Who we are

Welcome to Sinoglot!

China means not just lots of languages but language families: Sinitic, Tibeto-Burman, Tungusic… If you expand the scope into history, scripts, bilingualism, language acquisition and so on, it’s enough to induce vertigo.

Sinoglot is never going to cover it all, but we give you a bit in every dimension, eclectically. This is who we are:

Duncan maintains the Naxi Script Resource Centre, and works as a translator for various publishers in the UK.

Kellen runs Annals of Wu, xiǎo ér jīng and formerly Nothing Undone. When not doing that, he’s busy being a graduate student.

Paweł is a contributor to Echoes of Manchu where he is currently leading the translation project for The Book of the Nisan Shaman.

Randy runs Yuwen and writes for Echoes of Manchu.  He runs a language school in northeast China, and is the author of Open Me, a textbook that teaches English reading.

Sima writes for Echoes of Manchu and resides in Chinese Manchuria. Little else is known about him.

Syz / Steve Hansen produces Beijing Sounds. He lives and works in Beijing.

We also have a few regular guest contributors.

Daan co-authored the former sister-site Nothing Undone, focused on classical Chinese. He is interested in early China in all its aspects.

Here you’ll find our group blog among other things, but we all started blogging independently about narrower topics. Here are our subject-specific blogs:

Mandarin
Beijing Sounds - audio & discussion on Beijing dialect and culture
Yǔwén - Mandarin acquisition by native speakers
Manchu
Echoes of Manchu - information & discussion on the Manchu language
Naxi
The Naxi Script Resource Center - information on Naxi writing and language
Wu
Annals of Wu - audio & discussion on Wu (Shanghainese) dialects
Other
xiǎo ér jīng - life & language among China’s Muslims

Recent Comments            
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      1. TS: “While a Cantonese speaker would likely understand much of what was said around them...
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      1. Chris Waugh: “Every time we went through this, the scale would read something like 4.5kg...
      2. Kellen: While we’re reviving a slightly older post… The conversation about...
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      4. Sima: It seems that “catty” is the source of the somewhat more familiar word caddy as...
      Modern Character Creation  (9)
      1. Kellen Parker: That’d be one way to do it. I had a different idea of how it would be fixed,...
      2. Alan: To fix this, wouldn’t there have to be something like a Unicode extension for...
      Bowl, Plate, Plowl  (8)
      1. Syz (Steve Hansen): It’s a hard mentality to break out of. To this day I still find myself...
      2. Alan: I (native English speaker) got into exactly this discussion with a native Mandarin speaker...
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    Recent Posts
        
        
        
    Recent Comments          
    • Number Taboos in Sino-Korean  (10)
      1. TS: “While a Cantonese speaker would likely understand much of what was said around them...
      Catty  (25)
      1. Chris Waugh: “Every time we went through this, the scale would read something like 4.5kg...
      2. Kellen: While we’re reviving a slightly older post… The conversation about...
      3. Syz (Steve Hansen): Cool. For a second I was imagining, then, that “golf caddy” might...
      4. Sima: It seems that “catty” is the source of the somewhat more familiar word caddy as...
      Modern Character Creation  (9)
      1. Kellen Parker: That’d be one way to do it. I had a different idea of how it would be fixed,...
      2. Alan: To fix this, wouldn’t there have to be something like a Unicode extension for...
      Bowl, Plate, Plowl  (8)
      1. Syz (Steve Hansen): It’s a hard mentality to break out of. To this day I still find myself...
      2. Alan: I (native English speaker) got into exactly this discussion with a native Mandarin speaker...
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