Excepted for publication
Language Log 2021-07-30
I wrote to a colleague who helped me edit a paper that it had been accepted for publication. She wrote back, "I’m glad it is excepted".
Some may look upon such a typo as "garden variety", but I believe that it tells us something profoundly significant about the primacy of sound over shape, an issue that we have often debated on Language Log, including how to regard typographical errors in general, but also how to read old Chinese texts (e.g., copyists' mistakes, deterioration of texts over centuries of editorial transmission, etc.).
Often, when you read a Chinese text and parts of it just don't make any sense, if you ignore the superficial semantic signification of the characters with which it is written, but focus more on the sound, suddenly the meaning of the text will become crystal clear. In point of fact, much of the commentarial tradition throughout Chinese history consists of this kind of detective work — sorting out which morphemes were really intended by a given string of characters.
The best commentators, readers, and translators of Chinese texts — individuals such as Arthur Waley (1889-1966) — possess an uncanny instinct for plumbing beneath the surface of a text to get at the heart of the language it expresses. Of course, men like Waley are not infallible (given the vast complexities and historical vagaries of Chinese texts, that would be utterly impossible), yet their brilliant philological / phonological insights enable them time and again to make stunningly illuminating explications and felicitous renderings. (Incidentally, of all the great modern Sinologists, Waley was the least academic, but most literary.) This is especially important for those who work on vernacular writings, where there are frequently no standard orthographical conventions for recording common expressions in the spoken language, such as happens with medieval Dunhuang popular literature at every turn. Indeed, this is why Dunhuang vernacular texts are centrally situated at the birth of Sinitic vernacular writing.
Consequently, I keep a close eye open, not only for typing mistakes committed by others, but also my own, which I often find to be amusing, but telling.
Selected readings
- "Acquiring literacy in medieval Dunhuang" (2/20/21)
- Victor H. Mair, "Lay Students and the Making of Written Vernacular Narrative: An Inventory of Tun-huang Manuscripts", Chinoperl Papers 10 (1981), 5–96.
- "Take stalk of: thoughts on philology and Sinology" (3/29/20)
- "'One I first saw': more on homophonically induced typing errors" (4/8/20)
- "Spelling mistakes in English and miswritten characters in Chinese" (12/18/12)
- "Mistakes in English and in Chinese" (2/13/18)
- "The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation" (2/6/12)
- "The esthetics of East Asian writing"
- "The esthetics of East Asian writing" (4/7/12)
- "'Between the Eyes and the Ears': SPP turns 300" (7/20/20)
- "A revolution in Sinitic language conceptualization and learning" (1/7/21)
- "How to teach Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese" (9/6/18)
- "Aphantasia — absence of the mind’s eye" (3/24/17)
- "The miracle of reading and writing Chinese characters" (3/26/17)
- "Ancient Chinese mottos" (4/5/20)
- "Why Literary Sinitic is so darn hard" (5/30/19)
- "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" (8/91)