Language Log

Ignore the super-slow video (if you can! — I watched it a dozen times).  Look at what is written on the man's t-shirt.

I've been saying "Erin go Bragh" my whole life and knew that it meant roughly "Ireland Forever!".

The Chinese Football Association used dǎngguó 党国 ("party state" — nettlesome term to be explained fully below) in a powerpoint on its plans for '24. Awkward political illiteracy! 

Here's a screenshot.

From the Twitter / X account of the famous popular science writer and muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin:

光禁止“日本人”“美国狗”入内哪够啊，还有欧盟、英国、澳大利亚、加拿大……呢？不如干脆搞一个白名单，只欢迎朝鲜人、俄国狗入内。 pic.twitter.com/fhVu6oMyZx

— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) August 31, 2023

From the recent meeting between Putin and Wang Yi (Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party):

From the Twitter account of the famous popular science writer and muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin:

先把外资都赶跑、吓跑了，再死皮赖脸地请回来？ pic.twitter.com/FepFOsJnpY

— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) February 20, 2023

Students from the elite school Tsinghua University protested with Friedmann equation. I have no idea what this equation means, but it does not matter.
It's the pronunciation: it's similar to "free的man" (free man)—a spectacular and creative way to express, with intelligence. pic.twitter.com/m5zomeTRPF

— Nathan Law 羅冠聰 (@nathanlawkc) November 27, 2022

The photographs below are of government lockdown slogans on signs in Chinese cities.  The first was taken by a former student of mine in Guangzhou, and the other two are from Weibo.

In the first photograph, the last line is so awkward that if seems ungrammatical and barely makes sense.  As shown in the following analysis, it's the result of a forced rhyme.

1., 2. (left, right)

From Charles Belov:  seen on a street-sign pole in the Mission District of San Francisco:

Just out, a stimulating new book from Brill (2020):

Mareshi Saito.  Kanbunmyaku:  The Literary Sinitic Context and the Birth of Modern Japanese Language and Literature.  Series:  Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis, Volume: 2.  Editors:  Ross King and Christina Laffin; translators:  Alexey Lushchenko, Mattieu Felt, Si Nae Park, and Sean Bussell

From the author's Introduction, p. 1:

The chief aim of this book is to consider the language space of modern Japan from the perspective of what I am calling kanbunmyaku 漢文脈 in Japanese, translated here as “Literary Sinitic Context.”  I use  the term “Literary  Sinitic”* to designate what is often referred to as “Classical Chinese” or “Literary Chinese” in English, wenyan 文言 in Mandarin Chinese, kanbun 漢文 in Japanese (sometimes referred to as “Sino-Japanese” in English), and hanmun 漢文 in Korean.  The Context in Literary Sinitic Context translates the -myaku of kanbunmyaku, and usually implies a pulse, vein, flow, or path, but is also the second constituent element of the Sino-Japanese term bunmyaku 文脈 meaning “(textual, literary) context.”  I use the term Literary Sinitic Context to encompass both Literary Sinitic proper, as well as orthographic and literary styles (buntai 文体) derived from Literary Sinitic, such as glossed reading (kundoku 訓読) or Literary Japanese (bungobun 文語文), which mix sinographs (kanji 漢字, i.e., “Chinese” characters) and katakana.  In addition to styles I also consider Literary Sinitic thought and sensibility at the core of which lie Literary Sinitic poetry (kanshi 漢詩) and prose (kanbun 漢文), collectively termed kanshibun 漢詩文.

*For  the  term  “Literary  Sinitic,”  see  Victor H. Mair,  “Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular,” Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 (August, 1994), 707-751.

These days I'm getting so many greetings like this:

Chūnjié jiànkāng, niú zhuǎn qiánkūn.

春节健康，牛转乾坤。

"May you be healthy at this time of the Spring Festival, when the ox turns heaven and earth (the universe)."

The first part of this Lunar New Year's (February 12, 2021) greeting is transparent and easy to understand, but the second part makes you stop and wonder, "What?  How and why does the ox do that?"

The whole world knows about BLM (Black Lives Matter). Native speakers of English (at least American English — I can't vouch for other varieties) instinctively know what the innately idiomatic intransitive verb "matter" means in this construction. But, even for native speakers, it's not easy to define in one word. I suppose, in the expression "Black Lives Matter" it means something like "are of consequence / importance". Yet, if we reworded the slogan as "Black Lives Are of Consequence / Importance" or "Black Lives Are Important / Consequential", it would lose its impact, its zing.

Pondering all of these aspects of the movement's name, I often wondered how "matter" could be felicitously rendered in Chinese. To tell the truth, though, I didn't spend much time on trying to come up with a good translation, because nothing readily came to mind — until this morning when Diana Shuheng Zhang told me she was dissatisfied with the translation that she was most familiar with and appalled by its underlying racism: "Hēi mìng guì 黑命贵" ("Black Lives Are Expensive / Costly" — that's a raw, crude, literal translation of the last word, which can also be interpreted to mean "Important / Valuable"). Diana said that it sounds too crass and materialistic, and I would have to agree with her. She further says that this is blatant Chinese racism, reflecting perhaps not Chinese xenophobia but more of the Chinese willingness / initiative to be merged with supremacists — be they white (who have already “attained” supremacy in many repects), or Chinese themselves (who are yet “striving” for supremacy, at least ideologically!).

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: