Archive for This blogging life

Notes on Civility

Please read, and take to heart, our "Comments policy".

If you have something worthwhile to contribute, say it courteously and cordially.  There is no need to be gratuitously snarky.  That does not contribute to the smooth, productive flow of discussion.

Be respectful.

Do not be repetitive.

Do not harp on some private hobby-horse of your own.

Be aware that your reputation on Language Log will follow you elsewhere.  Realize that your behavior on other internet fora is known to the denizens of Language Log.  The World Wide Web is mercilessly unforgetful.

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Will this magical shaker leave you shooketh?

Pictured here is a zhèn lóu shénqì 震楼神器 ("magical floor shaker"):

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Non-Han writing in the PRC: A new series

[Blog post today by Bruce Humes]

VHM:  Since I know about half of the authors and translators in this series, I am pleased to see them and their cohort getting wider recognition and circulation.


"'Multi-ethnic' Literature: Yilin’s 2020 Cache of Fiction by non-Han Writers"

As your year-end holiday lockdown fast approaches, it’s worth noting a new series of books by non-Han writers launched this year by one of China’s best-known publishers, Yilin Press — lit., “translation forest” — that is normally associated with marketing popular foreign-language fiction in Mandarin for Chinese readers.

The name of the series itself, Library of Contemporary Classics by China’s Multi-ethnic Writers (中国当代多民族经典作家文库), is notable, because it employs the term “multi-ethnic” rather than the former politically correct, ubiquitous reference to “minority ethnic” literature (少数民族文学) that must surely have rankled some.

I will write more about the worrisome outlook for mother-tongue, multi-ethnic literature out of China — given moves to severely restrict education in Uyghur, Tibetan and Mongolian, and the ongoing incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Turkophone people in Xinjiang — but for now, here are the titles in Yilin’s new series (so far available only in Chinese) with a bit of background info and links:

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Lake name

One of my favorite places to run to from Swarthmore is a beautiful little lake about three miles away.  I've been running down there for a couple of years now after I discovered its existence when I mentioned to some folks who live in Ridley Park, where the lake is located, that I'm always looking for nice places to run, and they suggested, with some pride, that I should come down and check out their little gem of a lake.  So I tried it out and have become stuck on it.  I have to run down there at least once every week or two, otherwise I feel that something is missing in my life.

So I've been blissfully running to that pretty little lake for a couple of years, but never thought whether it had a particular name.  Yesterday, for some unknown reason (perhaps because the weather was so glorious — 70º, clear blue skies, still some autumn foliage), the thought entered my mind that I should ask some people walking around there, sitting on benches, fishing, and standing on the cute bridge at one end where there is a creek that feeds the lake, what they call that lovely, little body of water.

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Trollery

In previous posts on this subject (see "Readings" below), we have listed a number of traits of the typical troll.  There are a few more items that have not been explicitly covered, so I will mention them here.

First, though, a prefatory remark about the defining nature of a troll and what his / her modus operandi consists of.  Namely, the primary purpose of a troll is to disrupt the smooth, collaborative functioning of a discussion group that is dedicated to the discovery of ideas and free, fruitful, civil exchange of opinions.  Trolls want to inflame others so as to bring a screeching halt to amicable, productive dialogue and discourse.  Sometimes trolls will come perilously close to derailing an interesting discussion, causing a furor of denunciation and recrimination, but then, if the group is fortunate and things calm down, they will end up having a stimulating, enlightening conversation after all.

A conspicuous characteristic of the typical troll is that either they do not read the comments policy of the forums where they deposit their invective or they read the guidelines but choose not to adhere to them.  Our comments policy may be accessed by clicking on the link at the top right of the Language Log (LLog) homepage.  However, since many commenters consistently break these rules, I think it is fitting to list them here for all LLog readers to see:

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Spoofing the "crisis" meme

Language Log has been blogging on the "crisis = danger + opportunity" trope since at least 2005.  Our latest iteration is "'Crisis = danger + opportunity' redux" (2/19/20), with a list of references to earlier posts in the series.  By now, the "crisis" meme has become so dull and hackneyed that Tianyu M. Fang has subjected it to a withering deconstruction / reconstruction:

 

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The traits of a troll

Troll watch

WATCHWORD:  When one goes fishing for trolls, the trolls are almost always certain to bite.

We've recently had a succession of posts on trolls (see "Readings" below).  We all know that there are lots of trolls lurking out there all over the internet, and they are up to no good.  They cause much mischief and disrupt otherwise interesting, productive discussions.  They are especially destructive when they are the first to jump in after a post goes up and reflexively say something nasty and negative, without really having read the post and thought about what it's trying to communicate.  Yet, it is clear that different people have different ideas about what exactly a troll is.  So let us see if we can get some idea of or consensus on what constitutes trollishness in today's world.

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The Notion of "Trolling" in Ancient Sanskrit

[This is a guest post by Varun Khanna]

In the Nyāya Sūtra by Akṣapāda Gautama (composed sometime between the sixth century BCE and the second century CE), a three-fold conception of dialogue is discussed. It appears that at the time this was written, dialectic culture was strong in the Sanskritic world. Thus, the rules of dialogue and debate started being codified by several authors, such as Gautama in his Nyāya Sūtra and Caraka (third century BCE) in his seminal Ayurveda work Caraka Saṁhitā. In Gautama's work, he defines three types of dialogue.

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Oops (and apologies)

Those of you who got an email alert, or saw a tweet, about a post titled "Corpora and the Second Amendment: 'keep' (part 1)" may be wondering why you don't see that post.

The reason is that I accidentally posted an unfinished draft; I clicked on "Publish" instead of "Save Draft."

Maybe I need to stop drafting my posts in WordPress, and go back to using my word processing program (which I won't identify, in the hope that I'll escape Geoff Pullum's scorn).

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Language Log logo and t-shirts

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Language Log fan club in China

We have an ardent group of fans in Shenzhen, a large metropolitan area in the Pearl River Delta, just north of Hong Kong.

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Prescriptivist statutory interpretation?

The title of this post combines two topics that are popular with the Language Log audience, and that are not usually discussed together. It is also the title of a LAWnLinguistics post from 2012, shortly after the publication of Reading Law, a book about legal interpretation that was co-authored by Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner. It was one of a series of posts that I did about the book—a series of which the last installment has not yet been written.

The post was about whether prescriptivism has any role to play in statutory interpretation (no inside jokes in this title, I'm afraid), and it occurs to me that since many people here will be interested in the topic, it might be a good idea to bring the post back for a return engagement in a larger venue. And because the topic is one that I recently returned to at LAWnLing, I'm going to include the relevant part of that post as well.

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Toward a recursive meta-pragmatics of Twitterspheric intertextuality

A few days ago, I posted a post consisting of…

a screenshot of a tweet (by me) consisting of…

a screenshot of a Language Log post (by me) consisting of…

a screenshot of a tweet (by me) consisting of…

a screenshot of a tweet by Lynne Murphy, a linguistics professor, quote-tweeting* an earlier tweet by Benjamin Dreyer, who is (although I didn’t know it at the time) a vice president, Executive Managing Editor, and Copy Chief at Random House.
* retweeting and adding a comment

The post was titled, "There's a fine line between recursion and intertextuality."

A screenshot of the post is provided below the fold—but I hasten to add that I am providing the screenshot solely as a convenience to the reader, to save them the trouble of having to leave this post in order to look at that one, should they be so inclined.

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