pandap

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68881&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=decipherment-of-the-indus-script-new-angles-and-approaches-part-4

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68881

These are remarks by Ron Vara from here:

ᱮᱞᱚᱱ ᱨᱤᱣ ᱢᱩᱥᱠ ( /ˈiːlɒn/ EE-lon; ᱡᱟᱱᱟᱢ ᱡᱩᱱ ᱒᱘, ᱑᱙᱗᱑) ᱩᱱᱤ ᱫᱚ ᱢᱤᱫ ᱵᱮᱯᱟᱨᱤᱭᱟᱹ ᱠᱟᱱᱟᱭ ᱚᱠᱚᱭ ᱫᱚ ᱩᱱᱤᱭᱟᱜ ᱢᱩᱲᱩᱫ ᱵᱷᱩᱢᱤᱠᱟ Tesla, Inc., SpaceX, ᱟᱨ ᱴᱩᱭᱴᱚᱨ (ᱡᱟᱦᱟᱸ ᱩᱱᱤ ᱮᱠᱥ ᱞᱮᱠᱟᱛᱮ ᱧᱩᱛᱩᱢ ᱵᱚᱫᱚᱞ ᱮᱱᱟ) ᱨᱮ ᱵᱟᱰᱟᱭᱚᱜ ᱠᱟᱱᱟ᱾

This is the first sentence in the article Elon Musk in Santali alphabet (Ol Chiki). Yes, it's an alphabetic writing system, not an abugida. What makes the Santali alphabet really elusive is that it resembles the shapes of the undeciphered Indus Valley script. Soviet archaeologists once tried to decipher IVC seals using Santali alphabet. Sounds ridiculous, but it's a sad truth that Santali is a unique language with little to no academic attention having been paid to it.

What makes Santali language itself stand out is the lack of "indianization" as compared to even Southeast Asian Austroasiatic languages like Mon and Khmer. Its phonology is still archetypically East Asian with a superimposed South Asian areal layer. Its morphology is somewhat mixed between SEA Austroasiatic prefixing and (self-innovative) highly polysynthetic verb akin to the Kiranti languages (spoken ~20 kilometres away in Nepal), so Santali is not remotely influenced by Sanskrit, except for a few Austroasiatic loanwords in early Vedic Sanskrit.

Selected readings

• "Decipherment of the Indus script: new angles and approaches, part 3" (3/28/25)
• "Decipherment of the Indus script: new angles and approaches" (3/6/25) — with useful bibliography
• "Decipherment of the Indus script: new angles and approaches, part 2" (3/22/25)

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68881&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=decipherment-of-the-indus-script-new-angles-and-approaches-part-4

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68881

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68857&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=brain-mechanisms-and-constructed-languages-vs-natural-languages

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68857

"Constructed Languages Are Processed by the Same Brain Mechanisms as Natural Languages." Malik-Moraleda, Saima, et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 12 (March 17, 2025): e2313473122.

Pursuing the questions raised in this paper will help us distinguish between linguistic and non-linguistic domains of intellectual inquiry — math, music, art….

Selected readings

• "The origin and progress of linguistic norms" (2/22/09)
• "Natural language and artificial intelligence" (5/29/04)

[Thanks to Ted McClure]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68857&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=brain-mechanisms-and-constructed-languages-vs-natural-languages

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68857

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68863&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=crosswalk-protest-art

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68863

Last weekend, a number of crosswalk buttons in Silicon Valley were hacked so as to play (faked) messages from Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. This got lots of (social and mass) media coverage — for one useful summary, see Zoe Morgan, "Silicon Valley crosswalk buttons apparently hacked to imitate Musk, Zuckerberg voices", Palo Alto Online 4/12/2025, or check out various other sources…

Some audio samples:

Today's AI synthesis and voice morphing technology makes it easy to create such clips — and crosswalk buttons are not the only possible medium to be hacked.

And of course there will be targets from other regions of the political and cultural space.

Update — Apparently the same sort of thing happened yesterday in Seattle: "'Please don’t tax the rich': Seattle crosswalk buttons hacked to sound like Jeff Bezos", 4/16/2025. Reddit has a sample video.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68863&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=crosswalk-protest-art

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68863

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68852&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=linguistic-relativity-snow-and-horses

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68852

For the record:

"Do Inuit languages really have many words for snow? The most interesting finds from our study of 616 languages", The Conversation (4/10/25); rpt. in phys.org/news (4/13/25)

Authors:

Charles Kemp
Professor, School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne (PhD MIT)
Ekaterina Vylomova
Lecturer, Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne (The University of Melbourne, PhD/Computational Linguistics)
Temuulen Khishigsuren
PhD Candidate, The University of Melbourne (National University of Mongolia, M.A. in linguistics)
Terry Regier
Professor, Language and Cognition Lab, University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., Computer science, UC Berkeley, 1992; frequent co-author with Paul Kay; among his most-cited work is:

"Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left",
Aubrey L. Gilbert; Terry Regier; Paul Kay; Richard B. Ivry.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2006)\

These two articles (The Conversation and phys.org/news) are journalistic accounts of the scientific study by Kemp, Vylomova, Khishigsuren, and Regier.

The full scientific paper is here:

Temuulen Khishigsuren et al, "A computational analysis of lexical elaboration across languages", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2417304122

Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Some highlights from the two journalistic articles cited above:

Languages are windows into the worlds of the people who speak them – reflecting what they value and experience daily.

So perhaps it’s no surprise different languages highlight different areas of vocabulary. Scholars have noted that Mongolian has many horse-related words, that Maori has many words for ferns, and Japanese has many words related to taste.

Some links are unsurprising, such as German having many words related to beer, or Fijian having many words for fish. The linguist Paul Zinsli wrote an entire book on Swiss-German words related to mountains.

…

One example of a concept we looked at was “horse”, for which the top-scoring languages included French, German, Kazakh and Mongolian. This means dictionaries in these languages had a relatively high number of

1. 1. words for horses. For instance, Mongolian аргамаг means “a good racing or riding horse”
   2. words related to horses. For instance, Mongolian чөдөрлөх means “to hobble a horse”.

…

Our findings support most links previously highlighted by researchers, including that Hindi has many words related to love and Japanese has many words related to obligation and duty.

We were especially interested in testing the idea that Inuit languages have many words for snow. This notorious claim has long been distorted and exaggerated. It has even been dismissed as the “great Eskimo vocabulary hoax”, with some experts saying it simply isn’t true.

But our results suggest the Inuit snow vocabulary is indeed exceptional. Out of 616 languages, the language with the top score for “snow” was Eastern Canadian Inuktitut. The other two Inuit languages in our data set (Western Canadian Inuktitut and North Alaskan Inupiatun) also achieved high scores for “snow”.

The Eastern Canadian Inuktitut dictionary in our dataset includes terms such as kikalukpok, which means “noisy walking on hard snow”, and apingaut, which means “first snow fall”.

The top 20 languages for “snow” included several other languages of Alaska, such as Ahtena, Dena'ina and Central Alaskan Yupik, as well as Japanese and Scots.

Scots includes terms such as doon-lay, meaning “a heavy fall of snow”, feughter meaning “a sudden, slight fall of snow”, and fuddum, meaning “snow drifting at intervals”.

You can explore our findings using the tool we developed, which allows you to identify the top languages for any given concept, and the top concepts for a particular language.

…

The top-scoring languages for “smell” include a cluster of Oceanic languages such as Marshallese, which has terms such as jatbo meaning “smell of damp clothing”, meļļā meaning “smell of blood”, and aelel meaning “smell of fish, lingering on hands, body, or utensils”.

Prior to our research, the smell terms of the Pacific Islands had received little attention.

Much to their credit, the authors are careful to issue a set of thoughtful caveats:

Although our analysis reveals many interesting links between languages and concepts, the results aren’t always reliable – and should be checked against original dictionaries where possible.

For example, the top concepts for Plautdietsch (Mennonite Low German) include von (“of”), den (“the”) and und (“and”) – all of which are unrevealing. We excluded similar words from other languages using Wiktionary, but our method did not filter out these common words for Plautdietsch.

Also, the word counts reflect both dictionary definitions and other elements, such as example sentences. While our analysis excluded words that are especially likely to appear in example sentences (such as “woman” and “father”), such words could have still influenced our results to some extent.

Most importantly, our results run the risk of perpetuating potentially harmful stereotypes if taken at face value. So we urge caution and respect while using the tool. The concepts it lists for any given language provide, at best, a crude reflection of the cultures associated with that language.

To conclude, one of my favorite Mongolian words is Morin Khuur (Mongolian: Морин хуур), which may be translated as "horse fiddle".

See "Some Mongolian words for 'horse'" (11/7/19), a variorum post with observations and comments by more than two dozen specialists.

Selected readings

• "Finnish words for snow" (5/2/24)
• "The snow words myth: progress at last" (1/4/07) — too many other posts for Eskimo / Inuit / Yup'ik / etc. to list; just Google on:  "language log" eskimo snow
• "'No word for X' meets snowcloning" (11/20/20
• "Eskimo words for snow" (Wikipedia):

The claim that Eskimo words for snow are unusually numerous, particularly in contrast to English, is a cliché commonly used to support the controversial linguistic relativity hypothesis. In linguistic terminology, the relevant languages are the Eskimo–Aleut languages, specifically the Yupik and Inuit varieties.

The strongest interpretation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or "Whorfianism", posits that a language's vocabulary (among other features) shapes or limits its speakers' view of the world. This interpretation is widely criticized by linguists, though a 2010 study supports the core notion that the Yupik and Inuit languages have many more root words for frozen variants of water than the English language. The original claim is loosely based in the work of anthropologist Franz Boas and was particularly promoted by his contemporary, Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose name is connected with the hypothesis.^[4][5] The idea is commonly tied to larger discussions on the connections between language and thought.

Franz Boas did not make quantitative claims but rather pointed out that the Eskaleut languages have about the same number of distinct word roots referring to snow as English does, with the structure of these languages tending to allow more variety as to how those roots can be modified in forming a single word. A good deal of the ongoing debate thus depends on how one defines "word", and perhaps even "word root".

The first re-evaluation of the claim was by linguist Laura Martin in 1986, who traced the history of the claim and argued that its prevalence had diverted attention from serious research into linguistic relativity. A subsequent influential and humorous, and polemical, essay by Geoffrey K. Pullum repeated Martin's critique, calling the process by which the so-called "myth" was created the "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax". Pullum argued that the fact that the number of word roots for snow is about equally large in Eskimoan languages and English indicates that there exists no difference in the size of their respective vocabularies to define snow. Other specialists in the matter of Eskimoan languages and Eskimoan knowledge of snow and especially sea ice argue against this notion and defend Boas's original fieldwork amongst the Inuit, at the time known as Eskimo, of Baffin Island.

• "'Horse' and 'language' in Korean" (10/30/19)
• "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/19)
• "Of horse riding and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (4/21/19)
• "'Horse Master' in IE and in Sinitic" (11/9/19)
• "Mare, mǎ ('horse'), etc." (11/17/19)
• Victor H. Mair.  "The Horse in Late Prehistoric China:  Wresting Culture and Control from the 'Barbarians'."  In Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew and Katie Boyle, ed.  Prehistoric steppe adaptation and the horse, McDonald Institute Monographs.  Cambridge:  McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research,  pp. 163-187.

[Thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto and Ross Presser]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68852&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=linguistic-relativity-snow-and-horses

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68852

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68847&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mawkishly-maudlin

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68847

Thirty-five or so years ago, Allyn Rickett (1921-2020), my old colleague at Penn, referred to a certain person as "pópomāmā 婆婆媽媽" ("mawkishly maudlin" [my translation of Rickett's Mandarin]; "old-lady-like").  This is such an unusual expression, and it so perfectly characterized the individual in question, that it's worth writing a post on it.

In the years around the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Rickett ("Rick") was in China doing research for his doctoral dissertation on the Guǎn Zǐ 管子 (Master Guan), a large and important politicophilosophical text reflecting the thought and practice of the Spring and Autumn period (c. 770-c. 481 BC), though the received version was not edited until circa 26 BC.  Rickett was accused of spying for the US Office of Naval Intelligence and imprisoned by the PRC government.  There he underwent four years of "struggle sessions".  Call them what you will, he had ample opportunity to become familiar with such colloquial terms as "pópomāmā 婆婆媽媽".

I should also note that Rickett, who was a student of the distinguished Sinologist, Derk Bodde (1909-2003), was an outstanding scholar in his own right, and his densely annotated translation of the Guan Zi is a monumental achievement, one that he worked on for most of his professional life.

Now, back to pópomāmā 婆婆媽媽.  First, let's break the four-syllable term down into its constituent monosyllables:

pó 婆

From Proto-Sino-Tibetan *pʷa-n ~ *bʷa-n (“grandmother”). Cognate with Burmese ဘွား (bhwa:, “grandmother”).

1. old woman
2. grandmother
3. mother-in-law (of a woman); husband's mother
4. woman in a particular profession

   媒婆  ―  méipó  ―  female matchmaker

5. pejorative suffix for a woman

   肥婆  ―  féipó  ―  fat woman

6. (ACG, neologism) Short for 老婆 (lǎopo, “wife”)

In transcriptions of Buddhist terms, 婆 (MC ba) is often used to transcribe Sanskrit ब (ba), भ (bha) and व (va), e.g. 濕婆 / 湿婆 (Shīpó, “Shiva”).

(Wiktionary)

mā 媽

Colloquial form of 母 (OC *mɯʔ, “mother”), from Proto-Sino-Tibetan *mow (“woman, female”).

1. mom; mum: an affectionate term for a mother

   我的媽呀！／我的妈呀！  ―  Wǒ de mā ya!  ―  Oh my God! [Literally: Oh my Mom!]

2. (usually with qualifier) other older female relatives or house–servants
3. (religion) "The Mother", an epithet of the Fujianese sea goddess Mazu (媽祖／妈祖).
4. (obsolete, hapax legomenon) mare; female horse

(Wiktionary)

pópo 婆婆

1. (chiefly Mandarin, Jin) mother-in-law (husband's mother)
2. (Cantonese, dialectal Mandarin, dialectal Hakka, dialectal Jin, dialectal Wu, Taining Gan, Jianyang Northern Min, Shaowu Min) maternal grandmother
3. (Gan, dialectal Mandarin, dialectal Xiang, dialectal Wu) paternal grandmother
4. (dialectal) old woman
5. (figurative, Mainland China) higher authorities; superior; leader

(Wiktionary)

māma / mǎmá 媽媽

1. (informal) mum (mom); mama

   遵守媽媽的叮嚀／遵守妈妈的叮咛  ―  zūnshǒu māma de dīngníng  ―  to follow mum's advice

   媽媽的味道／妈妈的味道  ―  māma de wèidào  ―  the taste of mum's cooking

   媽媽總是向著妹妹。

   妈妈总是向着妹妹。

   Māma zǒngshì xiàngzhe mèimei. [Pinyin]

   Mum always favours my younger sister.

   你這麼淘氣，媽媽不擔心才怪！你这么淘气，妈妈不担心才怪！

   Nǐ zhème táoqì, māma bù dānxīn cáiguài! [Pinyin]

   You are such a naughty kid. It'd be surprising if your mum were not worried.

   我一輩子都被媽媽監視。

   我一辈子都被妈妈监视
   

   Wǒ yībèizi dōu bèi māma jiānshì. [Pinyin]

   Mum has kept tabs on me all my life.

2. (dialectal, colloquial) breast
3. (ACG, figurative) character designer (female)

(Wiktionary)

Putting all four syllables back together, we get "pópomāmā 婆婆媽媽", which means "overly careful (like an old woman); womanishly garrulous; irresolute", and so forth.

Here's an interesting quotation illustrating its usage:

• • 但這孩子卻也有可敬的地方：他的從容，他的沉默，他的獨斷獨行，他的一去不回頭，都是力的表現，都是強者適者的表現。決不婆婆媽媽的，決不粘粘搭搭的，一針見血，一刀兩斷，這正是白種人之所以為白種人。[MSC, trad.]但这孩子却也有可敬的地方：他的从容，他的沉默，他的独断独行，他的一去不回头，都是力的表现，都是强者适者的表现。决不婆婆妈妈的，决不粘粘搭搭的，一针见血，一刀两断，这正是白种人之所以为白种人。

    From: 朱自清 (Zhu Ziqing), 《白種人——上帝的驕子》[Báizhǒng rén——shàngdì de jiāozǐ]

    Dàn zhè háizi què yě yǒu kějìng de dìfang: tā de cóngróng, tā de chénmò, tā de dúduàndúxíng, tā de yī qù bù huítóu, dōu shì lì de biǎoxiàn, dōu shì qiángzhě shìzhě de biǎoxiàn. Juébù pópomāma de, juébù niánniándādā de, yīzhēnjiànxiě, yīdāoliǎngduàn, zhè zhèngshì báizhǒngrén zhī suǒ yǐ wéi báizhǒngrén. [Pinyin]

    But there was something about the child that could be respected. His leisurely way, his reticence, his arbitrariness, his way of walking ahead without looking back. These were manifestations of his power, the power of the strongest, of the fittest. The child was, by no means, overly careful, or irresolute. The child could hit the nail on the head and make a clean break. The child was a quintessential Caucasian.

• sentimental; maudlin; fainthearted

(Wiktionary)

The author of these sentences was Zhū Zìqīng 朱自清 (1898-1948), a famous poet and essayist of the Republican period.

Key terms, as rendered by online interpreters:

• White people—God’s favorite (GT), 
  
• White people — God's pride (Baidu)
• Caucasians — the proud sons of God (MS Bing)
• The white man — the pride of God (DeepL), plus three alternatives that vary only slightly

Zhu Ziqing had his finger on the pulse of the lingua franca of China during the first half of the 20th century (particularly the second quarter of that century).  When I began studying Mandarin in 1967, it was to that period that I looked for a model on which to base my own emerging idiolect.  The reason for this is that I thought it was the most vibrant vernacular of the century, certainly more lively and creative than the period in which I grew up and learned Mandarin.

Moreover, I had a strong antipathy to the characters, whether traditional or simplified, the former for being divorced from spoken language and the latter for being neither fish nor fowl.  So I turned to romanized missionary writings where I could learn delightful terms like shabulengdengde ("foolish; daffy") and pangdudu ("chubby").  When I was forced by my Mandarin teachers to learn characters, I preferred to do it through the literature of writers like Zhu Ziqing and Lao She (1899-1966), who stretched sinographic writing as close to alphabetic writing as it could go.  That's why I loved words like pópomāmā 婆婆媽媽 ("old-lady-like; anile") and niánniándādā 黏黏搭搭 ("sticky; irresolute; kleisty").

Selected readings

• "Japanese (and Chinese) Onomatopoeia" (7/21/08)
• "Vulgar village vernacular" (8/21/21)

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68847&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mawkishly-maudlin

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68847

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68845&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ai-sauce

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68845

This should add some zest to the debate over AI.

She's not the only one.  I've seen a lot of people mix up AI and A1.

Selected readings

• "AI (and human ingenuity) to the rescue" (2/6/24)
• "AI encroachments" (7/21/23)
• "The AI threat: keep calm and carry on" (6/29/23)
• "'Tomato sauce' in Cantonese, with a trigger warning" (10/30/23)
• "'Sauce' and 'caravanserai': linguistic notes from southeast Texas" (1/4/12) — with 97 substantial comments, this is one of the richest collections of notes on the catsup conundrum available anywhere, with plentiful, flavorful observations on "sauce".
• "Ketchup", a virtuoso blog post on The Language of Food (9/2/09) by Dan Jurafsky

The last two posts together are definitive.

[h.t. François Lang]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68845&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ai-sauce

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68845

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68831&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mandarin-disyllabism-for-beginners

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68831

tā jiǎng dé hěn qīngchǔ
她講得很清楚

tā jiǎng dé fēicháng qīngchǔ
她講得非常清楚

tā jiǎng dé tèbié qīngchǔ
她講得特別清楚

tā jiǎng dé shífēn qīngchǔ
她講得十分清楚

tā jiǎng dé qīngqīngchǔchǔ
她講得清清楚楚

tā jiǎng dé qīngchǔ de bùdéliǎo
她講得清楚得不得了

tā jiǎng dé bùnéng zài qīngchǔle
她講得不能再清楚了
("She couldn't have explained it more clearly"

All seven sentences say the same thing, "She explained it clearly", with various nuances. This is a language learning game I like to play to show how much flexibility there can be in Mandarin expressions.

Selected readings

• "Ask Language Log: Unnecessary disyllabism?" (11/27/17)
• "Ambling, shambling, rambling, wandering, wondering: the spirit of Master Zhuang / Chuang" (7/21/21)
• Perry Link, An Anatomy of Chinese:  Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013),

[Thanks to John Rohsenow]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68831&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mandarin-disyllabism-for-beginners

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68831

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68827&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rime-rhyme-tables-charts

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68827

In Chinese they are called yùntú 韻圖 / 韵图.  These tools are vitally important in the development of Sinitic phonology, but barely known outside of sinological specialists, so — for the history of world phonology — it is worthwhile to introduce them to linguists in general.

A rime table or rhyme table (simplified Chinese: 韵图; traditional Chinese: 韻圖; pinyin: yùntú; Wade–Giles: yün-t'u) is a Chinese phonological model, tabulating the syllables of the series of rime dictionaries beginning with the Qieyun (601) by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones and other properties. The method gave a significantly more precise and systematic account of the sounds of those dictionaries than the previously used fǎnqiè analysis, but many of its details remain obscure. The phonological system that is implicit in the rime dictionaries and analysed in the rime tables is known as Middle Chinese, and is the traditional starting point for efforts to recover the sounds of early forms of Chinese. Some authors distinguish the two layers as Early and Late Middle Chinese respectively.

The earliest rime tables are associated with Chinese Buddhist monks, who are believed to have been inspired by the Sanskrit syllable charts in the Siddham script they used to study the language. The oldest extant rime tables are the 12th-century Yunjing ('mirror of rhymes') and Qiyin lüe ('summary of the seven sounds'), which are very similar, and believed to derive from a common prototype. Earlier fragmentary documents describing the analysis have been found at Dunhuang, suggesting that the tradition may date back to the late Tang dynasty.

Some scholars, such as the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren, use the French spelling rime for the categories described in these works, to distinguish them from the concept of poetic rhyme.

(Wikipedia)

We are fortunate to have an expert treatment of the rime / rhyme tables in The Chinese Rime Tables:  Linguistic philosophy and historical-comparative phonology, edited by David Prager Branner (Amsterdam and Philadelphia:  John Benjamins, 2006), viii, 358 pp. [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 271]    https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.271

This book, the first in its field in a Western language, examines China’s native phonological tool with regard to reconstruction, theory, and linguistic philosophy.

After an introductory essay on the nature of the tables and the history of their interpretation, the book concentrates on three areas: application of rime table theory to reconstruction, the history of rime table theory, and the application of the tables to descriptive linguistics. An appendix details a number of 20th century systems for transcribing their phonology into Roman letters.

Major topics include Altaic contact-influence on Chinese, early native understanding of the tables’ meaning, the phonological work of Yuen Ren Chao, and Stammbaumtheorie/diasystemic thinking about Chinese. New reconstructions of Han and “Common Dialectal” phonology appear here, as do complete texts and translations of the Shouwen fragments and Yunjing preface.

Shouwen was a shadowy 9th-century Buddhist Chinese monk who has been credited with the invention of the analysis of Middle Sinitic as having 36 initials, later ubiquitously used by the rime tables.  One could say that he had created an abortive proto-alphabet for Sinitic, one that never bore fruit as an actual writing system.  I believe that was due to the strong path dependency of the deeply entrenched trimillennial sinographs.

    Introduction: What Are Rime Tables and What Do They Mean?
    David Prager Branner | pp. 1–34

    Part I: Rime-Tables in Chinese Reconstruction

    On the Principle of the Four Grades
    Abraham Chan | pp. 37–46

    The Four Grades: An Interpretation from the perspective of Sino-altaic language contact
    Chris Wen-Chao Li | pp. 47–58

    On Old Turkic Consonanticism and Vocalic Divisions of Acute Consonants in Medieval Hàn Phonology
    An-King Lim | pp. 59–82

    The Qièyùn System ‘Divisions’ as the Result of Vowel Warping
    Axel Schuessler | pp. 83–96

    Part II: The History of Rime Table Texts and Reconstruction

    Reflections on the Shouwen Fragments
    W. South Coblin | pp. 99–122

    Zhāng Línzhī on the Yùnjìng
    W. South Coblin | pp. 123–150

    Simon Schaank and the Evolution of Western Beliefs About Traditional Chinese Phonology
    David Prager Branner | pp. 151–167

    Part III: Rime Tables as Descriptive Tools

    How Rime-Book Based Analyses Can Lead Us Astray
    Richard VanNess Simmons | pp. 171–182

    Modern Chinese and the Rime Tables
    Jerry Norman | pp. 183–188

    Common Dialect Phonology in Practice.: Y.R. Chao’s Field Methodology
    Richard VanNess Simmons | pp. 189–208

    Some Composite Phonological Systems in Chinese
    David Prager Branner | pp. 209–232

    Common Dialectal Chinese
    Jerry Norman | pp. 233–254

    Appendix I: Pronunciation Guide to Boodberg's Alternative Grammatonomic Notation
    Gari K. Ledyard | pp. 255–264

    Appendix II: Comparative Transcriptions of Rime Table Phonology
    David Prager Branner | pp. 265–302

    Index of Biographical Names | pp. 327–332

    General Index | pp. 333–358

More recently, the Chinese scholar, Pān Wénguó 潘文国, published a two volume work titled Yùn tú kǎo 韵图考.  It was translated into English by Lǐ Zhìqiáng 李志強 (Andy Li), who was a visiting scholar at Penn a decade ago.

The Chinese Rhyme Tables , vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2023). 

Abstract

As the first volume of a two- volume set that studies Chinese rhyme tables, this book focuses on their emergence, development, structure, and patterns. Rhyme tables are a tabulated tool constituted by phonological properties, which help indicate the pronunciation of sinograms or Chinese characters, marking a precise and systematic account of the Chinese phonological system. This volume first discusses the emergence of the model and factors that determined its formation and evolution, including the Chinese tradition of the rhyme dictionary and the introduction of Buddhist scripts. The second part analyzes the structure and arrangement patterns of rhyme tables in detail, giving insights into the nature of “division” (deng): the classification and differentiation of speech sounds, of vital significance in the reconstruction of middle Chinese. The author argues that deng has nothing to do with vowel aperture or other phonetic features but is a natural result of rhyme table arrangement. He also reexamines the principles for irregular cases (menfa rules) and categorizes the 20 rules into three types.

The book will appeal to scholars and students who are studying linguistics, Chinese phonology, and Sinology.

Pan Wenguo, The Chinese Rhyme Tables, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2023).

Abstract

As the second volume of a two-volume set that studies the Chinese rhyme tables, this book seeks to reconstruct the ancient rhyme tables based on the extant materials and findings.

A rhyme table is a tabulated tool constituted by phonological properties, which helps indicate the pronunciation of sinograms or Chinese characters, marking an accurate and systematic account of the Chinese phonological system. The book first explores the relationship and identifies the prototype of the extant rhyme tables. Then the principles and methods for collating and rebuilding the ancient rhyme table are introduced. It then looks at the general layout, including tables, table order, shè, zhuǎn, rhyme heading, rhyme order, light and heavy articulations, rounded and unrounded articulations, and initials. The final chapter presents the reconstructed rhyme tables with detailed annotations and add-on indexes.

The book will appeal to scholars and students studying Sinology, Chinese linguistics, and especially Chinese

Because these two volumes are primarily descriptive and narrative, I do not list the contents of their chapters as I did for the Branner volume, which is geared more to the ideas behind the rime tables and their philosophical significance, plus an abundance of pathbreaking papers written by the leading historical linguists of the day that focus on common topolectal features, extra-Sinitic associations, and other previously undiscussed aspects of the rime tables.

I asked Chris Button whether he preferred one or the other, "rime" or "rhyme" for these charts / tables.  He replied sensibly:

I would use onset vs rime in a linguistic sense, but I would use rhyme when referring to poetry. So, I would probably go with "rime table" since it's not specifically for poetic use.

To give you an idea of what these "rime tables" looked like and how they were structured, here's the first chart (of 43) from the Yùnjìng 韻鏡 (Mirror of Rimes; 1161, 1203):

The five big characters on the right-hand side read Nèi zhuǎn dìyī kāi (內轉第一開). In the Yùnjìng, each chart is called a zhuǎn (lit. 'turn'). The characters indicate that the chart is the first (第一) one in the book, and that the syllables of this chart are "inner" (內) and "open" (開).

The columns of each table classify syllables according to their initial consonant (shēngmǔ 聲母 lit. 'sound mother'), with syllables beginning with a vowel considered to have a "zero initial". Initials are classified according to

• • place of articulation: labials (chún 脣 'lip'), alveolars (shé 舌 'tongue'), velars (yá 牙 'back tooth'), affricates and sibilants (chǐ 齒 "front tooth"), and laryngeals (hóu 喉 'throat'). The values of the last category remain controversial.
  • manner of articulation: voiceless (qīng 清 'clear'), voiceless aspirated (cìqīng 次清 'secondary clear'), voiced (zhuó 濁 'muddy') or nasal or liquid (qīngzhuó 清濁 'clear muddy').^[19]

The order of the places and manners roughly match that of Sanskrit, providing further evidence of inspiration from Indian phonology.

(Wikipedia)

There you have it, a capsule introduction to the Chinese rime tables, which were as important for premodern Sinitic phonology as slide rules were for mathematical operations before the invention of digital calculators and computers.  The parallels are not perfect, but the idea of having once been an essential tool in a technical field and later having become obsolete is common to both.

Selected readings

• "The concept of 'mother' in linguistics" (6/25/14)
• "QWERTY forever: path dependency" (4/6/25) — hanzi / kanji / hanja forever; maybe yes, maybe no; the system is a bit wobbly now
• "'Clear' and 'turbid' in Chinese phonology" (11/29/20)
• Victor H. Mair, "Two Papers on Sinolinguistics:  1. A Hypothesis Concerning the Origin of the Term fanqie (“Countertomy”); 2. East Asian Round-Trip Words, Sino-Platonic Papers, 34 (October, 1992), 13 pp.
• See the many works of Fabio Rambelli (UCSB) on the influence of Indian religion, language, and culture on Japan. (here and here)
• Victor H. Mair and Tsu-lin Mei. “The Sanskrit Origins of Recent Style Chinese Prosody.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 51.2 (1991): 375-470.

[Thanks to South Coblin and Axel Schuessler]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68827&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rime-rhyme-tables-charts

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68827