Language Log

Final panel of this New York Times article:  "What You Can No Longer Say in Hong Kong" (9/4/20), by Jin Wu and Elaine Yu:

E-mail message from my son, Thomas Krishna:

I'm using the voice recognizer to write you this message. When you do take your truck in for service at Toyota place, ask them if an exterior cleaning is included. Having visited you over the years I know that where you park a lot of tree debris falls onto your vehicles! This is no big deal, except for one thing, you don't want stuff to fall on top of your vents right in front of where the windshield is. I had this problem with my truck under the crepe myrtles at Lacey's house. For a while I tried using cardboard cutouts to cover them up but they did not last very well in the Sun and rain. I know that at your place things dropping off the trees is almost a continuous problem whereas for me it was only in the fall. So just thinking maybe you should try to find something that can cover those vents for when your truck is parked there.

This is the logo of Legco, the Legislative Council of Hong Kong:

It is a stylization of the "lap⁶ 立" ("set up; erect; establish; enact") of:

Hoeng¹gong² dak⁶bit⁶ hang⁴zing³ keoi¹ lap⁶faat³ wui⁶ (Jyutping)

Hēunggóng dahkbiht hàhngjing kēui laahpfaat wúih (Yale)

Xiānggǎng tèbié xíngzhèng qū lìfǎ huì (Hanyu pinyin)

香港特別行政區立法會

now written in PRC simplified characters as

香港特别行政区立法会

"Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region"

or, for short:

Laap6faat3 wui5 (Jyutping)

Laahp faat wúih (Yale)

Lìfǎ Huì (Hanyu pinyin)

立法會

now written in PRC simplified characters as

立法会

"Legislative Council"

The first of eight in a partial survey:

Typefaces of Protest: A Short Survey
1/ Paranoid Light pic.twitter.com/MSuBYvDvp1

— Tom Sutcliffe (@tds153) July 13, 2020

See the whole thread.

From Brenton Recht:

I live in a city with a large immigrant population in general and a large Bosnian population in particular (Utica, NY [VHM: population around 60,000; between Syracuse and Schenectady]). As such, I see "BiH" bumper stickers once in a while on the road. Most of the Bosnian population either came during the breakup of Yugoslavia or are children of those immigrants, so they are probably following the American trend of putting round stickers on your car for things you like or identify with, rather than the European usage of using them to identify country of origin.

A little over a week ago, I described how I mistyped "stalk" for "stock".  That led to a vigorous discussion of precisely how people pronounce "stalk".  (As a matter of fact, in my own idiolect I do pronounce "stock" and "stalk" identically.)  See:

"Take stalk of: thoughts on philology and Sinology" (3/29/20)

I just now typed "One I first saw…" when I meant "When I first saw…".

From Donald Clarke:

https://twitter.com/ps_ford/status/1172362422465613830

The word for "write" in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is xiě.   The traditional form of the Sinograph used to write this word is 寫, var. 冩 (can you see the difference?).  In Japanese that would be pronounced "sha" or "utsusu", but it is considered an uncommon character (hyōgaiji), and means not "write", but "transcribe; duplicate; reproduce; imitate; trace; describe​; to film; to picture; to photograph".

There are a number of words for "write" in modern Japanese (e.g., arawasu 著す, shirusu 記す), but the most common is kaku 書く.  Yes, that kanji means "book" in MSM, but it meant "write" in early Sinitic, whereas 寫 means "write" in MSM but meant "to place; to displace; to relocate; to carry; to relay; to express; to pour out [one's heart, troubles, etc.]; to copy; to transcribe; to follow; to describe; to depict; to draft; to create quotations; to draw; to sketch; to make a portrait; to sign; to formalize" in Literary Sinitic (LS) and Classical Sinitic (CS)   This is a good example of how Japanese often tends to retain older meanings of characters in the modern language, whereas in MSM characters have a propensity to take on new and quite different, unexpected meanings (e.g., zǒu 走 ["walk" in MSM] meant "run" in LS and CS).

"China to issue new RMB bills in August", CRI Online (4/29/19):

Tong Wang spotted this poster in a Beijing elevator:

Jeff DeMarco saw this on Facebook:

Tweet  by Noelle Mateer:

pic.twitter.com/ZKeOBldM0m

— Noelle Mateer (@n_mateer) November 13, 2018

Speaking of spaces between syllables (but, as in this case, not all syllables), as we have been in recent posts, this photograph of a sign in China was sent in by Paul Midler:

But the lettering is very nice!