Language Log

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

[VHM:  watch as much or as little of this 24-minute video as you wish; the most pertinent portion runs from 2:17 to 3:40]

We've been hearing about "zero Covid" since early in the year 2020.  Even though such an approach never seemed feasible to me, it was always fairly clear what the Chinese authorities meant by it:  through "public health measures such as contact tracing, mass testing, border quarantine, lockdowns, and mitigation software in order to stop community transmission of COVID-19 as soon as it is detected." (source)  In other words, "Find, Test, Trace, Isolate, and Support" (FTTIS).

The Chinese term for such a policy is "qīng líng zhèngcè 清零政策", where "qīng 清" means "clear; clean; thoroughly; completely", "líng 零" means "zero", and "zhèngcè 政策" means "policy".  Fair enough, though, as I indicated above, I never thought that, in dealing with a communicable virus, it was a practicable approach.  Apparently, in due course, the PRC authorities — though they strove, through the most stringent application of FTTIS measures — came to the same conclusion.  Eventually, they started to refer to their modified "qīng líng 清零" ("zero [COVID]") policy as one of "dynamic zero", the Chinese for which is "dòngtài qīng líng 動態清零", where "dòngtài 動態" signifies "dynamic".  Here they lost me, because, for the life of me, I simply could not comprehend how "zero" could be "dynamic".

"A person, usually a woman, who is trained to assist women in childbirth."  AHDEL

But not always a woman:

Men rarely practice midwifery for cultural and historical reasons. In ancient Greece, midwives were required by law to have given birth themselves, which prevented men from joining their ranks. In 17th century Europe, some barber surgeons, all of whom were male, specialized in births, especially births requiring the use of surgical instruments. This eventually developed into a professional split, with women serving as midwives and men becoming obstetricians. Men who work as midwives are called midwives (or male midwives, if it is necessary to identify them further) or accoucheurs; the term midhusband (based on a misunderstanding of the etymology of midwife) is occasionally encountered, mostly as a joke. In previous centuries, they were called man-midwives in English.

(source)

I have often wondered about the meaning and origins of the term "midwife".  My wonderment was piqued recently by several comments on this post:  "Wondrous blue" (5/9/22).

From the abstract of Sunghye Cho et al., "Lexical and Acoustic Speech Features Relating to Alzheimer Disease Pathology", published in Neurology on 4/29/2022:

Background and Objectives: We compared digital speech and language features of patients with amnestic Alzheimer’s disease (aAD) or logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA) in a biologically confirmed cohort and related these features to neuropsychiatric test scores and CSF analyses.

[…]

Discussion: Our measures captured language and speech differences between the two phenotypes that traditional language-based clinical assessments failed to identify. 

From an editorial by Federica Agosta and Massimo Felippi, "Natural Speech Analysis: A Window Into Alzheimer Disease Phenotypes", published in Neurology on 5/4/2022:

Compared to a standard language assessment, the automated analysis of natural speech is more complex and requires a larger amount of time to be post-processed. On the other hand, as is well demonstrated by this study, analysis of natural speech provides information at several levels of language production. Even though data are extracted from only one recorded minute of speech, the tool is able to detect subtle differences among groups, reflecting the patient’s daily experience in a more realistic way than the standard speech and language assessment. Its use has already produced important achievements in distinguishing different language phenotypes. Furthermore, differently from other studies, the work of Cho et al proposed an automated and reproducible method that highly reduces the time of speech analysis and increases the inter-rater reliability.

As seen on Weibo: Shanghai residents go to their balconies to sing & protest lack of supplies. A drone appears: “Please comply w covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.” https://t.co/0ZTc8fznaV pic.twitter.com/pAnEGOlBIh

— Alice Su 蘇奕安 (@aliceysu) April 6, 2022

I do not recall ever having Russian words of the year featured on Language Log, so it's a delight to have the opportunity to do so now.  They were called to my attention by Don Keyser, who spotted this piece in Novaya Gazeta this morning:

Норм и обнуление — Подведены итоги конкурса «Слово года»-2021. Особая конкуренция — в номинации «антиязык»

05:29, 19 декабря 2021  Андрей Архангельский, член экспертного совета «Слово года»

—-

Norm and zeroing

The results of the competition "Word of the Year" -2021 have been summed up. Particular competition – in the category "anti-language"

5:29 am, December 19, 2021

Andrey Arkhangelsky, member of the expert council "Word of the Year"

Don remarked:

Keeping up with the grimly evolving Russian language — neologisms, protoneologisms … the narrative is simultaneously enlightening, droll, and rather sad.

You can get a pretty good rendering via either DeepL or Google Translate. FYI, I've copied below the article the Google Translate rendering.  It doesn't do the embedded chart, of course, but the content of the chart is explained in the article.

Two days ago, I met a person who had a thick white coating on their tongue.  Wondering what it was called and its implications for health, I asked members of the e-Mair list about it.  Here are some of the answers I received:

Denis (Sinologist):

Thick tongue coating, often due to lengthening of the keratinous papillae on the tongue's surface.

Heidi (Yoga teacher and Ayurveda specialist):

We call it "ama" in Ayurveda – accumulated toxins from undigested foods. The person who has it might be ill. I scrape my tongue every day

From Proto-Indo-Aryan *HaHmás, from Proto-Indo-Iranian *HaHmás, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂eh₃mós (“raw, uncooked”), from *h₂eh₃- (“to burn”). Cognate with Ancient Greek ὠμός (ōmós, “raw, crude, uncooked, undressed”), Old Armenian հում (hum, “raw, uncooked”), Old Irish om (“raw, uncooked”) (whence Irish amh), Persian خام‎ (xâm, “crude, raw”).

(source)

VHM:  In some Indic languages it means, among other things, "undigested", as Heidi noted for Ayurveda in general.

"WHO — You cannot be Xi-rious! The WHO’s decision to skip the Greek letter Xi in its ludicrous naming system shows exactly who controls it", by David Spencer, Taiwan News, Contributing Writer, 2021/11/28:

(source)

New article in Mongabay (the critter in the banner at the top of the page who serves as their logo reminds me of our little friend, the gecko):

"Extinction of Indigenous languages leads to loss of exclusive knowledge about medicinal plants", by Sibélia Zanon on 20 September 2021 | Translated by Maya Johnson

Key points:

Victor Steinbok reports:

This made the rounds on Reddit a few times. The screenshot of a 2019 Reddit thread popped up on my FB feed today. It might even come in white and red 😈

Source:  NV Debao Winery Magical Penis Wine

Yesterday I went to Philadelphia's famed Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians.  I hadn't been there for about 35 years, so it was nice to reacquaint myself with some favored old exhibits (human beings with long horns growing out of their forehead, fetuses at all stages of formation and deformation, bodies with extra heads and limbs, gigantic tumors and colons, etc.), though a few of the most famous items had disappeared (e.g., shrunken heads, apparently because they had been "unethically procured").

One of the most striking exhibits — for me, since most people probably would not pay much, if any attention to it — was the one about bezoars.  They are nondescript objects that look like stony balls.  Even in section, they are not very exciting to look at, because they are basically a hard, indigestible mass of material such as hair, plant fibers, or seeds that form in the stomach or intestines of animals, especially ruminants, sometimes also humans.

Sign in Vancouver International Airport:

Segregated line-ups for vaccinated and unvaccinated international arrivals at Vancouver International Airport. Photo by Andrew Aziz. (Source)

"We Need To Get Real About How the Pandemic Will End:  Even more transmissible new variants means that more people will get infected or vaccinated, and that's how it will all end".  By Zeynep, Insight (5/28/21):

[A]s far as I can tell from vast amounts of trial and real life evidence, every single vaccine out there does a very very good job against preventing severe disease and death.

If what Zeynep says about "every single vaccine out there" is true, we are destined for some dire end times indeed.