Language Log

Headline from the Deccan Herald:

"India pips China, inks deal to develop, support maintain harbour at naval base in Maldives", Anirban Bhaumik (2/21/21)

Although I could guess from the context what it meant in the title of this article, I had never encountered "pip" with this meaning before.

Upon looking it up in Wiktionary, I find that "pip" has no less than seven different main meanings.  Of these, five are nouns and only two are verbs.

When I first began to have extensive interactions with Chinese friends more than sixty years ago, I was puzzled upon hearing them say, "My waist is sore / hurts / aches / pains".  I thought my puzzlement would disappear when I started to learn Mandarin around five years later, but I actually became more confused because what I heard them articulating in Mandarin, "yāo suān", sounded like they were saying "waist is sour".  In those years I didn't pay much attention to the characters, but focused primarily on the spoken language.

"Yāo" was not a problem because I knew that if you had a body part that was troubling you and it was pronounced "yāo", then it must be your waist.  But in English we don't usually talk about problems with your waist unless you're complaining that it's too wide.  We wouldn't normally think of a waist as being "sour".

A chart in Wikipedia ("Indo-European vocabulary") [rearranged here] — see under "Bodily functions and states" — shows the connection between words for "sleep" and "dream" in IE languages, including Tocharian.

1. PIE: *swep- "to sleep", *swepnos "dream (n.)" 

2. English: archaic sweven "dream, vision" (< OE swefn); NoEng sweb "to swoon" (< OE swebban "to put to sleep, lull") 

3. Gothic: ON sofa "sleep (v.)" 

4. Latin:  somnus "sleep (n.)"

5. Ancient Greek: húpnos "sleep (n.)"

6. Sanskrit: svápnaḥ "sleep, dream (n.)" 

7. Iranian: Av xᵛafna- "sleep (n.)" NPers xwãb- "sleep" 

8. Slavic: OCS spěti "sleep (v.)", sŭnŭ "sleep (n.), dream (n.)" 

9. Baltic: OPrus supnas "dream", Lith sapnas "dream"

10. Celtic: OIr sūan, W hun "sleep (n.)" 

11. Armenian: kʿnem "I sleep", kʿun "sleep (n.)"

12. Albanian: gjumë "sleep (n.)"

13. Tocharian: A ṣpäṃ, B. ṣpane "sleep (n.), dream (n.)" 

14. Hittite: sup-, suppariya- "to sleep"

When is a Qaghan really a Qaghan?

It matters, so let's familiarize ourselves with the meaning of the term right off the bat.  In Chinese Studies, we call this "zhèngmíng 正名" ("rectification of names").

Confucius was asked what he would do if he was a governor. He said he would "rectify the names" to make words correspond to reality. The phrase has now become known as a doctrine of feudal Confucian designations and relationships, behaving accordingly to ensure social harmony. Without such accordance society would essentially crumble and "undertakings would not be completed." Mencius extended the doctrine to include questions of political legitimacy.

Wikipedia

So, what is a "qaghan"?

Dmitry Ostrovsky reacted to a litotic sentence in Bari Weiss's resignation letter:

"None of this means that some of the most talented journalists in the world don’t still labor for this newspaper."

Dmitry's email:

This strikes me as very odd. It is not a simple "arithmetic" misnegation, if "none of this means that" and "don't" are dropped the sentence obviously would have a meaning intended by Ms. Weiss "[…] some of the most talented journalists in the world […] still labor for this newspaper", but as written it doesn't work. The trouble, it seems to me, is the word "some". If "None of this means that" (a straightforward negation) is removed, the sentence would have the structure "S don’t still labor for this newspaper", but almost anything is true about S when S = "some of the most talented journalists in the world" — S like beer and S hate soccer, S work late and S rise early, S read LL and S don't read even their own publication. And thus, no matter what is your statement about S, its negation is wrong.

[This is a guest post by Alex Baumans]

I recently became aware of the Chinese idol survival programme 'Youth with you', which has resulted in the formation of the group The 9. I got to wondering about the members' names. The group consists of XIN Liu, Esther Yu, Kiki Xu, Yan Yu, Shaking, Babymonster An, Xiaotang Zhao, Snow Kong and K Lu. Of these, only Zhao Xiaotang strikes me as an original Chinese name. As my Mandarin is non existent, I can only guess at the derivation of the other stage names.

Today King County Metro (in Washington State) announced that a "New public health Directive requires masks or face coverings on transit":

Starting Monday, May 18 until further notice, passengers are required to wear masks or face coverings while riding transit. Additionally, Executive Dow Constantine has directed that all King County employees, including transit operators and crews, wear masks or face coverings when in public indoor spaces or outdoors when they are unable to social distance. 

According to Public Health – Seattle & King County, a face covering may prevent further community spread of the COVID-19 virus by blocking infectious droplets from spreading when someone with the infection coughs, sneezes, or speaks. It’s the latest move to promote safety across our fleet for operators, crew, and passengers.  

The new directive requires voluntary compliance, and Metro operators will not prevent passengers without face coverings from boarding.

Tweet from the University of Westminster Contemporary China Centre Blog @CCCblogUoW:

who did dis pic.twitter.com/2VPoSZOYvf

— The Contemporary China Centre Blog (@CCCblogUoW) February 10, 2020

Long Ling has an essay about an exam given to prospective civil servants in Chinese:

“What Really Happened in Yancheng?” by Long Ling, the London Review of Books, 42.2 (1/23/20).  Translation by Jonathan Flint.

This essay, written by a government official in Beijing — presumably writing under a pseudonym — describes the civil service examinations used to select personnel in China. Conventional problem-solving makes up about half of the test, with ideology making up the other half. The author zooms in on the degree to which the exams require regurgitating Marxist ideology: essentially, a test of one’s ability to follow the party line.

Jialing Xie surveys the field in "Top 10 Buzzwords in Chinese Online Media: An overview of China’s media top buzzwords over the past year", What's on Weibo (1/5/20).  As in the previous year, the expressions were chosen by the chief editor of the magazine Yǎowén Jiáozì 咬文嚼字, which Xie says "literally means 'to pay excessive attention to wording'”.

No, that's not the literal meaning of "yǎowén Jiáozì 咬文嚼字", it's the lexical, figurative meaning.  The literal meaning of "yǎowén Jiáozì 咬文嚼字" is "to bite on phrases and chew on characters".  Other lexical, figurative interpretations of "yǎowén Jiáozì 咬文嚼字" ("to bite on phrases and chew on characters") are "be punctilious about minutiae of wording: chop logic; pay excessive attention to wording and choice of characters; to nitpick like a grammar Nazi; to talk pedantically").

Garrett Wollman writes:

Not sure if this really belongs in LL's misnegation files, but I found this sentence hard enough to parse (despite knowing exactly what the author meant) that I stumbled over it on a re-read:

"The really troubling thing," Zora says to the rain, "is that I can't convince myself I'm not in a life where knowing someone who can do that isn't purely a good thing."

Graydon Saunders, A SUCCESSION OF BAD DAYS

The context here is that one of the other characters makes a rather creepy magical barrier around the people in the scene while waiting for medical attention after a disease outbreak.  So what the character is (I believe intended to be) saying is that they think it's entirely good to know someone who can do that, but they are troubled by the thought. 

From Alison Winters:

I am a regular reader of Language Log and really enjoy your digging on unusual Chinese turns of phrase.

One word I have recently been puzzling over lately is the usage of guāngfù 光复 in the Hong Kong call to arms 光复香港时代革命*. The dictionary description indicates it has to do with reclaiming land from an occupier, and specifically references the end of Japanese occupation in Taiwan, but in English the slogan has been translated as “liberate”. When I look up “liberate” in the other direction, the dictionary suggests jiěfàng 解放, but note that it’s also associated with the CPC victory over the KMT.

I wonder if the usage of 光复 for liberate is a quirk of Cantonese (I live in mainland and only speak Standard Chinese), or if it’s a political choice to use that word based on previous “liberations”? I am curious about the etymology and would be interested to see a write-up on the blog, if you know a bit more background.

[*VHM:  A "standard" English translation of this slogan is "Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times", the "loose" Cantonese Romanization for which is "Gwong Fuk Heung Gong! Si Doi Gark Ming!"  Source

[This is a guest post by Nicholas Morrow Williams]

Victor recently pointed out to me the appearance of Martin Kern’s important article in the latest issue of Early China on “Xi Shuai” 蟋蟀 (“Cricket”) and Its Consequences: Issues in Early Chinese Poetry and Textual Studies” (Early China 42 [2019]: 39–74).  Kern’s article offers both a very detailed examination of the poem “Cricket” contained in a Tsinghua manuscript, which differs substantially from the comparable poem in the Shijing 詩經, and also reflections on the broader significance of the manuscript for “textual studies.”

The article is well worth reading both the recently-discovered poem and for the broader reflections, but I would like to discuss one issue to which it does not devote so much attention, which is the interpretation of the received text of “Cricket” in the Shijing itself. After comparing the excavated and received texts, Kern concludes: