Language Log

David Moser sent me this photograph of a sign on the side of a Beijing bus:

The Daily Mail reports that a visit by Justin Bieber to the beach revealed a new tattoo. Here's a screenshot showing the Daily Mail's description of the tattoo as "a row of mysterious symbols under his left arm". Here's the Daily Mail's close-up, captioned "What is it? It's unclear exactly what Bieber has had tattooed under his arm".

The "mysterious symbols" are perfectly ordinary and legible Hebrew letters. They spell ישוע "Yeshua", the Hebrew name for "Jesus". I understand that not everyone can read Hebrew, but that no one at the Daily Mail can even recognize Hebrew writing is pretty bad.

[For those of our readers who do not know who Justin Bieber is, he's a teen idol. A lot of teenage girls are crazy about him. When I teasingly told a 15-year old friend on Facebook that he looks like a dork, she unfriended me for three weeks!]

Over at "Pinyin news," Mark Swofford has just made a very welcome post entitled "Spreading the good news." As a long-time, strong advocate of phonetically annotated character texts, it is indeed good news to note that great strides are being made in the automatic insertion of pinyin annotations in character files.  What is even more heartwarming is that, as Mark reports, the people who are most actively engaged in this work have an awareness of the necessity for word parsing, capitalization, correct use of apostrophes, and proper orthography for tense-marking particles.

I'm trying to imagine a novel such as Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting being written in Chinese.  Trainspotting consists of a number of voices, all of them Scottish-accented in one way or another.  It's difficult enough to write in unalloyed Pekingese, for example, much less several varieties of Pekingese or of other Sinitic topolects.

Gadafi, Gadaffi,  Gaddafi,  Gaddaffi,  Gadhafi, Gadhaffi,  Ghadafi, Ghadaffi, Ghaddafi, Ghaddaffi,  Ghadhafi, Ghadhaffi, Kadafi, Kadaffi, Kaddafi,   Kadhafi,  Khadafi, Khaddafi, Khaddaffi, Khadhafi, Khadhaffi, Qadafi, Qadaffi, Qaddafi, Qaddaffi, Qadhafi, Qadhaffi, Qadhdhafi, Qathafi, … I give up.

The last hold-out for the Elizabethan approach to spelling. One of the few reasons that he'll be missed.

Update — see R.L.G. at the Economist's Johnson Blog for an exegesis…

Chuck Cook, PANDA Group Cooperation Officer of the European Bioinformatics Institute, called to my attention this Blackberry ad that he spotted on the MTR (Mass Transit Railway) in Hong Kong:

Chuck was particularly interested in finding an explanation of zi3 ging3 hai6 nei5 至勁係你 which, as he said, "I still do not understand, despite asking my wife's cousin, a native speaker of Cantonese who is fluent in Mandarin and competent in English."

The other day, just before going through security at the international terminal at the airport in Melbourne, Australia, I noticed a second sign beside the sign of instructions on what you couldn't take onto the airplane.  The second sign was (I assume) the same set of instructions in Chinese, and it was headed "Chinese – Traditional".

In a recent LL post, I wrote about Northeast and Northwest Mandarin borrowings from Russian that — in the mouths of those who are not highly literate in characters — seem to have escaped the phonotactic constraints of the sinographic script. In this post, I write about a Beijing street name that began as a sinographically writable expression, but which — again in the mouths of those whose speech is not strongly conditioned by the characters — devolved into a form that cannot readily be written in characters.

My previous post was about "dialects" that are often not really dialects, but bona fide languages, and the efforts of the Chinese government to phase them out.  In this post, I'll be talking about "etymology" that is not really etymology, but character analysis.

The occasion for these ruminations (see especially the last two paragraphs below) is this brief news item that occurred in the Beijing Morning Post on January 13 (pardon the somewhat peculiar English of the following paraphrase, which is taken from a daily Chinese newspaper digest [so far as I know, the BMP is published only in Chinese]; it conveys the sense and tenor of the original in a serviceable, though abridged, fashion):

The varieties of Chinese English are so numerous as to defy complete listing.  To name only the better known, we have pidgin, Chinglish, Singlish, Zhonglish, China English, Chinese-English, and sinographically transcribed English.  Martian Language, Internet Language, and much scientific, technological, and academic prose also are more or less saturated with English words.  Advertising language is particularly fond of using English words and phrases, often in very clever and unusual ways that are particularly well suited to the Chinese linguistic and cultural environment.

There have even been attempts to write English words in the shape of Chinese characters, the most famous being the "Square-Word Calligraphy" of the artist Xu Bing:  whole passage; character for "excellence"; character for "respect"; character for "elegance"; character for "design".

Paul Goble, "Another battle of the alphabets shaping up in Central Asia", Kyiv Post 11/16/2010:

A statement by a Kazakhstan minister that his country will eventually shift from a Cyrillic-based alphabet to a Latin-based script and reports that some scholars in Dushanbe are considering dropping another four Russian letters from the Tajik alphabet suggest that a new battle of the alphabets may again be shaping up in Central Asia.

Russian commentators have reacted by suggesting that this is yet another effort by nationalists in those countries to reduce the role of the Russian language and hence of the influence of Russian culture, but in fact the controversy over any such change is far more complicated than that.

Back in August and December of last year, I wrote about the efforts of Hangeul enthusiasts to get a tribe in Indonesia to adopt Hangeul as their script.

The latest news, in the Korea Times, no less, is that the rumors of the tribe's having chosen Hangeul as their offical script were not only premature, they were downright false.

Last summer, I posted on an ad in the New Yorker sponsored by the Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism in which a string of Chinese characters was inverted mirror-fashion: "Masschusetts is red(-faced)", 6/5/2009.

When I saw this photograph in the Wall Street Journal, I immediately did a double-take and thought that I had caught the WSJ committing the same error (Paul Mozur, "Taiwan and China work on their thesaurus", 8/31/2009):