I've sustained a steadily increasing interest in mapmaking, chiefly because it's one of the few great pursuits based on impossibility: making a faithful copy of a solid object on the flat plane. It's like attempting to translate between two very distant languages. Dealing with the impossibility of perfection is where all the interest lies.
Wendy Carlos, known mostly for music, seems to have a diverse range of interests besides. One of them is maps, and one of those maps is one I've always wanted to create: a way to see one's personal antipode, the exact point on the opposite side of the globe from where you happen to be. Carlos calls it a Hole-digger's map.
There are other inventive exercises in mapping here that go to show that maps are another way of thinking in space about what the world is. Well worth a thoughtful visit.
The alphabet as we know it is several millennia old, an inherited cultural tradition with no particular moment of invention. The alphabet and the way we use it have remained unchanged for centuries, despite talk of spelling reform that comes up every hundred years or so.
In China they do things differently. Chinese literature managed quite well without an alphabet for three thousand years, and when it took a mind to change things, it invented one essentially overnight. In 1958 the government introduced its own version of the Roman alphabet adapted to the sounds of northern Chinese. No slow evolution for them. In 1979 the ISO made it a world standard, and virtually overnight newscasters bravely made the switch from "Peking" to "Beijing".
As a result, romanized Chinese is as straightforward as can be expected for something that sounds like Chinese. There are no odd spelling rules, no silent E, and certainly nothing like the letter C, which sounds either like S or K, with no sound at all of it own.
It also means that a Chinese dictionary, can contain every possible written Chinese word (in the northern language, at least). That's scarcely imaginable in English, where it's a regular practice to invent a slew of never-before-heard proper nouns just for the sake of naming the people and places in a story. But the compactness of Chinese words makes this possible. There are 27 sounds that can start a word, 14 that can end it, with 4 variations in tone. That's 1512 possible words, enough to carry around in your pocket. The practice of compounding two sounds into one word is used, but limited, and the result is an entire language with no acoustic surprises, and no chance of opening a book and coming across a novelty like "Narnia".
Of course, Chinese has a vocabulary far larger than 1500 words, and the result is thoroughgoing polysemy, with one sound (and one written form) representing anything from a handful to a dozen possible concepts. This is the opposite of English, where our messy history of the written word has produced an abundance of written forms for comparatively few sounds. In Chinese class, though, we're continually running into completely different words that are written and sound exactly alike. It's the linguistic equivalent of driving and suddenly going color blind.
Last week someone asked the question that I should have thought of myself: does English have any words that behave this way: written identically, but with entirely different meanings?
It's a word puzzle I've not run into before, and it's surprisingly hard to come up with solutions. Part of the reason is that English works mighty hard to avoid spelling words the same way. Any writing system that writes the same sound as both "ate" and "eight" clearly has no love for identical twins. We write "border" and "boarder", "insure and "ensure", and we like it that way. It keeps different words looking different, and the look of words is the more important quality in a reading society. In the case of "insure" and "ensure", the spelling change has actually been introduced where it didn't exist before, just to avoid the problem of identical twins. Thus some possible solutions to the puzzle really aren't, being spelling variations in words with the same ultimate root: "ban" in the sense of "forbid" and "ban" in the sense of "marriage announcement" both are descendents of a single word meaning "to announce". They're half-solutions at best.
Here are a few twins that came to mind:
board as in "board a ship", and board as in "bulletin board"
can "If I can", and can the container.
light, of weight, and light of illumination
club the blunt instrument, and club the social group.
That's about it so far, and I'm not too sure that the last item is really playing by my own rules, since the "club" twins may be related, with the basic meaning "to beat together into a heap"; "clod" and "cloud" are the other members of this family.
(Notice that heteronyms like a bass fish and a string bass don't count in my book.)
Hard problem, then, but not impossible, and I'm welcoming any other solutions. If it's any comfort, Chinese's picture-perfect spelling system means that homophones like "too" and "two" don't exist, and is even nnow causing untold numbers of English students across the Pacific to scratch their heads while you work on this.
More about the pinyin writing system and its history