Language Log

Most people seem to call it "homophonia" (25,000 ghits), but I'm not even sure what that means:   "Homophonia" (7/31/14).

Following this cartoon in Magic Coffee Hair (8/16/12) and Gretchen McCulloch's article, "What's the Difference Between Homophonia, Homophobia, and Homophonophobia?" (8/1/14) in Lexicon Valley, I'll go with homophonophobia (4,310 ghits), despite the fact that it is a forbidding mouthful, as being a more accurate term for what I want to describe:  an extreme, irrational fear of or aversion to words that sound alike.  In this post, we will discuss homophonophobia, particularly as it relates to Japanese, but also touching upon Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese manifestations of this type of anxiety disorder.

[The following is a guest post by Dr. Ian Morgan of the Research School of Biology, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia and Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.  It is in response to "Chinese characters and eyesight" (11/12/14), which generated a lot of interest and discussion, and which references the work and views of Dr. Morgan.]

I came across your blog and the comments on the relationship between Chinese characters and myopia quite recently, and I thought it was worth a quick response.

Despite the efforts of the central government to clamp down on and diminish the role of Cantonese in education and in public life generally, the language has been experiencing a heady resurgence, especially in connection with the prolonged Umbrella Movement last fall.

"Cantonese resurgent" (12/11/12)

"Here’s why the name of Hong Kong’s 'Umbrella Movement' is so subversive" (10/23/14)

"Translating the Umbrella Revolution" (10/3/14)

"Cantonese protest slogans" (10/26/14), etc.

A government sponsored mural in Kashgar:

Nathan Hopson found this poster hanging up all over student bulletin boards at Nagoya University in Japan:

Just in case you hadn't seen this in the news, the winner of the Taipei mayoral election held on November 28, 2014 is Ko Wen-je (Kē Wénzhé 柯文哲), a trauma surgeon who ran as an independent.

"Pro-independence party candidate Ko Wen-je claims victory in Taipei mayor race"
The Straits Times (11/29/14)

There was an interesting article in the Economist a couple of day ago:  "Why So Many Chinese Children Wear Glasses" (11/9/2014)

Myopia is epidemic in China, and the percentage of those with this affliction is increasing each year.

The following diary entry by an elementary school student is making the rounds in the Chinese media and in the blogosphere:

On December 15, 2012, Jakob Leimgruber sent in the following photograph of an unusual sign in Montreal:

[This is a guest post by David Moser]

Part I

I was giving a talk the other day, in Chinese, to Chinese students, about English pedagogy (go figure).  I wanted to mention something about the difficulty of remembering how to write Chinese characters, and I chose to use an example of the idiom 韬光养晦 tao1guang1yang3hui4, "to hide your light under a bushel."  Now the interesting thing about this example is that I had used it several times before as an example, in talks about the difficulty of Hanzi, and I said to the audience something like:

When Tom Mazanec came home from Fudan University in Shanghai a few nights ago, he found this leaflet in a baggie hanging on his door:

More than four years ago, on Aug. 23, 2010, Doctor Science left the following comment on a post by Mark Liberman, "Cell phone cupertinos":

I'm pretty sure I saw something several years ago about a whole dialect (argot? jargon? slang?) that had developed among young people in Japan (or possibly some other Asian country), based on phone cupertinos. Basically, they used the first suggestion from the autocomplete function *instead* of the original target word, to create an argot that was reasonably opaque to outsiders.

Now that comment has been brought back from the dead, appearing in two different articles about autocorrect.

A few months ago on the Penn campus I heard a Chinese guy and a girl having a conversation in Mandarin, and I was surprised when he twice said, "Wo3 ming2bai4 le."  The rest of his speech was standard, but then he came out with this strange transformation of "Wo3 ming2bai le".  Of course, I shouldn't have been surprised, because I've heard the exact same thing before.  Nonetheless, it still sounded odd to me, since from first-year Mandarin on I've had it drilled into me that this sentence should be pronounced "Wo3 ming2bai le" and that any other pronunciation of ming2bai was wrong.  This was reinforced by the canonical pronunciation ming2bai given in dictionaries and other authoritative sources.