Language Log

J. Edward Moreno, "Facebook apologizes after Chinese president's name translated into vulgar phrase", The Hill (1/18/20) — with screen capture in Burmese and English.

Poppy McPherson, "Facebook says technical error caused vulgar translation of Chinese leader's name", Reuters (1/18/20):

YANGON (Reuters) – Facebook Inc (FB.O) on Saturday blamed a technical error for Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s name appearing as “Mr Shithole” in posts on its platform when translated into English from Burmese, apologizing for any offense caused.

People's Daily video posted on illegal Twitter:

Chinese calligraphy, an artistic expression of human language in a tangible form, is not exclusively for mankind anymore. This robot not only masters the art, but it is also designed to preserve the character calligraphy culture. pic.twitter.com/IrFZ2rlOaZ

— People's Daily, China (@PDChina) December 25, 2019

Two days ago, I received this message from a colleague in China:

Not sure if this should be a badge of honor or a disappointment, but a few days ago Language Log got blocked in China.  (Source — GreatFire.org:  Language Log is 100% censored)

This caps off a miserable year where we also lost Wikipedia (all languages), The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Hackernews, Imgur….

[VHM:  Of course, Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many other invaluable websites were already off-limits to Chinese citizens for years  The internet in China is severely decimated by the CCP government.]

Apollo Wu sent in this list of what he calls "Chinese acronyms" (Romanizations, translations, links, and comments are by VHM):

GJBZ 国家标准 Guójiā biāozhǔn ("National Standard") — this is commonly reduced still further to "GB"

YDYL 一带一路 Yīdài yīlù ("One Belt, One Road" or "Belt and Road")

RMB 人民币 Rénmínbì ("RMB", the Chinese yuan)

Several colleagues called this article to my attention:

"Programming Language for the ancient Chinese"

Here's the introduction:

文言, or wenyan, is an esoteric programming language that closely follows the grammar and tone of classical Chinese literature. Moreover, the alphabet of wenyan contains only traditional Chinese characters and 「」 quotes, so it is guaranteed to be readable by ancient Chinese people. You too can try it out on the online editor, download a compiler, or view the source code.

The home page then goes through "Syntax", "Compilation", and "Get (Source Code; Online Editor; Reference".

Apollo Wu, who was a long-term translator at United Nations headquarters, sent me the following note:

Dear Victor,

I wish to acquire a language tool for two way conversions between Pinyin and Hanzi texts. Do you know if any do exist?  I sometimes write Pinyin texts and want to convert them to characters for some Chinese readers who are not familiar with Pinyin.

Best!

Apollo

Here's an emoji:  😻

Here's an emoticon:  :‐)

As we will see below, the superficial resemblance of the two words is completely coincidental — even though they both have to do with the visual depiction of emotions and ideas in texts.

This post began as a comment to "Emoticons as writing" (7/7/19), but it soon became too long and too complex to fit in a comment, so it now receives separate treatment of its own.

This morning I received this card from a friend:

Article in The Washington Post (6/18/19):

"Robocalls are overwhelming hospitals and patients, threatening a new kind of health crisis"

A couple of nights ago, I had dinner with one of my students from China and his parents, both of whom are members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  The father is a doctor and has to work 10 hours a day, during which he sees a hundred patients every day.  Most of them are suffering from diabetes.  At the end of his long day, the father is required (i.e., not optional) to log into the Party's Xuéxí / Xué Xi 学习 ("Learning / Learn Xi [Thought]") app — full name “Xuéxí / Xué Xi qiángguó 学习强国” ("Learning / Learn Xi [Thought]" to strengthen the nation"), which was launched in the early part of 2015.

[This is a guest post by Jeffrey Shallit]

A Chinese student here at Waterloo used the term "odevity" for what English-speaking computer scientists typically call "parity" — the property of an integer being odd or even.

I had never heard this term before, so I used Google Scholar to look at where it is being used.  It is used almost exclusively by Chinese engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists.  The first usage I was able to find with Google Book Search was in 1972, obtained with this search.

[The following is a guest post by David Dettmann.  The "Schwarz Uyghur dictionary" to which he refers in the third paragraph is this:  Henry G. Schwarz, An Uyghur-English dictionary (Bellingham, Washington:  Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University, 1992).]

It is a bit of a nerdy obsession of mine to customize my computers to comfortably use languages that I've studied.

About 10 years ago, I got relatively proficient with using optical character recognition (OCR) software and scanner hardware. Any time I found an essential dictionary for the languages I studied, I converted them to unicode OCR scans in pdf format (i.e., converting images of pages to text). I later used that data to create dictionary content files that would work together with the Mac OS dictionary application. I did this process with several dictionaries that I found essential while I studied Kazakh, Uzbek, and Uyghur.

This process was particularly useful for me to use the Schwarz Uyghur dictionary. I could not get used to the alphabetical order that he favored (which was different from typical Latin order AND Uyghur Arabic script order). As a result, any lookup would just take forever. That said, the formatting of each page was quite pleasant, and there were some nice illustrations of plants of traditional Uyghur medicine as well as handy keys at the bottom of each page to explain abbreviations.

In several recent posts, we've been discussing the most efficient, least painful way to acquire facility with hanzi / kanji / hanja 漢字 ("Sinographs; Chinese characters").  Lord knows there are endless numbers of them and they are so intricately constructed that it is an arduous task to master the two thousand or so that are necessary for basic literacy.

It would be so much easier to learn the Sinographs if language pedagogues would provide phonetic annotations for each character.  Better yet, the phonetic annotations should be divided into words with spaces between them according to the official orthographic rules.