Language Log

Four days ago, rumors and reports were flying fast and furious that Alice Mak Mei-kuen, a member of Legislative Council of Hong Kong for the New Territories West constituency, representing the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions, swore at the Chief Executive (CE) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, using the most vile language imaginable:

"Swear words heaped on Carrie Lam as pro-establishment lawmakers express fears of election rout over Hong Kong extradition bill fracas:  Lawmaker hurled expletives at Lam as she tearfully explained her decision to suspend the bill; Many fear electoral backlash in November's district council elections", by Gary Cheung and Tony Cheung, SCMP (6/20/19)

Although the language employed by Mak was, shall we say, quite colorful, I held off on posting on it until I could get better confirmation of her actual words.  That came through yesterday evening in the form of these notes from Bob Bauer:

One never ceases to be amazed at the articles one comes upon in Wikipedia.  First, in this comment to a discussion on anti-Westernism in China ("War on foreign names in China" [6/22/19]), I encountered the notion of "Westoxification" in contemporary Iranian discourse.  Reading the Wikipedia article on this subject is so interesting that I copy passages of it here for Language Log readers (the whole article is fascinating and well worth reading):

….On Monday they shot down an unmanned drone flying in International Waters. We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019

AP News report (6/21/19) by Fu Ting:  "Chinese crackdown on foreign names draws protest".  The article begins thus:

The Manhattan neighborhood, Venice Garden, the Vienna hotel chain — to the ears of the Chinese government, the names are too foreign-sounding and must go.

Provinces and cities across China have been issuing notices pressuring both private and public officials to rename businesses, bridges and neighborhoods, reflecting renewed efforts by President Xi Jinping's government to "sinicize" China.

Eoin Cullen writes:

For a while I've been familiar with the fact that there is an established set of two-character surnames in Chinese including Sīmǎ 司馬 and Ōuyáng 歐陽, but I was interested to see the novel two-character surname of the head of the SAR government in HK, Lam4zeng6 Jyut6ngo4 林鄭月娥.

My German is not that great. But I think I understand the headline. pic.twitter.com/WuwOGZZdz9

— Paul (@paulj71) June 13, 2019

Alison Flood, "The curse of Jeremy Hunt: why his name is hard to say", The Guardian 6/21/2019:

Linguistics experts have been picking over a particularly juicy problem for the last few weeks: why do presenters from James Naughtie to Nicky Campbell keep replacing the first letter of Jeremy Hunt's surname with a C?

Bob Sanders writes from Kanazawa, Japan:

Today I bought some mouthwash at a national pharmacy chain and received a coupon for a discount on any two future purchases made later this month, with certain items excluded from this offer. In fact, it is this list of exclusions which immediately caught my attention (see photo below), because it so graphically highlights why for me, at least, as someone who came to Japanese much later in life with a background in Chinese language studies, katakana, rather than kanji or hiragana, is the most difficult of the three orthographies to process orally in my brain.

A truly amazing chain of Cantonese puns has sprung up from last Wednesday's protests in Hong Kong.

As police were about to shoot tear gas at them (virtually point blank), Hong Kong reporters shouted out, "gei3ze2 記者!" ("Press! [Don't shoot!]).

Applying the norm that you can insert virtually anything into the initial slot in the phrase "diu2 lei5 lou5 mou5*2 屌你老母" ("fuck your mother") to mean, roughly, "fuckin' X" or "X my ass," one of the police shouted back "gei3 lei5 lou5 mou5*2 記你老母" ("fucking journalists," "fuck you / fuck your mother, journalists," or "journalists my arse").

Today's SMBC:

The main slogan of the Hong Kong protesters is "faan2 sung3 Zung1 反送中" ("against being sent to China; against extradition to China").  The sung3 Zung1 送中" ("extradition to China") part of the slogan is echoed by the expression sung3zung1 送終 ("attend upon a dying relative; mourning; pay one's last respects; bury one's parent").  Consequently, when the protesters shout "faan2 sung3 Zung1 反送中" ("against being sent to China; against extradition to China"), they are also simultaneously and paranomastically exclaiming that they are against the death [of Hong Kong] (faan2 sung3zung1 反送終).

A few days ago, the hashtag #方言怎么翻译 (fāngyán zěnme fānyì ["how to translate 'fangyan']") was trending on Weibo (a Chinese microblogging website) since it appeared in the cet-6 exam (College English Test, a national English examination in the People's Republic of China) that recently ended. It was interesting to see how examinees translated it. For example, "local language, folk language, place's language, regional language, area's language."

On the UT Dallas campus: