Language Log

Yesterday afternoon, UC San Diego Linguistics grad student Amanda Ritchart presented her research (joint with Amalia Arvaniti) on the use and realization of uptalk in Southern California English at the 166th Acoustical Society of America meeting. This work is profiled in the ASA's press room, and has thus far received a fair amount of attention. You can hear and/or read about it on KPBS (San Diego's public radio station), at WBUR's Here & Now, on BBC News, and in the Washington Post. (See also this shout-out on the Linguistic Society of America website.)

Uptalk has been discussed many times here on Language Log, so regular readers are probably not unfamiliar with it. But one of the most recent Language Log posts on the topic ("Uptalk awakening", 9/29/2013) shows how relatively unaware of this long-standing feature of many varieties of English some folks still are. So the media coverage of Ritchart & Arvaniti's work is welcome — and on the whole pretty good, if a little biased toward a "wow, it's spreading to men!" interpretation of the research results, which kinda misses the point. But of course, if you scroll down to the comments (why oh why do I ever scroll down to the comments???), you'll see that many appear to think that the use of rising intonation at the ends of (some!) statements is the clearest evidence we have of the decline of western civilization. Sigh.

Update — more here.

At the expense of English and of other Chinese topolects and languages?

We have seen that, in recent weeks and months, there has been considerable agitation against the increasing role of English in Chinese education and life in general. Supposedly, overemphasis on English is leading to the deterioration of Chinese language skills. Consequently, the amount of time devoted to English in schools is to be reduced, the weight placed upon English in college entrance examinations is to be decreased, and there are calls for children to begin to study English later than first grade of elementary school, which is the case now.

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Together with his "greetings from small-town Japan", Chris Pickel sent in this photograph of a sign, which was put up in his neighborhood for the aki-matsuri 秋祭り ("autumn festival").

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Yesterday morning in class, I had all the students from China pronounce a word I wrote on the board — gē'ermen 哥儿们 ("pals; buddies; brothers") — and everybody was astonished to hear with their own ears the enormous differences in the way the word was pronounced, even though each student thought they were speaking standard Mandarin.  This was not due to dialectal variation — because when I asked a few of the students to pronounce the word according to their home topolect, then it would come out in a quite different manner — but simply to individual differences in the realization of gē'ermen 哥儿们 in Mandarin.

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Students of Japanese often get confused about when to use "Nihon" and when to use "Nippon" as the name of the country.  In truth, there are many names for the "Land of the Rising Sun (a translation of Nihon / Nippon にほん / にっぽん / 日本), and sometimes the English name "Japan" gets thrown into the mix.  All of these variants came together in an incident that is recounted for us by Jim Breen.

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Here is the name card of one of the officers at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Boston.

Nearly every literate person who receives this card would pronounce her name, 黃薳玉, as Huáng Yuǎnyù, but they would be wrong.

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The winner for the 2012 Nobel prize in literature is Mò Yán 莫言 (means roughly "speechless"), pen name of Guǎn Móyè 管谟业.

Currently the most comprehensive exposition of his work is Shelly W. Chan's A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan published by Cambria Press in 2011.

Yesterday, there was talk from the PRC that, if Mo Yan won the prize, this would be the first for China, but that is far from the truth, since Gao Xingjian won the literature prize in 2000 and Liu Xiaobo — who languishes in prison — won the peace prize in 2010.

Despite the good news for Mo Yan that is being trumpeted around the world, his simple two syllable pen name is being murdered as "Mow Yawn", "Moe Yahng", and so forth. Here is a recording of what it sounds like in Modern Standard Mandarin as pronounced by a native speaker.

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When I went to the Einstein Bros Bagels shop in Houston Hall at 7:39 a.m. this morning to get my usual sausage, egg, and cheese on a ciabatta loaf, I noticed this sign taped to the cash register:

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Andrew Spitz and Momo Miyazaki, students at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, posted this charming video of their cross-linguistic art project:

WTPh? (What the Phonics) is an interactive installation set in the touristic areas of Copenhagen. Street names in Denmark are close to impossible for foreigners to pronounce, so we did a little intervention :-)

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If you have a friend who is confused about the 'iptivisms — or if you yourself have some doubts about the issues involved — I recommend John Wells, "ha ha", John Wells' Phonetic Blog 6/19/2012.

Judging from many comments on this post, "Annals of airport Chinglish, part 3", there is both tremendous interest in and massive confusion about how Chinese characters are constructed.

Jeremy Goldkorn sent me this clever complaint about the characters from Weibo (China's imitation of Twitter) which is circulating widely on the web; it seems to be relevant to our present discussion:

终于会读了，泪奔 三个土念垚（yáo）三个牛念犇（bēn）三个手念掱（pá）三个田念畾（lěi）三个马念骉（biāo）三个羊念羴（shān）三个犬念猋 （biāo）三 个鹿念麤（cū）三个鱼念鱻（xiān）三个贝念赑（bì）三个毛念毳（cuì）三个车念轟（hōng）不会读的转!

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One of the earliest and best photographers in China was called John Zumbrun, but I have also seen his surname spelled various different ways, including Zumbrum.  Some of his pictures may be seen here (this site is run by Thomas H. Hahn, digital archivist of old photographs).

As soon as I saw his surname, I suspected that it might be a variant of the Zumbrunnen among my own maternal relatives who were of Swiss German extraction.  When I mentioned to my sister Heidi (who does intense genealogical research on our family) that I thought Zumbrun might be a variant of Zumbrunnen, she replied, "Oh man, the variant spellings of Zumbrunnen are driving me batty.  I have even seen Zum Pwunnen.  Have you heard of the soundex?  It is a way to index names & deal with all of the variant spellings."

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This afternoon I passed by a group of high school kids from China going down the street outside of Williams Hall, the office building in which I work.  One of the girls said merrily, "Bur'ao", by which she meant Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) bù zhīdào 不知道 ("[I] don't know").

The retroflex final -r is well known for northern varieties of Mandarin, but in Pekingese it seems that the mighty R has the ability to swallow up whole syllables, as in the example quoted in the previous paragraph.

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Having just returned from a month of living and teaching (in Chinese) on the Mainland (in other words, receiving an intensive dose of Putonghua), I was struck by how different Taiwan Guoyu *sounds* in this video.  It's about a subject that is dear to my heart:  the medieval caves at the Central Asian site of Dunhuang with their magnificent wall-paintings and multitudinous medieval manuscripts.

Of course, Taiwan Guoyu (National Language, i.e., Mandarin) is still basically the same language as Putonghua (Modern Standard Mandarin [MSM]) on the mainland, but the sounds and a lot of the words and typical expressions are somewhat different (judging not merely from this one short video, but from other samples, both written and spoken, as well).  And, of course, the script has radically diverged.

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From Kathleen Parker in today's Washington Post:

Scene: An elevator in New York Presbyterian Hospital where several others and I were temporary hostages of a filthy-mouthed woman who was profanely berating her male companion. It wasn’t possible to discern whether he was her mate or her son, but his attire (baggy drawers) and insolent disposition seemed to suggest the latter.

Every other word out of the woman’s mouth was mother——, presumably a coincidental reference to any familial relationship. Finally, she shared with us bystanders her belief that said mother—— would not be welcome in her house (Hark! Good news at last!) and that he could very well seek shelter at his mother—-ing father’s house. Aha, family ties established.

The race and class of the woman and her companion weren't specified, but readers might have been able to divine those attributes from the particular word Parker chose to report (or was that the only vulgarity the woman used?), helped along by the setting at Broadway and 168th Street and the mentions of the separated father and in particular of the young man's "baggy drawers," which presumably were intended to convey some relevant information. (If it had been an upper-middle-class white woman screaming "motherfucker" at a phat-pantsed white preppie, communicative cooperativeness would have obliged Parker to mention that fact lest the reader draw the wrong conclusions.)

I've always found those nudge-nudge allusions to race and ethnicity immeasurably more vulgar than an explicit mention would be, in a sense of "vulgar" that's ought to be a lot more ethically troubling than the one that Parker is focused on — you think of the way people intimate someone's Jewishness by saying they're "very New York." But that's not the kicker…

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