Language Log

Terms and concepts related to "letters" and "characters" were used at spectacularly crossed purposes in many of the comments on Victor Mair's recent post "Twitter length restrictions in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean". I'm not going to intervene in the tangled substance of that discussion, except to reference some long-ago LLOG posts on the relative information content of different languages/writing systems. The point of those posts was to abstract away from the varied, complex, and (here) irrelevant details of character sets, orthographic conventions, and digital encoding systems, and to look instead at the size ratios of parallel (translated) texts in compressed form. The idea is that compression schemes try precisely to get rid of those irrelevant details, leaving a better estimate of the actual information content.

My conclusions from those exercises are two:

1. The differences among languages in information-theoretic efficiency appear to be quite small.
2. The direction of the differences is unclear — it depends on the texts chosen, the direction of translation, and the method of compression used.

See "One world, how many bytes?", 8/5/2005; "Comparing communication efficiency across languages", 4/4/2008; "Mailbag: comparative communication efficiency", 4/5/2008; "Is English more efficient than Chinese after all?", 4/28/2008.

In English, singular personal pronouns are almost the only residue of morphological gender. But in many languages this is a much bigger problem, with gender agreement in adjectives, gendered forms of most nouns, and so on. A few years ago, French proponents of "écriture inclusive" ("inclusive writing") proposed a novel use of an otherwise little-used character, the "middle dot", to set off optional letter sequences and create gender-ambiguous written forms. Thus

Thus, as Le Figaro put it,

Pour que les femmes comme les hommes «soient inclus·e.s, se sentent représenté·e·s et s'identifient», le Haut Conseil à l'égalité entre les femmes et les hommes recommandait en 2015, dans un guide pratique, d'utiliser l'écriture inclusive.

The following post is from an old, now defunct, blog, but the description of little Eunice learning three languages at once (none of which was her natal tongue spoken at home) and other discussions of Chinese are unusual in their detail and sensitivity, so worthy of sharing with Language Log readers:

"Primary learning in a multilingual society ", Grammar Gang (5/24/14)

The author of the post is Jyh Wee Sew (Centre for Language Studies, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, National University of Singapore).  I will simply quote a few passages of the post and make a few concluding remarks, but warmly recommend that anyone who is interested in second (and third) language pedagogy / acquisition read the whole post.

We've already had a taste of the crass, crude contumely that the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) typically spews forth against the perceived enemies of the North Korean state:

"Dotard" (9/22/17)
"Of dotards and DOLtards" (10/4/17)

KCNA hits a new low with their latest denunciation of the Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzō Abe:

"North Korea promises to bring 'nuclear clouds' to Japan, mocks PM as 'headless chicken'", by Katherine Lam, Fox News (10/3/17)
"N. Korea threatens nuke strike on Japan, calls Abe ‘headless chicken’:  Abe’s comments at UN will 'bring nuclear clouds to the Japanese archipelago,' says KCNA", Asia Unhedged, Asia Times (10/4/17)

Josh Horwitz has a provocative article in Quartz (9/27/17):  "SAY MORE WITH LESS:  In Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, 140 characters for Twitter is plenty, thank you"

The thinking here is muddled and the analysis is misplaced.  There's a huge difference between "characters" in English and in Chinese.  We also have to keep in mind the difference between "word" and "character", both in English and in Chinese.  A more appropriate measure for comparing the two types of script would be their relative "density", the amount of memory / code space required to store and transmit comparable information in the two scripts.

Bob Mankoff gave a talk here in Madison not long ago.  You may recognize Mankoff as the cartoon editor for many years at the New Yorker magazine, who is now at Esquire. Mankoff’s job involved scanning about a thousand cartoons a week to find 15 or so to publish per issue. He did this for over 20 years, which is a lot of cartoons. More than 950 of his own appeared in the magazine as well. Mankoff has thought a lot about humor in general and cartoon humor in particular, and likes to talk and write about it too.

The Ted Talk
On “60 Minutes”
His Google talk
Documentary, "Very Semi-Serious"

What’s the Language Log connection?  Humor often involves language? New Yorker cartoons are usually captioned these days, with fewer in the lovely mute style of a William Steig.  A general theory of language use should be able to explain how cartoon captions, a genre of text, are understood. The cartoons illustrate (sic) the dependence of language comprehension on context (the one created by the drawing) and background knowledge (about, for example, rats running mazes, guys marooned on islands, St. Peter’s gate, corporate culture, New Yorkers). The popular Caption Contest is an image-labeling task, generating humorous labels for an incongruous scene.

But it’s Mankoff's excursions into research that are particularly interesting and Language Loggy.  Mankoff is the leading figure in Cartoon Science (CartSci), the application of modern research methods to questions about the generation, selection, and evaluation of New Yorker cartoons.

Philadelphia, this jawn's for you. https://t.co/e9Ux87wkA4

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) October 4, 2017

See Ben Zimmer's jawn etymology interview, and also "Vaina == Jawn?", 8/12/2016.

Jeffrey Lewis, "Donald Trump Threatened North Korea After Completely Imaginary Negotiations", Foreign Policy 10/3/2017:

Over the weekend, a story emerged that the United States was in some sort of talks with North Korea, followed in quick succession by a series of tweets from U.S. President Donald Trump rejecting any sort of diplomatic engagement with North Korea.

One small problem: There never were any such talks.

This particular episode in the months-long twitzkrieg between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump is a parable about how bad reporting can create its own facts, leading gullible readers to act out of false information or contrived narratives. And if one of those gullible readers happens to be the president of the United States, watch out.

Reading Remy Tumin's article today discussing Stephen Colbert's guest appearance in Michael Moore's Broadway play ("Stephen Colbert Uses Profanity to Describe President Trump’s ‘Soul’", NYT 10/5/2017), I was struck by this passage:

“Trump keeps summoning monsters of abstraction — things that aren’t real — they’re extensions of the ordinary, fears that you have that he plays on,” Mr. Colbert said. “

He wants to brush people into a corner where he can shine his feeble, fucking anemic firefly of a soul,” Mr. Colbert continued, inching his two pointer fingers close together.

What struck me was not my failure to understand Colbert's metaphor — perhaps someone will explain it to me in the comments — but the fact that the NYT chose to quote it.

That's a word that was completely unknown to me until I received this note from my sister, Heidi:

Glamping is big and getting bigger all of the time. Especially as the boomers retire daily. There are even 3 sites in PA and four in Ohio… and 9 in Texas.

And it is related to the off the grid and tiny house movement… also inspired by Burning Man subculture. As you can see, it was added to the Oxford Dictionary last year.

There are glamping supplies, tents, and destinations. See the official web site.

Yesterday (10/4/2017) Theresa May gave a speech at the Conservative Party conference in which a remarkable number of things went wrong: she suffered an extended coughing fit, the comedian Simon Brodkin handed her a fake dismissal form ("P45") signed by Boris Johnson, and two letters fell off her background slogan "BUILDING A COUNTRY THAT WORKS (F)OR EVERYON(E)". For details and commentary, see e.g. "The cough, the P45, the falling F: Theresa May's speech calamity"; "Theresa May battles a sore throat and prankster in conference speech"; "Theresa May’s speech overshadowed by a persistent cough and a prankster"; "The most excruciating moments in Theresa May’s speech"; "Theresa May's nightmare speech: a prankster, a lost voice and a stage-set fail"; "Theresa May, Coughing and Caught by a Prankster, Endures a Speech to Forget".

But besides these performance issues, the content of the speech also came in for some criticism — there was the "British Dream" theme, and the alleged West Wing plagiarism.

[A guest post by Jichang Lulu.]

After all the brouhaha over Kim Jong Un's 'dotard' philippic, I was reminded of some other Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) invective: those sexist insults against Park Geun-hye, the racist insults against Obama, and specifically those aimed at Michael Kirby, the Australian judge who led a UN inquiry on North Korean human rights. The NK leadership didn't appreciate the scrutiny, and responded by calling Kirby, who is openly gay, a DOL (Disgusting Old Lecher). I was wondering what the Korean for that would be, so I looked for the original piece.

According to HuffPost UK, although figures from the Office of National Statistics indicate that the LGB percentage of the population rose last year by a statistically significant amount, "the majority of the UK population still identifies as heterosexual or straight."

Phew! So the straights (unlike the current Conservative-led government) held on to their majority. Good. I was bracing for a wave of homophobe fury. But let's take a look at the numbers to see how close a call it was, shall we?