Language Log

From Xinyi Ye:

I was on my way home from HKU (Hong Kong University) and was looking for a dinner place and found this handwritten menu:
(explanations and annotations below)

Xinyi is not a native of Hong Kong, but she has been living there long enough to know the folkways and even to be sufficiently familiar with the local lingo to be sensitive to the special flavor of the menu shorthand on display in the eateries there.

This signboard offers a cornucopia of delicious Hong Kong menu shorthand, starting with the first two items (N.B.:  not all items on the board are distinctively Cantonese, but plenty of them are):

1. dòufù 豆付 (lit., "bean pay") for dòufu 豆腐 ("tofu; bean curd")

2. jiāndàn 煎旦 ("fried dawn") for jiāndàn 煎蛋 ("fried egg")

Friday's On The Media, "Deep Fakes, Data Centers, And AI Slop — Are We Cooked?" has some linguistically-interesting discussion, especially the part about the rise of AI-generated trolling — more on that later. But this post is just a quick note on a widespread symptom of current end-to-end speech-to-text technology, where the text end of the process is letter-sequence tokens of obscure origin, yielding some peculiar spelling errors.

This past semester, the lectures for ling0001 took place in a classroom located in Penn's Annenberg School for Communication, and one of the students in the course asked me something that I've wondered about myself from time to time: Why is it "The Annenberg School for Communication" rather than "The Annenberg School of Communications"?

There are two questions here:

• Why "for" rather than "of", as in most other post-secondary "School of X" institutions?
• Why singular "communication" rather than plural "communications"?

Compare the many web hits for "school of communications", where other programs made the opposite choice of preposition and plurality.

Wikipedia deepens the question by telling us that

The school was established in 1958 by Wharton School alum Walter Annenberg as the Annenberg School of Communications. The name was changed to its current title in 1990.

This morning I received the following link without any accompanying explanation:  link is embedded here.  As soon as I started to read through the text, it seemed as though it were Hindi-Urdu, or some other northern Indic language, but it was so jumbled with English and jargon that I couldn't really make full sense of all that it was saying.  Moreover, it was written in romanization, not Devanagri or Perso-Arabic.  I had studied a summer of Hindi-Urdu about 60 years ago, but that was in the two native scripts, and I had become quite proficient in Nepali from having lived in the eastern Himalayas from 1965-67. Nepali was also written in Devanagari and was full of Indic cognates, but also had plenty of Persian and Arabic borrowings.

Several of my PRC M.A. students have told me that the following tool for the computation of dialect closeness has become quite popular in China:

fāngyán yīnxì xiāngsì dù cèshì 方言音系相似度測試 ("Dialect phonological similarity test"),V3.2.358

(source)    

Following up on Diana Shuheng Zhang's notes on forty Northeasternisms (11/12/25), Yizhi Geng gives us another helping.  While Diana's collection is based mainly on Dalian city, Yizhi's comes from Changchun.

"mǎ húlu 马葫芦": "manhole" (lit., "horse gourd / calabash / cucurbit"), where "mǎ húlu gài 马葫芦盖" refers to "manhole-cover". According to older generations, this word came from Japanese, "manhōru マンホール", which was created during Japanese occupation. It seems to be interesting how this word came from English, to Japanese, and finally to Northeastern topolect dōngběi huà 东北话 we used in Changchun. 

"dà huí / xiǎo huí 大回 / 小回": "turn left / turn right" (lit., "big retreat / small retreat". It is said to also come from Japanese, but I cannot relate it to any Japanese expression I know. 

Trump's Wednesday evening speech got a lot of media coverage, as expected — but along with descriptions of (and responses to) the content, there were also many references to the tone, and specifically to the pace.

From surya:

I took this at the Grand Street Skewer Cart in Manhattan.

Around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, there were countless Chinese intellectuals and common citizens who perceived that their nation was in such desperate straits that something drastic had to be done or it would collapse altogether.  Many of these concerned citizens focused on the archaic script as unsuited for the purposes of modern science.  Others concentrated on the "unsayable" classical / literary language (wényán 文言) as primarily responsible for China's backwardness, which resulted in Japan's defeat of China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95).  There were scores upon scores of reformers, the best minds of the country, who put forward a broad variety of proposals for language and script reform.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-ninth issue:

“The Pazyryk Vehicles: New Data and Reconstructions, a Preliminary Report,” by Victor A. Novozhenov, Kyrym Altynbekov, and Elena V. Stepanova. (free pdf)

South Korea exam chief quits over 'insane' English test | BBC New (12/12/25)

It's WOTY season, and The Economist's choice for 2025 is slop:

PICKING A WORD of the year is not easy. In the past the American Dialect Society has gone with “tender-age shelters” (2018) and “-ussy” (2022). The Oxford English Dictionary (oed) has caused conniptions by opting for things like “youthquake” (2017) and “goblin mode” (2022). If you cannot remember why those terms were big that year, that is the point: the exercise is not a straightforward one.

Sometimes a single suitable word is not at hand, so a phrase is chosen instead; other times the word simply seems jarring. Middle-aged lexicographers are often tempted to crown a bit of youth slang, but such terms are transient and sound out of date before the press release is published.

The Economist’s choice for 2025 is a single word. It is representative, if not of the whole year, at least of much of the feeling of living in it. It is not a new word, but it is being used in a new way. You may not like it, but you are living with it. And it is probably here to stay.

The Canadian English Dictionary

is a project being developed by the Society for Canadian English, a not-for-profit consortium including Editors Canada, the Canadian Word Centre at UBC and the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University.

And as of yesterday, they announced their first Word of the Year.