Language Log

A Shanghainese friend of a friend just sent him a link to a curious video, and he forwarded it to me.  It looks like a Nike-sponsored rap song with five different fāngyán 方言 ("topolects") and lots of English.

My friend asked, "I wonder to what degree the Hànzì 汉字 ("Chinese characters") in the subtitles match the actual lyrics."

The video comes via Bilibili, which sometimes seems to load very slowly.  It is also available on iQIYI and DigitaLing.  Subtitles are more clearly visible in the Bilibili and DigitaLing (last one) versions.

The main questions, at least for me, are which topolects are presented, how faithful the presentations are, and how well the subtitles represent what is being said.

From March through July of 2016, we had a long-running series of posts comparing words in Indo-European and in Old Sinitic (OS),  See especially the first item in this series, and don't miss the comments to all of the posts:

• “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions” (3/8/16)
• “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 2” (3/12/16)
• “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 3” (3/16/16)
• “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 4” (3/24/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 5" (3/28/16)
• "Of shumai and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (7/19/16)
• "Of felt hats, feathers, macaroni, and weasels" (3/13/16)

Today's post is not about a sword per se, but it is about an armament for parrying sword thrusts.  It was inspired by seeing the following entry in Paul Kroll, ed., A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 104a:  fá 瞂  pelta; small shield — Middle Sinitic bjwot.  I asked Paul where he got that beautiful word "pelta", and he replied:  "One of the benefits of my early classical studies. I got it from Vergil, but it’s originally Greek."

I think I've seen this before, but can't remember where or when:

Source (bottom of the page)

"Japanese start-up helping ‘delinquents’ compete against college graduates for city jobs with new internship:  The company Hassyadai has so far helped 100 youth from outside Tokyo to land employment", SCMP (12/2/17):

Dubbed the “Yankee internship”, the programme, whose participants range in age from 16 to 22, is unique in that it includes the category of Yankee – Japanese slang for delinquent youth.

How did English "Yankee" come to mean "delinquent youth" in Japanese?

Given the bevy of shamed politicians and celebrities who have been paraded before the public in recent weeks, it may be of interest that the word for "sexual harassment" in Chinese is quite a colorful one:

(Source)

In Paris for this workshop, I'm glad to see that cultural diffusion is alive and well on l'Avenue des Gobelins:

From Thorin Engeseth:

Photo by Ross Bender, taken near Osaka Castle last month:

Neologisms pop up so fast in China that it is almost impossible to keep abreast of them.  Furthermore, it is very hard to figure out where many of them come from.  Some of them are undoubtedly borrowed from other languages, but given such a twist that it is difficult to recognize the original source.  Others are just made up by imaginative netizens.  If they are taken up by others and catch on, they become part of contemporary vocabulary.

"Japan’s buzzwords of 2017 cover everything from politics to poop", by Tomoko Otake, The Japan Times (11/9/17).

To me, the most intriguing candidate out of the top thirty is Aufuhēben アウフヘーベン（from German Aufheben).

Currently circulating political poster in the PRC:

Jeff DeMarco writes:

From a Facebook post (timeline) by a young woman in HK:

卡拉ok ing ……😂🤣

GT deftly translates it as karaoke ing.