Language Log

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Can you pass the nackle?"

[I wrote this piece more than a year and a half ago, but neglected to post it because I was in the midst of a long run.  Nonetheless, it's still relevant and interesting, so I'm going ahead to post it now.]

"Linguists have identified a new English dialect that’s emerging in South Florida", by Phillip M. Carter in The Conversation (6/12/23)

Beginning sentences:

“We got down from the car and went inside.”

“I made the line to pay for groceries.”

“He made a party to celebrate his son’s birthday.”

These phrases might sound off to the ears of most English-speaking Americans.

In Miami, however, they’ve become part of the local parlance.

According to my recently published research, these expressions – along with a host of others – form part of a new dialect taking shape in South Florida.

This language variety came about through sustained contact between Spanish and English speakers, particularly when speakers translated directly from Spanish.

Poor cattle, they suffer for / from their gallstones in more ways than one.  If you want to know why, read the previous Language Log posts on bezoars, for which see "Selected readings" below.

For linguists, one of the most interesting things about the Chinese term for "bezoar", niúhuáng 牛黃 ("cow yellow"), is that it is among the earliest attestable borrowings into Sinitic from Sanskrit, viz., gorocanā गोरोचना ("bright yellow orpiment prepared from the bile of cattle; yellow patch for the head of a cow; bezoar") — already in pre-Buddhist times.

Because they are so expensive and sought after by believers in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), bezoars are back in the news again:

Cattle Gallstones, Worth Twice as Much as Gold, Drive a Global Smuggling Frenzy
A prized ingredient in China’s $60 billion traditional medicine industry, gallstones have become the must-have item among underground traders and armed robbers in Brazil

By Samantha Pearson, Wall Street Journal (Jan. 19, 2025)

A Brazilian pasture holds a potential fortune on the hoof.

There has been quite a ruckus over the impending ban on TikTok, a mainland Chinese short-form video hosting service, and its supposed replacement by REDnote (aka Xiaohongshu [XHS], aka Little Red Book, aka RedNote, aka RED), a Chinese social networking and e-commerce platform.  I think that much / most of the commotion is sheer hype to stir up business.  Nonetheless, since hundreds of millions of impressionable youths and clueless adults are all in a lather over this battle of the alien apps, I suppose we can't ignore them on Language Log.

The claims about the supposed impact of this switcheroo are outlandish at best — such as that hordes of Americans are scrambling to learn Mandarin so they can use REDnote (you don't just rush out to learn Mandarin so you can hop on an online app), that they are military applications being tapped by the Chinese government, and so forth.

That's about as much as I personally am prepared to say about the internet imbroglio, so I will hand the baton to two of my colleagues.

From Mark Sundaram and Aven McMaster at The Endless Knot, 50 minutes on "The Scandalous History of the Manhattan Cocktail":

Above is the cover of John DeFrancis's magnum opus, Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1989).  It has a stunning illustration consisting of the phonetic representation of the first six words of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address transcribed as follows: acoustic wave graph of the voice of William S.-Y. Wang, IPA, roman letters, Cyrillic, devanagari, hangul, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Arabic, katakana, Yi (Lolo, Nuosu, etc.), cuneiform, and sinographs (a fuller version of the cover illustration may be found on the frontispiece [facing the title page] and there is a generous explanation on pp. 248-251).

I don't order things online, but sometimes others do so for me, and I'm always amused / bemused by wording such as this:  "Your package will ship on 1/23/25". Normally, I would expect "your package will be shipped on 1/23/25" or "we will ship your package on 1/23/25".  Now, however, "Your package will ship on 1/23/25" seems to have become almost standard.

Here's a real-life example, received this afternoon:

We have received and begun processing your gift selection. Your gift will ship via United Parcel Service, to the address you confirmed during the ordering process. We expect your gift to ship within 2 weeks.

Sign on the back of a pickup truck in Fujian Province:

With current LLM technology, users can create individualized chatbots, and interact with them over time as if they were real friends. This started almost a decade ago with Replika, and more recently, we've seen similar tools from Character.ai (from September 2022) and Meta's AI Studio (from July 2024).

There've been several recent problems with these apps. The most serious ones involve harmful advice, such as those described in this recent lawsuit. In a less serious but still troublesome issue, NBC News recently found "two dozen user-generated AI characters on Instagram named after and resembling Jesus Christ, God, Muhammad, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, MrBeast, Harry Potter, Adolf Hitler, Captain Jack Sparrow, Justin Bieber, Elon Musk and Elsa from Disney’s 'Frozen'".

But the weirdest recent problem seems to be the result of a Character.ai bug.

When I was in the British Museum bookshop several weeks ago, I was pleased by the numerous offerings of books on language.  Two types stood out:  those on the origins of speech and those on the origins of writing.  As we would say in Mandarin, they are iǎngmǎshì 兩碼事 ("two different things").  The best stocked / selling one on scripts was Andrew Robinson's The Story of Writing, and its counterpart for speech was Daniel Everett's How Language Began:  The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention.

In this post, I will focus on the latter volume and its author, with whom Language Log readers are well acquainted (see the bibliography below).  I will not discuss his lengthy fieldwork among the hunter-gatherer Pirahã of the Lowland Amazonia region (to be distinguished from the piranha or piraña fish which has such a fearsome reputation and also lives in the Amazon), but will emphasize his radical theories of the origins of language.

Yesterday on YouTube, "Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon sits down with Dasha Burns, POLITICO's White House bureau chief". At the end of the interview, there's a conventional exchange of thank-yous. From Dasha Burns:

All right Steve, I know you got a show to record,
thank you so much for- for beaming in here
and uh sorry for the technical difficulties everyone.
Steve thanks so much.

And Steve Bannon's response:

Dasha thank you,
and thank Politico for having me.

[This is a guest post by Christopher Paris (website).]

I just wanted to thank you for your 2009 essay on the misinterpretation of “wēijī” as meaning both opportunity and crisis.

This controversy takes on dramatic new importance as the misinterpretation has been used to justify the invention of a school of thought that “risk is positive.” When challenged with English language dictionaries dating back to the 1700s, showing risk as typically meaning a potential threat or harm, the proponents of “positive risk” run to the wēijī trope. They say, “the Chinese came up with this 3000 years ago, so English dictionaries don’t matter.”