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Haha, it's Sip House. And it's a Vietnamese coffee shop, not a bar at all, I may have just gotten that false impression because of the connotations of the word "Lounge".

The font on their website is really different from the font on their sign!
www.siphousewa.com

I wonder if the person who made the sign is even aware of the ambiguity they created?

To tell the truth, I'm still not 100% sure the sign is supposed to say "house" and not "Lounge". I'm going to look the place up right now on the web to find out what its name is. Be right back.

2) The letter s isn't usually written with a descender, even in cursive, so g is a better candidate than s for the second-to-last letter.

3) "lounge" is a more natural word than "house" for a café — at least it seems so to me.

I think there are several reasons, all unconscious assumptions.

1) A default expectation that both words of the name would be capitalized. The first letter of the second word looks as much like a cursive capital L as a lower-case h.

For years I walked past this sign and assumed it said "Sip Lounge".

Then one day recently I walked past and thought, Wait. Could that second word be "house"?

Now I'm sure it's "house". There's nothing that could be construed as the "n" in "Lounge". So why was I initially so sure it said "Lounge"?

Photo of a cafe on a street corner. Its name is on a neon sign above the entrance, in cursive script. The first word is clearly “Sip”. The second word is not so clear (at least not to me).

This time with Alt text.

This café/bar is on my daily walking route to work. I’ve passed it dozens, maybe hundreds, of times over the years since it opened.

I’m beginning to suspect that I’ve been misreading the sign this whole time.

If you have a list of things you'd like to see revised or updated, please let me know! I don't know if/when the publisher will be interested in a second edition, but I want to be ready if it happens.

Thanks for pointing those out. I agree that I need to make some revisions. Part of the problem is I had trouble deciding when it was better for readers if I used modern pronunciations as illustrations.

An image showing the evolution of the Chinese character 馬 'horse', from early oracle-bone to various Warring States forms, then to seal script, clerical script, and modern script

If the state of Hán 韓 had somehow managed to conquer all the other Warring States and establish the first dynasty instead of the state of Qín 秦, the modern character for 'horse' would look something like 目.

And there's a typo I made in the Korean title in the post above. That should of course be:

동아시아의 한자: 중국 문자의 차용과 변용

Korean cover of 동아시아의 한자: 중국 준자의 차용과 변용, a translation of Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script, by 제브 핸델 (Zev Handel)

My 2019 book Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script has just been published in Korean. I'm deeply grateful to Prof. LEE Yong 이용 (University of Seoul) and his team for the incredible effort that went into translating this work with care and accuracy.

동아시아의 한자: 중국 준자의 차용과 변용

Is it the default ampersand/et symbol in Irish Gaelic orthography? How is it pronounced?

Thank you for introducing me to the exotic Tironian ampersand ⁊ ! I did not know about it.

Do you know how extensively it is used today?

Anyway, do drop by to see me talk if you are in the neighborhood Tuesday afternoon, and stick around to say hi to me. I'd love to meet you.

bsky.app/profile/zevh...

... it can't represent the sound sequence hé in any other Mandarin words (like hé 'river', hé 'nucleus', etc.).

The ampersand has many other fine qualities besides being a Chinese-character-like logograph. Its shape and name both have a fascinating historical origin.

... it can't represent the sound sequence [ænd] in any other English word (like "sand", never written s&).

Compare a Chinese character like 和. It only writes the Mandarin word hé 'and'. It can't represent other Mandarin words with the same meaning (like gēn, yǔ, tóng, yìqǐ, etc.), and ...

I'm very fond of the ampersand.

Like most Chinese characters, it is a logograph (or, if you want to be more precise, a morphograph). As the slide illustrates, it writes only the word "and". It can't represent other English words with the same meaning (like "with", "also", "plus", etc.), and ...

This is one of the slides from my upcoming book talk at Barnes & Noble in the U District, Seattle (this Tuesday, 5:00pm). I often use the English ampersand as an example to help those with no knowledge of Chinese understand how Chinese characters function in Standard Written Chinese.

Wow, 小篆 seal script (based on Shuō wén jiě zì 說文解字) is going to be separately encoded for inclusion in Unicode 18.0!

Proposal document here: www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n53...

Oh no! I had hoped a 5:00pm start would avoid conflicts for most people.

Cover of the book Chinese Characters Across Asia by Zev Handel (University of Washington Press, 2025)

Like the book, this talk will be accessible to everyone—regardless of whether you have any knowledge of Chinese characters or East Asian languages. All are welcome and guaranteed to have a good time.

If you are in the Seattle area, come see me on February 3 at the Barnes and Noble UW Book Store. I'm holding a talk, reading, and book signing for my book Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.

stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/978006...

Front cover of Zev Handel’s book _Chinese Characters across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese_.

Just finished reading _Chinese Characters Across Asia_ by @zevhandel.bsky.social l. It’s the clearest introduction I have read about how the Chinese writing system works—dispelling common, long-held misunderstandings—, and how the script was adapted to Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Zhuang.

How interesting. The code point is for a digraph of L followed by a raised dot.

The ij digraph is presumably for Dutch?

I can see why cigarettes and alcohol are 迷惑, but jack-o-lanterns? They seem pretty harmless.

Are you sure that’s what it is an image of? It doesn’t look like much of anything to me.

I can see how it gives that impression.

There's also a great set of new digitized Nôm tools here at the Digitizing Vietnam project: www.digitizingvietnam.com/en/tools

/end of references

© VNPF 1999 - 2025. Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, All Rights Reserved.

You can find variants (like in Tweet #42) yourself using this on-line tool from the Nôm Preservation Foundation: nomfoundation.org/nom-tools/No... .

Try entering trăng in the search box!

Alexandre de Rhodes’ dictionary:
Page images at the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (Portuguese National Library): purl.pt/961
Digitized on Wikisource: vi.wikisource.org/wiki/T%E1%BB...