Language Log

In "Give Elfdalian, Haitian, Limburgish, Patois, Ukrainian and, yes, Black English their due", NYT (3/11/22), John McWhorter writes:

It was long ago common for Russians to regard Ukrainian as just a dialect of Russian. “Little Russian,” it was called. Writing for The Conversation this week, Florida International University’s Phillip Carter said, “If you ask some Russian nationalists, Ukrainian isn’t a language at all,” noting that in the 1863 Valuev Circular, Pyotr Valuev, Russia’s interior minister, decreed that a separate Ukrainian language did not exist.

We've just been through the problems of standard language versus the vernaculars in Arabic (see "Selected readings" below).  Now we're going to look at a photograph, a caption, a book review, and a letter to the editor that encompass these contentious issues in spades — but for Chinese.  Here's the photograph:

In various publications and Language Log posts over the years, I have collected scores of old polysyllabic words (e.g., those for reindeer, phoenix, coral, spider, earthworm, butterfly, dragonfly, balloon lute, meandering / winding, etc.), which proves that Sinitic has never been strictly monosyllabic, although that is a common misapprehension, even among many scholars.  The reason I call the one featured in this post "another early polysyllabic Sinitic word" is because I don't think I've ever pointed it out before.

A week ago, Julie Lee made this interesting comment on Language Log:

…when I studied Yuan dynasty drama and had books from the library, my husband (a physicist) picked them up to read and was amazed at the 13th century dialogue. "That's just the way we spoke at home in Shandong", he exclaimed. He grew up in Tengxian County*, Shandong, and went to school in Qingdao. I couldn't understand his Shandong speech. I too was amazed that Chinese colloquial speech (in Shandong) lasted from the 13th century till the 20th century — 700 years. The dialogue in Yuan drama was popping with lively expressions.

[*Likely the birthplace of the populist, egalitarian, pragmatic, empirical, scientific minded philosopher, Mo Zi / Micius (ca. 470-391 BC.)]

Here's a video clip of a young American businessman named Ben Metcalf (Mai Banda 麥班達) in Taiwan making a presentation for his company's first public launch as part of their IPO process.

This is cause for rejoicing:

 "Meet the Malaysian on a mission to make Hokkien great again, amid Mandarin’s rising popularity in Southeast Asia"

    Linguist Sim Tze Wei has been accused of trying to divide the Chinese people, as there are those who see the use of other Chinese languages ‘as a sign of disunity and weakness’
    But he points out that Chinese immigrants to Asia have for generations been speaking their own languages, which are being edged out as more turn to learning Mandarin

Randy Mulyanto, SCMP, 1/24/21

From Diana Shuheng Zhang:

"Irish man leaves funny recording for his funeral":

I assigned this book to my class on the Silk Road:

The Silk Road:  A Very Short Introduction, by James A. Millward (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013)

I noticed that it bore the following dedication, one of the most peculiar and eye-catching I've ever encountered:

For Herrgottsbescheisserle and all their cousins

It looked German, but not standard German.  I could see "God's" at the beginning and "shitter" near the end.  So I asked Jim Millward what it meant.  He replied:

It's a dumpling–a friend told me about them:  god-cheaters, since the meat is in the dumpling, God can't see it, so you can eat it on Fridays is the idea behind the name.  I don't know German, but I verified the word with a bunch of sources, to my satisfaction.   Looking now at it I do see "scheisse" as a root which even I recognize as "shit," so I hope I didn't commit a vulgarity, albeit in the descent obscurity of a learned language.  

I can't help with the etymology, but the general "roughly translated as little god foolers" idea seems pretty common. You can check with a German speaker. My point was to dedicate the book to dumplings, since I'd had the whole manti discussion in the book–which you helped me with.

Yesterday morning I ate breakfast at a Cracker Barrel in Canton, Ohio and in mid-afternoon I had an early dinner at a Dutch Pantry off Route 80 in Pennsylvania.  When the waitress gave me the bill, I noticed that she had written "Be Dank mich!" on the back of it.  There was also what looked to be like the Chinese character shé 舌 ("tongue"), some scribbled Korean, and another script at the bottom that I didn't take time to examine closely (they kept the check and I was in a hurry to get home before midnight).

The good news is that it's a language.

The bad news is that you can't speak it.

"China’s version of TikTok suspends users for speaking Cantonese:  ByteDance’s short video app Douyin has been urging live streamers to switch to the country’s official language", Abacus via SCMP (4/3/20)

I've been hearing similar reports concerning the use of Cantonese on other social media:  it is definitely discouraged or even forbidden.  At least, though, the Abacus article does not miscall Cantonese a dialect, but affords it the dignity of referring to it as a language.

Anyone who learns Standard Japanese and then travels around outside of the Tokyo area will quickly come to realize how distinctive and numerous are the local forms of language once one leaves the metropolitan region of the capital.

Some interesting aspects of this phenomenon are presented in a new article in nippon.com, "Linguistic Treasures: The Value of Dialects", by Kobayashi Takashi, professor at the Center for the Study of Dialectology, Tōhoku University, who specializes in dialects and the history of Japanese.

"British schoolboy's thick Yorkshire accent goes viral", by Sae Strang, Newshub (11/20/19):