Stepping Back from the European Lens

A message for consulting heralds: 

The submitter, especially for names from regions that use Chinese characters, will come to you likely with some kernels of what they want that will be useful.  They will also likely know more about how that language works that you do, if this is not your specialty.  Let them speak, and while they do so, make note of everything they say. 

Starting Linguistic Terms

All definitions below are pulled from Oxford Languages Dictionary. *Except this one, which is pulled from Merriam-Webster. Where Chinese characters are used, they are Simplified Chinese Characters (简体字) with pinyin transcriptions, and the eventual plan is to update these to traditional across the board to lessen confusion. Some small deviations for differences between common and linguistic usage.

• Morphemes:

  • a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided. (e.g. "un-" or "-done" are mophemes in the English word "undone" because they cannot be further divided and retain their meaning) 

• Morphograms:

  • A morphogram is a single symbol which represents a complete morpheme which has a pronunciation that is langauge-specific. (e.g. "蝴" and "蝶" are morphograms in the Mandarin Chinese word "蝴蝶" (húdié) which means "butterfly" in English. Further, 狗 (gǒu, pinyin) is the Mandarin morphogram which corresponds to the English word "dog" but is not to be confused with 狗 (gau2, Cantonese pinyin) which is the Cantonese morphogram for the same concept.)

• Pictograms/Pictographs:

  • a pictorial symbol for a word or phrase. Pictographs were used as the earliest known form of writing, examples having been discovered in Egypt and Mesopotamia from before 3000 BC. (e.g. early hieroglyphics in Egypt and oracle bone inscriptions in China)

• Phonograms:

  • a symbol, or group of symbols, representing a vocal sound. 

• Ideograms:

  • a written character symbolizing the idea of a thing without indicating the sounds used to say it, e.g., numerals and Chinese characters.

• Logograms:

  • a sign or character representing a word or phrase, such as those used in shorthand and some writing systems. (e.g. the Mandarin word for "dog" is 狗 (gǒu) which is a logogram because it is a symbol representing a whole word and also a morphogam because it represents a unit of language that cannot be further divided)

• Radicals:

  • any of the basic set of 214 Chinese characters constituting semantically or functionally significant elements in the composition of other characters and used as a means of classifying characters in dictionaries. These are most obviously recognized in characters 木 (mù), 林 (lín), and 森 (sēn) where 林 is two 木 placed side-by-side. Many radicals are slightly altered forms of their morphogram inspiration as can be seen in the radical for 人 (rén) which becomes 亻as a radical like on the left side of the character 你 (nǐ).

• Syllabary:

  • a set of written characters representing syllables and (in some languages or stages of writing) serving the purpose of an alphabet.

• Alphabet:

  • a set of letters or symbols in a fixed order, used to represent the basic sounds of a language.

• Transliteration:

  • to represent or spell in the characters of another writing system.*

• Transcription:

  • a written or printed representation of something.

    • (Since this is all the dictionary entry gave us, I will add - we are specifically using this in the "write down what something sounds like" way, but more specifically, we are using this to explain someone writing something they are hearing in a language they also know how to write in, because I do not currently know other more accurate term.  For example, AI that knows English, can generally transcribe a video that is run through it, and generate captions.  This word has other definitions, and can be used outside of this context, but for our purposes it will be same-language script.)

Example statements using the above terms

• Transcription can be transliteration if the perspective changes from "native speaker + native writing system," to "native speaker + outsider writing system."

  • Transcriptions typically attempt to accurately portray the pronunciation of something spoken. Alphabets originated as transcription systems for spoken language.

  • Transliteration attempts to approximate the sound of something spoken in another language using the target laguage's writing system, regardless of any meaning associated with the characters used. Loanwords are often transliterated like the word "coffee" from English becoming 咖啡 (kāfēi) in Mandarin which approximates the sound of coffee in English.

• English words are written using an alphabet where each letter, or a group of letters, makes a sound which are combined to represent certain words. 

• English uses ideograms to describe numbers, such as writing "1" meaning the number unit of "one." If a German speaker were to see "1" they would pronounce it as "eins." If an English speaker were to see a "1" at the beginning of a list of numbers, they could instead pronounce it as "first".  Hence, "1" could have multiple pronunciations depending on linguistic context both within a language or between multiple langauges.

• Morphograms have pronunciations because they're tied to a specific morpheme within a language. The word "dog" in English is a morpheme but not a morphogram because it is made up of 3 characters whereas 狗 (gǒu) is the Mandarin morphogram for the concept "dog" because it is a single character that represents a complete morpheme.

• Ideograms or pictograms are detached from specific languages, and will hold their meaning regardless of the pronunciation or context. This is the case for arabic numerals (1, 2, 42, 785, etc.)

• The radicals in Chinese characters, can sometimes indicate the sound a character makes or the meaning of a character, but this is not consistent and mostly only works for Chinese languages.

• Modern written Chinese languages are mostly morphograms because many words are written with two or more characters to convey a whole word. Written Literary/Classical Chinese is more logographic, because in that use, one character represents one word on its own much more often.

• Chinese as ideograms can be used to represent words in other languages, if the literate group all understand the meaning behind the ideogram.  If a Japanese reader were to see: 書 in a blog, they would know it means "body of writing" or "book" even if that blog is written in Chinese.

• Historically, Chinese character morphograms have been used to initially transliterate many languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, based on the sound of a word attached to a character (in Chinese) and how it was pronounced when it was introduced. This leads to a lot of sound-alikes and loan words in languages that adopted Chinese characters as a writing system.

• For hundreds of years, the ideographic nature of Classical/Literary Chinese used as a written language of governance and high literature made communication across vernaculars and different kingdoms possible.

• Japanese has two syllabaries that can transcribe different uses and pronunciations of a Chinese character's use. Usually one syllabary is used to transliterate foreign words into Japanese (katakana), and the other is used to transcribe grammar and spell words (hiragana).

• Korean has an alphabet (hangul) made of vowels and consonants, where the letters are blocked together in syllables. This alphabet can be used to transcribe the old Korean writing system which used Chinese characters, and it can transliterate foreign words into Korean.

Romanization

Romanization is the term used commonly in most East Asian languages to refer to systems that transliterate into the Latin (English) alphabet. In Japanese, it can even be referred to as "romanji" (Roman Characters, as opposed to Chinese Characters, "kanji").  For heraldic use, the SCA requires a uniform transliteration system for Non-Latin Scripts. Generally, this is the last step of the process if you are building a name from Chinese characters first, and once you've built it and verified the way it is written in the native language, then you choose a romanization system and convert. Thankfully, by plugging in the characters into dictionaries, you can pull the correct romanizations from there.  

You might be wondering, "How do I know this is a period romanization for this character?"  The answer is: it's not. While there are currently scholars working on reconstructing late-Middle, early-Middle, and more temporal versions of the languages we are about to delve into, that information is not fully developed, nor is it widely agreed upon, and all of that means that outside of writing down Chinese characters for names, we have a lack of any historical transliteration systems. When you read Joshua Badgley's "Japanese Names," or Sǫlveig Þrándardóttir's Name Construction in Mediæval Japan, the transliterations you are seeing are first the furiga'na/ふりがな/振仮名 (small phonetic notations next to Chinese characters that tell to a reader how to pronounce them, essentially a transcription of the characters as best a medieval author knew how) in a period document, where the same writing system was used that we can now read, but the spoken language for them sounded different. Next, those furiga'na are being transliterated, or romanized via a modern transliteration system.  We have much knowledge on how to interpret/read meaning from these period sources, but as for the period pronunciation, that is something that is not as available.  Looking to the furiga'na gives us how the local people would have said it at the time but does not provide the full context for how that reading might have drifted due to linguistic change.

The difference between Late Middle English (Chaucer) and early modern (Shakespeare) English is a decent comparison for how different the language sounds would be across time.