Hello, this is Mike Campbell with Glossika
and I'm sitting down today with Dr. Emmanuel Ternon,
That is correct
and it's a pleasure to meet you finally,-
Finally, yes.
-and good to hear your speech here at the Polyglot Conference.
Thank you.
And you uh- you have a background in electrical engineering.
That is correct.
You're a software engineer and you're also a polyglot.
Mhmm. I can see you have a handful of languages here
from Europe, from Asia
and you also speak Python.
Yeah, well, I speak Python, Java, swift
and computer languages
[laughter]
programming languages because yeah, that's my day job and
we had to throw in the polyglot as including those languages right?
Yes, absolutely!
Yea, we can do that too.
So that this is really fascinating.
And you've also published this book called
Traditional Chinese Characters, A Trans-lingual Writing System.
That is correct. -Which you can find on Amazon.
And you have Kanji 漢字(Han Zi) and 한자(Hanja )
Yes,- written here as the pronunciations.
How do you say that in Vietnamese, by the way, do you know?
I think it's Hán tự
I'm not sure about the intona-the tones of Vietnamese, because, uh
Yeah, but it's- uh
Right, so you'd say- I readi
Yeah, I was reading through this, this is fascinating.
And I remember through my own study of these languages,
having gone through picking up all of this data from various sources,
but it's hard to find things all on the same page like you've done
that's basically the reason why I felt like I had to write a book like this
because there's so many resources on the internet regarding-
and I and I am familiar with Ken Lunde's book CJKV but-
yeah its pretty good this is really this is
a really good thing for like the layman like if you want to learn-
Absolutely. -about anything thing about the East Asian languages
and how Chinese characters influence- have influenced Korean or Vietnamese
this is an absolutely great resource to getting uh-
I mean, I think that if you read this book,
you could walk out and- and go talk with your
friends and you'd be an expert,
even without having to learn the language. Yea, yeah
you want to be an expert on- on how the Chinese characters work.
Yeah, that's great.
That's basically the reason why I wanted to write this book, because I read a lot on various
sources about all this and the information is there, but it's the- there was like, no
central place where you could find all this.
But what I really love about it is that you don't need to have any knowledge of the languages
before you read this. And when you finish reading it, you won't know the languages but
you will know enough to be able to do your job very well, absolutely, yeah, yeah. And
I love I love that approach about the book because it's not forcing you into like, "Oh,
you have to learn this language in order to
understand this concept." That was not my intention when I wrote it.
Yeah. And so you can see here like the green versus the red areas
that use the different kind of characters.
How did that play out really beautifully? Thank you.
Um, so tell us more about some of the personal projects that you work on.
Yeah,- I heard you've got
an app, or I mean a dictionary as well.
Yes. Okay. So this, it's basically the perfect companion to the book because you know, when
you when you learn about Chinese characters and how they can be used in multiple languages,
as a language learner, you want to make use of this, like common vocabularies, and be
able to cover all the different scripts, no matter whether you simplified, traditional, or
Japanese characters, you want to be able to look for common words
between all these different languages.
And the dictionary I've made, which is called CJKV Dict. does exactly that.
So whenever you search for a word, you're going to have information about all four languages.
You get automatic simplified to traditional conversion.
So for anybody who doesn't recognize the acronym, Yes.
C- yeah- it's for Chinese, J is for - Japanese
K is for - Korean
V is for - Vietnamese, so we normally say it in that order as well.
Like we always say C J K and sometimes add the V- for Vietnamese
There's a website, so you can use it on the browser basically, on your laptop, desktop,
whatever you wish. And there's an app version for iOS and Android.
So how do we use it?
It's completely free. You just download it. And then on the main page, you have like, the
search bar, and whenever you enter characters, and you press this button-
that sounds hard- for some, I mean, if assuming, I don't know the language works, how do I enter a character?
So what is -oh wow- is one of the methods that I can use to enter?
Okay, so if you already know how to write the language on a computer,
or on your smartphone, we don't need to answer it, then you're gonna be okay.
But for the people who don't know how to enter the language.
Thats the thing, you can also input phonetic phonetic transcriptions oh uh- yeah.
So if I know if I know the spelling of Tokyo, and I want to know what the Chinese characters
for Tokyo are, can I type in T O K Y O? Uh for-
-or do I have to- you have to know its a long vowel T O U K Y O U
Question though, because I have to write- you're right, you're absolutely right. So
if I'm looking at Japanese and I'm traveling around Japan like we are now, -Yes. And I
see the sign and it says to with a line on the top that I know that that's a long O,
but it's not an OO, but it's an OU. Yes.
Right? Because Okay, you still need to be able to know a little bit about the language,
but that's why it's targeted at language learners, right? Because when you start learning Japanese
you learn about long vowels that they're mostly written OU and not OO only in some cases,
Yeah. Well as to whether the word comes from is like a native Japanese word or so Sino,
Right so so your words that have been borrowed into Japanese for Chinese are normally going
to have the U ending on those long vowels. Yes, that's correct, that's correct.
So the word for FAR 遠い - Yeah, it's actually a double O.
Yes- But that's a native Japanese word. Because it's a native Japanese word
So if it's coming from Chinese it's going to have- normally what we would say is the
NG ending in Chinese becomes the OU in Japanese and some of shifts shifted in another
direction they've gone to EI.
So like the word 明(Ming) , like bright. You get みょう(myō),
Or you get めい(mei)
Yeah, like the Meiji Period. Yeah, for example, I'm talking about this in the book
about the
the difference, translation of Japanese kanji because they were imported from China from
different parts of China, at different times in history in the history of Japan. So that's
why sometimes you end up in, in uh-
I was just reading about that today. I was trying, I was trying to act smart here to
kind of show that I had read your book. So you mentioned the Kan-on Yes. and the Tō-on,
all right. See if I can find it, yeah. Or you know where it is?
Yeah. I know where it is [Laughter]
or can you just tell us about it.
So yeah, yes. Theres the Kan-on readings, then the Tō-on reading-
Exactly.
So this- Okay, the first is the uh -
Gō-on. Gō-on readings, ok.
and the Gō-on was like, it's exactly the same as Wu, so so the Wu
Chinese like the Shanghai region from was like the during six century? Really? Really?
Yeah. A long time ago. Yeah, it was the first reading to be imported.
Okay. Then you had the Kan-on on that came during -
and that's the majority- That was during the Tang Dynasty
is that the majority of readings in Japanese are Kan-on. Um, not sure about the statistics.
Okay, I'm not sure about the statistics- So it's just kind of split.
Yeah, yeah.
But I've seen that some of those Tō-on readings are very similar to Mandarin so it's almost as if they
were like really late. Yeah.
Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think the Tō-on or the latest one that were it was during the Song
Dynasty or the Ming Dynasty. So a lot later than you know the Kan-on and Gō-on readings-
because a lot of the NGs in mandarins still remain as an N and Japanese on the Tō-on
readings- Yep, yes, that's correct. Yeah.
Yeah. Because I mean, yeah, you have to see that when the Gō-on readings were imported.
Yeah, people in China weren't I'm speaking, Modern Standard Mandarin that we're speaking
like, so this is interesting
if I, if I know a Chinese character and I know how to read it, let's say Mandarin, then
I can go through that process like I just did to kind of get an educated guess of what
it might be in Japanese. You could, yeah.
But if I'm taking the word like Ming,
and I go into, let's say Korean,
Yeah, something different happens, right? Mmm, that's true. Because Yeah, I think it's
명 (Myeong). Yeah.
That's what I remember. There's this place in Seoul called Myeongdong.
Yep, that's correct. And we use the same characters,
and then if we go down to and of course, there are the different Chinese languages and dialects,
like you've got theTaiwanese or the Cantonese. Yeah.
-very similar readings.
But then we when we get to Vietnamese then
we get like, I don't know, what would it be in Viet.
I think the phonological system of Vietnamese
is a lot wider than um, Korean and whatnot- I think it's Minh and the tone goes the opposite way.
So it would be M i n h with a fallen tone.
I find - if I if I get - I'm rusty on that
I did. I did research on this many years ago and I think I have a rule of thumb to try to,
to remember. Actually this is a typical use case for CJKV Dict.
Oh is it? Yeah, if you want to know you know how to pronounce the character in Chinese, in Mandarin, for example.
So you just input the Mandarin pronunciation if you know what the character means you can find
it in the list of results and then you look at all the pronunciation in all other
Personally I feel that Mandarin is not a good base language.
I think that Cantonese is probably the best base language because- Yeah I've heard that before, yep
-it retains all of the ancient variations that you can now
map to all the other languages and so I think for a Cantonese speaker, learning any of the
other languages in East Asia is super fast for vocabulary acquisition, at least
as a mandarin speaker, I feel it's sometimes a little bit more challenging.
I'm really curious to know. Yeah.
What are you working on in the future? Are you allowed to talk about it?
What's your next big project? Yeah,
I mean, well, CJKV Dict is not finished. So yeah, there are still quite a few features
I'm working on right now.
So how about a word like, the Japanese word for
Yes. I mean, the Japanese word てがみ (tegami)
Yeah. yeah.
Which is the Japanese word for letter.
Yes. That's great.
So if I, if you translate that into Chinese, currently, your dictionary does it literally.
Yes.
So are you are you planning to do a version
where you will translate that into the single character scene?
Ah, I see what you mean, yeah, I see what you're talking about, but not really.
But what's cool with CJKV dict is okay:
It's not meant to be a Chinese to Japanese Dictionary or
Chinese to Korean. It's meant to be a dictionary that shows you that sometimes
you know the same characters can mean completely different things
like as in the case of tegami- Oh so when I- when I look it up,
it'll show me what the different meanings are
Exactly. Okay, so you will see our is interesting
we have four translations here. Yes. Exactly so
Letter in Japanese and toilet paper in, in Chinese you know.
And yeah there are a couple more examples like kombu hada in Korean
so- to study. In Japanese, the- the equivalent
word is くふう (ku fuu) which means to solve something ingeniously it has
and then we have the borrowing English from Chinese which is
the 功夫 (Kung Fu) yeah but actually Yeah I don't know-
I don't know if it comes
from the the exact same kind of but actually when we speak Chinese,
Kung Fu does not always mean a martial art.
It means- like some effort-
my hard my hard work is also my Kung Fu. Right.
So it has multiple uses,
uses in Chinese.
Yeah.