025. Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, All Rights Reserved.

You can find variants (like in Tweet #42) yourself using this on-line tool from the Nôm Preservation Foundation: nomfoundation.org/nom-tools/No... .

Try entering trăng in the search box!

Alexandre de Rhodes’ dictionary:
Page images at the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (Portuguese National Library): purl.pt/961
Digitized on Wikisource: vi.wikisource.org/wiki/T%E1%BB...

Huỳnh Sanh Thông translation from Posts #7-8: “Graphemic borrowings from Chinese: The case of chữ nôm--Vietnam’s demotic script” by Nguyễn Đình-Hoà. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 61.2:383–432. (I don’t know where the translation was originally published.)

© VNPF 1999 - 2025. Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, All Rights Reserved.

Tale of Kieu image from Post #4: nomfoundation.org/nom-project/...

Nôm dictionary page from Post #5: Trần Văn Kiệm 1989. Giúp Đọc Nôm Và Hán Việt. Republished 1999 Huê: Thuân hóa.

Text of Nguyễn Trãi poem Bảo kính cảnh giới #47 from Posts #6, 13: www.nomfoundation.org/nom-tools/QA...

50/ References follow for those interested.

/end

Same high resolution photograph of the moon as in post #1

49/ ... from writing a word for a giant snake and the name of an ancient Chinese state over 2,000 years ago and 1,500 km to the north, to humbly representing the consonant sound [b] in 17th-century Vietnamese Chữ Nôm writing!

48/ Next time you look up at the full moon, spare a thought for the incredible journey of the Chinese character 巴 ...

Page from de Rhodes' dictionary with this entry highlighted: blái: fruta: fructus, vs.

Image of the graph 𢁑 (巴 over 賴) in case it doesn't render

47/ Here, for example, is the page from the bl- section of the Dictionarium with the entry for ‘fruit’ (trái in modern Vietnamese), along with one of the Nôm graphs that writes it.

𢁑 trái ‘fruit’: 巴 (b-) + 賴 (lại) for earlier blái

46/ This isn’t a one-off. There are enough other examples of 巴 used in this way that we can be quite confident about its function.

45/ It’s effectively an alphabetic letter representing the sound /b/, the first sound of a consonant cluster.

巴 (b-) + 陵 (lăng) → blang

44/ In 𠀧 ‘three’, the 巴 is a syllabic phonetic component, indicating the sound of the Vietnamese word being written. But in the Nôm graph for ‘moon’, it’s one of two phonetic components, and it’s not syllabic!

43/ Three of these Nôm graphs writing blang ‘moon’ contain 巴.

The 巴 in these graphs is functioning quite differently from the one in this Nôm graph for the Vietnamese word ba ‘three’ that we saw earlier.

3 𠀧 ba ‘three’: 巴 (ba) + 三 (‘three’)