Language Log

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

“The Japanese and Their Language: How the Japanese Made Their Language and It Made Them,” by Samuel Robert Ramsey.

PROLOGUE

Travel the length and breadth of Japan, across the more than 6,800 islands in the archipelago, and anywhere you go, from the Tokyo megalopolis to the most remote and isolated village, every person you meet will immediately understand and speak Nihongo—Japanese. The accents you hear might vary from place to place. There will be odd and unexplained words and pronunciations peculiar to each of these places. But not one person among the more than 126 million citizens of Japan will have any trouble at all understanding the standard language as it’s normally spoken.

No, this is not about Mister Ed. The OED glosses to talk horse as "to talk the language of ‘the turf’; to talk big or boastfully", with quote from T.C. Halliburton's 1855 collection Nature & Human Nature:

Doctor, I am a borin’ of you, but the fact is, when I get a goin’ ‘talkin’ hoss,’ I never know where to stop.

But Sam Slick, the speaker of that fictional quote, is actually talking about a horse-riding incident, which would fit perfectly well in the current equestrian podcast Talk Horse. And I asked the OED about the "talk horse" phrase because of a quote in a collection of 1852-53 articles about Emma Snodgrass: Cross dresser, for which the "talk big or boastfully" sense might be more appropriate.

Photograph from Neil Kubler of a sign in front of a gift shop in Penghu, Taiwan selling Pénghú wénshí 澎湖文石 ("Pescadores aragonite"); its name in Chinese, wénshí 文石 literally means "patterned stone", an apt characterization for this carbonate mineral which is favored by sculptors.

Wiktionary's etymology:

nyce, nice, nys, from Old French nice, niche, nisce (“simple, foolish, ignorant”), from Latin nescius (“ignorant, not knowing”); compare nesciō (“to know not, be ignorant of”), from ne (“not”) + sciō (“to know”).

Wiktionary's etymology:

From Middle English mery, merie, mirie, myrie, murie, murȝe, from Old English meriġe, miriġe, myriġe, myreġe, myrġe (“pleasing, agreeable; pleasant, sweet, delightful; melodious”), from Proto-West Germanic *murgī (“short, slow, leisurely”), from Proto-Germanic *murguz (“short, slow”), from Proto-Indo-European *mréǵʰus (“short”). Cognate with Scots mery, mirry (“merry”), Middle Dutch mergelijc (“pleasant, agreeable, joyful”), Norwegian dialectal myrjel (“small object, figurine”), Latin brevis (“short, small, narrow, shallow”), Ancient Greek βραχύς (brakhús, “short”). Doublet of brief.

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.