Language Log

Over the years, we've discussed the fact that "filled pauses" (um and uh in American English) sometimes have communicative force beyond their role in filling compositional silences — see e.g. "And uh — then what?", 1/5/2004, and "Uh", 10/12/2016. There's a nice example in a recent headline at TPM: "Um, Tapes?", 1/21/2019. In the article under the headline, Josh Marshall remarks on a striking passage in Rudy Guliani's New Yorker interview:

RG:But I can tell you, from the moment I read the story, I knew the story was false.

NYR: Because?

RG: Because I have been through all the tapes, I have been through all the texts, I have been through all the e-mails, and I knew none existed. And then, basically, when the special counsel said that, just in case there are any others I might not know about, they probably went through others and found the same thing.

NYR: Wait, what tapes have you gone through?

There's a Thai word for "soul", khwan, that sounds like Sinitic hún 魂 ("soul").

Old Sinitic

(Baxter–Sagart): /*[m.]qʷˤə[n]/

(Zhengzhang): /*ɢuːn/

I've always assumed that Thai khwan and Sinitic hún 魂 are related, but was never sure in which direction the influence / borrowing spread.

One reason I'm so interested in this question is because, already in BC times, we have evidence in south China (N.B. south) of rituals for calling back wandering souls, which are very similar to such rituals in Thai religion.

Or maybe writing problems? Donald Trump's recent speech announcing the end of the government shutdown was read (I presume from a teleprompter), but the reading was awkward in at least two ways: the president often pronounced unstressed function words in a full and unreduced form, and his phrasing was odd, sometimes to the point of obscuring the meaning.

The middle four panels of today's Doonesbury:

Ben Zimmer has a great piece at Politico, "Roger Stone and 'Ratfucking': A Short History". The subtitle: "The flamboyant political aide is often tagged with the term. But its origins—and Stone’s relationship with the word—are complicated."

Ben takes the history back to one of Edmund Wilson's notebooks in 1922, and (via Jesse Sheidlower) before that to WWI military slang:

Sheidlower zeroes in on a veteran of General John J. Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force named Leonard H. Nason, who used a series of rat-related euphemisms in novels he wrote based on his experiences at war. His favorite circumlocution was “rat-kissing” to describe destructive activity, as in, “No more of this rat-kissing” (Sergeant Eadie, 1928) or, “You know, I had a sergeancy clinched if we hadn’t run into all this rat-kissing!” (The Man in the White Slicker, 1929). And in a turn of phrase that Ted Cruz would appreciate, Nason referred to “this here gigantic rat-copulation they call a war” in his 1930 novel, A Corporal Once.

[This is a guest post by Chau Wu]

There is a long-standing puzzle that has attracted historical linguists’ interest. This is a single sentence of 10 characters in two clauses: “秀支替戾岡, 僕谷劬禿當” (xiù zhī tì lì gāng, pú gŭ qú tū dāng). The sentence does not make sense in any of the Sinitic topolects. Obviously, this appears to be from a foreign language using Sinographs as phonetic transcriptions. Indeed, the source document which gives this mysterious sentence clearly indicates this is in Jié 羯, a non-Sinitic language that showed up in China during the chaotic period known as the Sixteen Kingdoms (304-439 CE) marked by uprisings of 五胡 wŭhú ‘Five Barbarians’ (Xiōngnú 匈奴, Jié 羯, Xiānbēi 鮮卑, Dī 氐, and Qiāng 羌) against the Jìn 晉 dynasty.

From an anonymous contributor in Taiwan:

From Francis Miller in Xi'an, China:

From Joel Martinsen:

From Bobby Shore:

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges." –James Tobin, July 1984

John asked:

Does the Unicode process restrict the language people use? For example, I haven't seen any requests to add any new English characters – I can write whatever I like without having to amend the base character set.

Good question and observation!

Our Roman alphabet has 26 X 2 = 52 letters, and you are right.  With them we can write any word that we can say.

It's quite a different matter with Chinese characters.  There are tens of thousands of them, only about 3,000 of which are in fairly common use (covering 99.18% of all occurrences), and about 6,000 of which are in infrequent use (covering about 99.98% of all occurrences).

Most great works of Chinese literature, both modern and premodern, are written within a range of around 3,000 characters or less.

I've never met a single person, no matter how learned, who could actively produce more than 8,000 characters by handwriting, without the aid of any electronic device (I think that there must be an upper limit to the number of different characters the human brain can keep distinct in their brain for active production, which requires intricate neuro-muscular coordination. .

10,000 characters would cover 99.9999999% of all occurrences.

[VHM:  The coverage figures in the previous paragraphs are taken from "Modern Chinese Character Frequency List" by Jun Da.]

"Senate Finds Russian Bots, Bucks Helped Push Brexit Vote Through", NPR Weekend Edition 1/19/2019:

A recent report on Russian influence operations overseas detailed large amounts of money and effort spent to influence the referendum. Scott Simon talks with The New Yorker's Jane Mayer.

Uncharacteristically for a professional speaker, Scott Simon commits two interesting speech errors in his short parts of this short (3:44) interview.