Update and Stuff

Andrew and I have spent the past couple of weeks battling what’s either a bad cold or a mild case of ‘flu (it’s been worse for him than for me), so I’ve made it into work without coughing on everybody, but haven’t done much that’s exciting, nor have I made it out to any demos in support of the schoolteachers’ union or the land defenders, alas.


This morning, for some reason,
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Live-bloggng an article on 20th-century attempts to unify Chinese in both script and pronunciation:

Description of a conference of linguists in post-1911-Revolution (1913) China, trying to come up with a scheme of phonetic characters and also a unified pronunciation scheme for the whole country. Which went about as well as you’d expect.

Sounds like at one point there was an attempt at gerrymandering Mandarin, which is not a pair of words I usually get to use together.

(Googles Yüan Shih-k`ai)  Whoah. OK, you never really hear about that period.

(Reads further down, gets to the ‘teens and early ‘twenties) I should have known somebody would suggest Esperanto sooner or later.

(Even further) Oh good, here comes Y. R. Chao, the reason I looked this up in the first place.

(1930s) “Many supporters looked not to themselves but to a strong man to force the reform of the script, as had happened in the case of Turkey. "If China had a Kemal Pasha," said a Western admirer of the National Language Romanization, "we should probably see this system replace the characters in daily life."”

Uh....