Language Log

From Mok Ling:

As I'm writing this (evening of 3 May), my friends across the Strait of Malacca in Singapore are eagerly awaiting the results of their most recent general elections. As I've found out, in Singapore, voting in elections is not only a civic duty but mandatory by law!

I happened to come across this image showing the reverse of a poll card issued to all voters:

The reverse of a poll card issued for the Singaporean presidential election, 2011.
The polling station in question was at the void deck of Block 115 Clementi Street 13
in the Holland-Bukit Timah Group Representation Constituency.  (source)

Two days ago, I received a big package with three heavy books inside.  They were three copies of the following tome:

Routledge Handbook of Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Victor H. Mair and Zhenjun Zhang (London:  Routledge, 2025), 742 pages.

It came as a surprise for, even though we had been working on the handbook for years, I had lost track of when it would actually be published.

Holding the printed and bound work in my hands, the sheer magnitude of what its pages contained began to sink in.

Stumbled upon an earliest surviving partial bible translation into Japanese made by Manuel Barreto in 1591 (known as バレト写本 or Reg. lat. 459), here's the first paragraph.

Scans can be found here:https://t.co/pW2nH8Udtj pic.twitter.com/HMehP0F6qd

— Maxim Persikov (Panates) (@gyankotsu) December 5, 2024

The Japanese writing system consists of three major components — kanji (sinographs), hiragana (cursive syllabary), and katakana (block syllabary).  I would argue that rōmaji (roman letters) are a fourth component.  We have rehearsed and rehashed their different lexical, morphological, and grammatical functions so often that I don't want to waste time going over them again now.  Since we are focusing on katakana in this post, I will merely mention that their main roles are the following:

• transcription of foreign-language words into Japanese
• the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo)
• emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia
• for technical and scientific terms
• for names of plants, animals, minerals
• often for the names of Japanese companies

(Wikipedia)

[This is a guest post by William Jinbo WANG (王金波), associate professor of English and translation studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University]

Over the past 22 years I have been researching the translation of classical Chinese novels, with concentration on The Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as The Story of the Stone; 18th-century) in the English- and German-speaking worlds. I have published more than a dozen research articles about the translation of the novel and received several research grants concerning the novel from various provincial and national grant-giving bodies. 

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

Exactly what had become ‘visualizable’ according to Heisenberg in 1927,
and whence the term ‘Blurriness Relation’ in lieu of Uncertainty Principle?

As backdrop for the physics concepts and associated German vocabulary to be explored in a moment, here is a story I call “Quadrille Dance & Shotgun Wedding”:

1925. Heeding the lesson of Niels Bohr’s ill‑fated orbital theory (1913‑1918), Heisenberg is wary of developing any visual model; he wants to “get rid of the waves in any form.” Accordingly, with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, he sets forth his matrix‑mechanics formulation of quantum theory.

The words that leap to mind are pustakālaya पुस्तकालय (pustak पुस्तक ["book"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]) and granthālaya ग्रन्थालय (granth ग्रंथ ["text"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]).  Those are simple and straightforward.

There were several other Sanskrit words for library I used to know, such as vidyākośasamāśraya विद्याकोशसमाश्रय* that included the component vidya ("knowledge"), but they were more subtle and complicated, so they were harder for me to recall.

*knowledge treasury coming together (for support or shelter)

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

[This is a guest post by Hiroshi Kumamoto]

The Last Words of Helmut Humbach (1921-2017)

1

When an eminent classicist, the late Martin L. West published The Hymns of Zoroaster: A New Translation of the Most Ancient Sacred Texts of Iran, London: Tauris, 2010, Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst wrote (Review in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2011, p. 379),"This book (…) comes as something of a surprise, since scholars of the difficult texts in Old Avestan, the oldest known texts in Old Iranian, do not usually emerge out of the blue". Now another surprise is brought by Heindio Uesugi, who edited Old Avestan Dictionary, Tokyo : Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa  (ILCAA), 2024 [became available in Feb. 2025] (XXVIII, 404 + VI, 116 pages). Although Adam Alvah Catt at Kyoto University, who is credited as editorial supervisor, is known from his works in Indo-Iranian and Tocharian linguistics, the name of the editor has been totally unknown in the field in Iranian linguistics.

Is Taishanese Cantonese?

Legally, in Canada, no.

[Preface:  This is one of the eeriest posts I've ever written, where thoughts I had about a student two decades ago while I was teaching her in my classes at Penn have become reality today, in a conspicuous, public way.  The realization of mental projection into the future.]

The material for this post came to me by a curious path.  From Bruce Rusk:

My father is a retired journalist in Toronto and one of his hobbies is tracking Ontario appeal court decisions. He came across a case that is of potential relevance to those interested in the status of Sinitic languages and the nature of fangyan. I thought that you (and perhaps Language Log readers) would find it interesting.

Because it was about Sinitic languages and fangyan ("topolects"), I was moderately interested, but because the written decision, like most judicial documents, was long and tediously detailed, I thought I'd just skim through it quickly.

This morning, I received the following interesting message from Adam C.:

Spending some time in Ireland, I hear people saying "It's a soft day" or "It's a soft day, thank God!".  Not knowing what that expression implies, I do a search and find that "A soft day is what the Irish call a very very damp fog or a mizzle, which is a cross between a mist and a drizzle." (source)  Mizzle is also the color of a shade of paint. (source)

"Soft day" is a phrase derived from Irish lá bog (lit.) ("overcast day; light drizzle/mist").

That reaction to a moist, overcast day tells you something about the Irish mindset and helps you understand Irish sentiment and humor.

I forget who it was and for what reason, but a week or two ago, someone said "Thank you" in Hakka to me.

That got me thinking about all the different ways to say "thanks" in Sinitic languages.

Here's a map of Sinitic topolectal equivalents for MSM (Modern Standard Mandarin) "xièxie 謝謝 / 谢谢" (“thank you”).  If you click on the place names in characters at the bottom of the map, pinyin romanizations will be supplied.

Bear in mind that European-style  words of etiquette such as "hello" and "thanks" did not exist in China before the 20th century.  For the impact of English on the development of such spoken Mandarin civilities, see Mary S. Erbaugh, "China expands its courtesy:  Saying 'Hello' to Strangers," The Journal of Asian Studies, 67.2 (May, 2008), 621-652.