The replies to this pinned tweet index my threads on language and linguistics—dealing mostly with sinograms, historical phonology, and etymology. And occasionally Pokémon. Languages (focus on East Asia): 🇨🇳🇹🇼🇭🇰🇰🇷🇰🇵🇯🇵🇻🇳 etc.

For example, is ‘toast’ a basic idea? Is ‘toothbrush’ a basic idea? Is ‘dodecahedron’? ‘Disgruntlement’? ‘Romantic love’? Is the slight indentation between the bottom of your nose and your upper lip a basic idea? *** Come hear more on Tuesday! https://t.co/eNXJEd5oer

Do our spoken languages have single words corresponding to all basic ideas? Are basic ideas immutable, or do they vary across time, space, and cultures?

But would it even be possible for a system of characters of this kind to exist? A thought experiment along these lines raises all kinds of daunting practical and philosophical questions. How many “ideas” or “things” are there in the universe, and which ones are “basic”?

Like Francis Bacon, he was convinced that each individual Chinese character represented an idea, and that for each basic concept in our universe there must exist a single corresponding Chinese character.

In short, there is no single Chinese character for ‘horizon’. I did my best to explain this. My best was not good enough. This fact was not just unwelcome; it was not comprehensible, because it contradicted his deeply held presumption about Chinese writing.

It literally means ‘flat line of the earth’. In Chinese writing, each meaningful element of spoken language is represented by a distinct character. So the three parts of dìpíngxiàn are written with a sequence of three characters, one for each morpheme: dì-píng-xiàn 地平線.

“If I give you my email address, can you send me the Chinese character that means ‘horizon’?” he asked. In Mandarin there is a word meaning ‘horizon’. It is dìpíngxiàn. The word is a compound composed of three meaningful parts: dì ‘earth’, píng ‘flat’, and xiàn ‘line’.

He eagerly explained to me that he was making a birthday card for his girlfriend, and he wanted it to be special. He planned to put a Chinese character on the card but, not knowing any Chinese, he needed help finding the right one. The character he was looking for was ‘horizon’.

The excerpt below is adapted from pages 190–191. *** I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley studying Chinese linguistics in the 1990s .... One day, the phone rang. On the other end of the line was a young man calling out of the blue with a question about Chinese characters.

spoken language, was reinforced by the widespread (but mostly incorrect) belief that Chinese characters are pictures. One of the themes explored by my book is the question of whether Chinese characters, or indeed any kind of writing, could be truly universal in this way.

The use of Classical Chinese, written in Chinese characters, as a prestige written language across East Asia (and Vietnam) led to a number of myths about Chinese characters. The myth that characters had a universal capability to communicate ideas, regardless of a person's

My book talk at Third Place Books in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle is next Tuesday! Below in thread is an excerpt from *Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese*. I'll be reading more at the book event.

Are you in the Seattle area? Come see me at Third Place Books in Ravenna on Sept 16, 7pm. I'll be talking about and reading from my new book, followed by Q&A and book signing. Check out the link for more info, to RSVP, and to preorder a book for signing. https://t.co/CD8Wal2bEB

The book is on a huge sale right now! https://t.co/sQDz0TeB13

It is only by dispelling these myths that we can truly understand how Chinese writing works, and how the characters were adapted to write many different languages beyond China’s periphery. (The above is adapted from Chinese Characters Across Asia, pp. 1–4.) 12/

Their misunderstandings about the nature of Chinese characters and writing became widely believed and widely shared. They deeply influenced the way that Europeans thought about Chinese writing, nd they persist today as myths about how the Chinese script functions. 11/

But Ricci and Bacon were wrong. 🤯 Their observations about the widespread accessibility of Chinese writing in Asia were accurate, but the conclusions they drew from that fact were faulty. 10/

“It is the use of China and the kingdoms of the High Levant to write in characters real, which express [not] words in gross, but things or notions; insomuch as countries and provinces which understand not one another’s language can nevertheless read one another’s writings.” 9/

The English polymath Francis Bacon (1561–1626) described them as “characters real”, by which he meant they were symbols that directly represented and reflected reality. Bacon wrote this in 1605: 8/

Ricci was not the first Westerner to claim that Chinese characters directly represented “things”—not words or sounds, as the letters of Western alphabets do—and therefore had the capacity to serve as a universally understood written medium of communication. 7/