Loving the art!!

The last was supposed to be "figure out what's wrong with my English accent"

Glad to see you back! :)

I'd recognize the TFwiki logo anywhere

Love the design on this!

Found it:

《洗兒》蘇軾

人皆養子望聰明，
我被聰明誤一生。
惟願孩兒愚且魯，
無災無難到公卿。

transcribe an inscription exactly. But now Unicode has added compositional characters that can combine hieroglyphs in different positions, which means the coinage of new characters for Chinese may be back again in the near future!

Also, one VERY recent development, almost certainly after the final draft of the bookw as finalized, was compositional characters for Egyptian hieroglyphs! Previously you could only write them all in a chain, removing all positional information, which makes it troublesome if you're trying to, e.g.

the outermost electrons of tennessine (a very large atom) are so loosely held that they can easily be swapped between atoms (or rather, it's meaningless to say who those electrons belong to), making a metal, which in turn would make 鈿 a more appropriate character. (sound: TIEN + meaning: metal)

A couple more things that aren't actually key to the book: Tennessine, being used as an example of a newly coined character, is not actually non-metallic. Astatine is debatable, but given that larger atoms have looser outermost electrons due to the inner electrons shielding the nucleus's influence,

Otherwise I think it's a very good introduction to Chinese writing! Do go read it!

@zevhandel.bsky.social

Ch.5 Endnote 6: I think common usage is that Old Chinese is the earliest attested form of Chinese, which also happens to be a common ancestor of all Chinese, which I don't think was clear.