Language Log

[This is a guest post by Robert S. Bauer]

The Japanese word “ramen” has been borrowed from standard Chinese 拉麵 la1 mian4 ‘pulled noodles’; ramen/la1 mian4 is a different word from Cantonese “lo mein”, i.e., 撈麵 lou1 min6 ‘wheat noodles’. While these are two distinct words, nonetheless, they still seem to be ultimately related, according to Wikipedia’s entry on “ramen” which sheds some interesting light on their historical connection as follows:

“The origins of ramen can be traced back to Yokohama Chinatown in the early 20th century. The word "ramen" is a Japanese borrowing of the Chinese word lamian (拉麵), meaning "pulled noodles", but is not derived from the northern Chinese dish of lamian. Instead, the dish evolved from southern Chinese noodle dishes from regions such as Guangzhou, reflecting the demographics of Chinese settlers in Yokohama.” (from Wikipedia entry on ramen, retrieved on January 3, 2025). The would seem to imply that Japanese “ramen” refers to Cantonese 撈麵 lou1 min6, also known as “lo mein”.

Grammatically, that is a choice question:  "is it city[-like] (or not)?"  In other words, is whatever is at question sophisticated / modern?  This phrase, which has been chosen by Sixth Tone* (12/17/24) as one of the top ten Chinese buzzwords of 2024 (I will list the other nine in the Appendix) is composed of two identical English loanwords and the most common negative particle in Mandarin.

Before explaining this viral phenomenon further, I will show a video featuring "city不city" to demonstrate that it is real:

Someone recently wrote to tell me that he had:

…constructed a linguistic theoretical framework based on the principle of "one-to-one correspondence between Chinese characters or symbols and their semantics", aiming to explore the mathematical basis of language symbol structure, semantic relationships, and context adaptation.

It was a longish communication and all in Chinese except for one word.  He said that he had a 50-page "Beamer" presentation that he wanted to show me to convince me of the worthiness of his project.  "Beamer" was the only word in his message that I couldn't understand.  So I google it, and AIO instantaneously returned the following:

In recent weeks and months, we've been having many posts and comments about Taiwanese language.  Today's post is quite different:  it's all about the difference between Mandarin as spoken on the mainland and as spoken on Taiwan.

"Words of Influence: PRC terms and Taiwanese identity", by Karen Huang, Taiwan Insight (8 November 2024)

What is a ‘video clip’ in Mandarin Chinese? In Taiwan, a video clip is yingpian (影片), while in China, it is referred to as shipin (視頻). Similarly, tomatoes are called fanqie (番茄) in Taiwan, but xihongshi (西红柿) in China. These vocabulary differences between Taiwan Mandarin (Guoyu 國語) and PRC Mandarin (Putonghua 普通话) are expected. After all, it is natural for different dialects of a language to have some differences in their vocabulary—just like how ‘rubbish bin’ in British English is ‘garbage can’ in American English.

Reading through Étienne de La Vaissière's massive magnum opus, Asie Centrale 300-850:  Des routes et des royaumes (2024), I came to a screeching halt when my gaze alighted on this photograph (III.6, p. 71):

Limestone relief of Saluzi ("Autumn Dew"), one of the Six Steeds of Zhao Mausoleum, along with an unknown human general. The general switched horses with the emperor and cared for Saluzi; he is seen here pulling an arrow out of Saluzi's chest. On display at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (source)

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-seventh issue:  “Resurrecting an Etymology: Greek (w)ánax ‘king’ and Tocharian A nātäk ‘lord,’ and Possible Wider Connections,” by Douglas Q. Adams. (pdf)

ABSTRACT

Examined here is the possible cognancy of Homeric Greek (w)ánax ‘king’ and Tocharian A nātäk ‘lord’ and their respective feminine derivatives (w)ánassa ‘queen’ and nāśi ‘lady.’ ‘King/lord’ may reflect a PIE *wen-h₂ǵ-t ‘warlord’ or the like. Further afield is the possibility that a Proto-Tocharian *wnātkä might have been borrowed into Ancient Chinese and been the ancestor of Modern Chinese wáng ‘king.’ 

I was in a Salt Lake City shop called Caputo's that bills itself as a Market and Deli, Purveyors of Regional Italian and Southern European Foods.  It reminds me somewhat of the great Di Bruno Bros. in Philly, but more on the "paisan"* side (sort of like the South Asian word "desi" as used in America to describe a small down-home food shop that caters to folks from the subcontinent).

[*I absolutely love that Italian word!  So much depends on the intonation with which you say it.  A scholarly disquisition on a more formal set of Italian words for the same idea is the following:

You are probably thinking of the variations of the Italian “compare” often used in various dialects in the south, particularly cumpà/compà or ‘mpare/‘mbare. From Latin “compater”, formed by “cum” (with) and “pater” (father), which originally referred to the person present with the father at a child’s baptism, the child’s godfather. Over centuries these forms became a common greeting among friends in southern dialects. Since many immigrants from Italy to the US in the early 20th century were from the south and spoke their dialects, cumpà/compà /‘mpare/‘mbare became known as Italian-American colloquialisms. 

In Italian, naturally I would say fra as in fratello (brother). It is very common to shorten the word by cutting off the end and emphasizing the vowel that remains at the end.  To say "hey bro" in Italian, I would use one of these: “Ehi fra…” “Oi fra…” “Ciao fra…” “Ei fra…”

Another slang term for “bro” or “dude” is “zio” (uncle, like Spanish “tío,” and has the same slang meaning in Spanish too)

It comes from one of my two favorite New Jersey undergraduate paisans who took my classes a few years ago.]

An eminent Chinese historian just sent these two sentences to me:

Yǒurén shuō AI zhǐ néng jìsuàn, ér rénlèi néng suànjì. Yīncǐ AI yīdìng bùshì rénlèi duìshǒ

有人說AI只能計算，而人類能算計。因此AI一定不是人類對手。

"Some people say that AI can only calculate, while humans can compute.  Therefore, AI must not be a match for humans".

Google Translate, Baidu Fanyi, and Bing Translate all render both jìsuàn 計算 and suànjì 算計 as "calculate".  Only DeepL differentiates the two by translating the latter as "do math".

This is something I was going to write about in the early part of December, 2023, but got sidetracked by too many other things.  Now I'm going through my e-mail clutter to clean out old messages that I had neglected to take care of back then.  At that time, more than half a year ago, "PUA" was still very popular.  Although speech fashions change rapidly in China, it was so viral then that I suspect it is still relevant today, so let's take a good look at it.

When I first encountered "PUA", I had no idea what it meant nor how to pronounce it (the same sort of feeling of being at sea when I initially heard "hawk tuah"), so I started looking around for what it might mean.  Clearly, from the contexts in which I was hearing it, PUA was not "Pandemic Unemployment Assistance", which was a federal and state government program back in the day.

I fairly quickly came to the realization that the term "PUA" is derived from the American English phrase “pick-up artist”.  Well, I'd never heard of that either, so had to educate myself about that too.

[This is a guest post by Liam Kelley.]

Looking up "triệu" in this Nom dictionary brings up an example from a line in a work that appears to date from the early twentieth century that states: "The soul of the 4,000-year-old country has yet to awaken. The 25 million [triệu兆 ] people are still deep in slumber."

There was definitely modern Mandarin terminology that entered classical Chinese in Vietnam at that time (I haven't looked at many Nom texts from that period so I can't say about Mandarin terms in the spoken language, but it would make sense that some would be there too), and the topic here (soul of a country/nation, awakening from sleep) is the type of new nationalist concepts that spread from Japan/China to Vietnam at that time.

In a comment to this post, "Yuezhi archeology without concern for Tocharian language" (8/4/24), Gokul Madhavan raised an interesting question:

I’m very curious to know if there are any reliable and up-to-date sources for Tocharian loanwords into Sanskrit or other Indo-Aryan languages.

Given both the use of Gāndhārī Prakrit across the region and the presence of the Kuṣāṇa empire in India, I would expect to find at least some Tocharian-origin names or words that got absorbed into Indo-Aryan languages.

Xinyi Ye came upon this post on Zhīhū 知乎 ("Did you know?"), a Chinese social media site that is comparable to Quora:

Rúhé kàndài huíguó rénshì shuōhuà jiádài Yīngwén?

如何看待回国人士说话夹带英文？

"How should we view / treat people returning to China [from abroad] who mix English in their speech?"

The author is Ren Zeyu, who seems to be an anime artist, based on the bio of his account.

[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson]

I recently received the following delightful question from Hilary Smith (University of Denver) about the origins of the term for protein in Chinese (dànbáizhì) and Japanese (tanpakushitsu). Thanks to her for pointing me down this lovely rabbit hole!

The hanzi/kanji used are identical (蛋白質), though in written Japanese the term is often タンパク質 or たんぱく質 because the 蛋 character is not one of the “regular use” kanji (常用漢字 jōyō kanji) selected by the officially announced by the Japanese education ministry for mastery during compulsory education.