Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk) Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
Combined Chinese character for 福禄寿 "good fortune, prosperity, long life" inscribed on a ceramic pot lid excavated from a Qing dynasty mosque at Jingdezhen 景德镇 in Jiangxi
Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
From a report on the excavations of the mosque in the latest issue of the Palace Museum Journal 故宫博物院院刊
mp.weixin.qq.com/s/QvDlHLow9t6wF-kzKDudIw
Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
The four characters shown in the first image (⿱雨⿰口合, ⿱雨⿰口明, ⿱雨⿰口日, ⿱雨⿰口天) are not available in Unicode, but the first three were proposed for encoding by the UK, and have been accepted into CJK Ext. J expected in Unicode 17.0 next year.
bsky.app/profile/kizou.bsky.social/post/3kybedipvi62x
Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
They were among a set of over a hundred Daoist-usage characters proposed for encoding by the UK, most of which will be in CJK Ext. J. (www.unicode.org/irg/docs/n27...)
Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
The UK has just submitted an encoding proposal for 1,000 Chinese characters, including 138 characters attested in Daoist texts included in the Zhengtong edition of the Daoist Canon (明正統道藏) printed between 1445 and 1447 (www.unicode.org/irg/docs/n26...).
Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
The WS2024 UK submission includes many interesting characters, including the characters devised by Yuen Ren Chao 趙元任 (1892‑1982) for his Chinese translation of Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" (www.babelstone.co.uk/Twitter/Arch...)
Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
"Specimen Characterum Chinesium" — in Walton, Biblio sacra polyglotta (1657) via @monikalehner.bsky.social on the x-site
This is the imprint inscription (牌記) at the end of the edition of The Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms 新刻按鑑全像批評三國志傳 published in Fujian in 1592 by Yú Xiàngdǒu 余象斗
Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
A single copy of this book was brought to Europe in the early 17th century (by 1635), and broken up into ten parts for sale. It is now partially preserved in four different libraries: Cambridge (vols. 7-8), Stuttgart (vols. 9-10), Oxford (vols. 11-12), and British Library (vols. 19-20).
Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
The 1657 drawing of the imprint inscription is copied from the final page of vol. 20 of the part held at the British Library (15333.e.1). Unfortunately, I don't have images of the British Library copy ...
www.instagram.com/notesonbookconservation/p/CryZzpholEV/?img_index=1
Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
... but I do have black-and-white reproductions of a different copy of the same edition (vols. 1-8 and 19-20) held at the Kennin-ji Temple 建仁寺 in Kyōto. As you can see the imprint inscription is identical to the 1657 facsimile.
Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
In the translation of Æsop's Fables by Lín Shū 林紓 et al. (published by the Commercial Press in Beijing in 1903 as 《伊索寓言》), the word 'mole' in "The Mole and his Mother" is translated with the otherwise unattested (and as yet unencoded) character ⿺鼠如
Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
Moles have a perfectly good name in Chinese (鼹鼠 yǎnshǔ), so why did Lín Shū invent a new character here? My theory is that Lín Shū, who famously did not speak English, asked the person interpreting the story what a 'mole' was, and got the reply 如鼠也 "it's like a rat", so he wrote the character as 如鼠.
Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
《華英通語》(1860) : Stay here till I come back = 時爹 唏 啲倪 埃 今 ⿿逼 ... that's weird, how did that happen?
Andrew West 魏安 (@babelstone.co.uk)
Hand-written Japanese phonetic misreading of the Cantonese phrase 呢的係乜野 as ニー チー シー ネャ ヤ (English 喝衣士撻 = What is that?) in 《英語集全》 = "The Chinese and English instructor" (Canton, 1862)
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