Language Log

New old news:

"Dev Shah wins 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling 'psammophile'"
Chris Bumbaca
USA TODAY (6/1/23)

Another year, same story:

The 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee ended the old-fashioned way.

Two competitors left on the stage. No spell-off required.

Dev Shah, an eighth-grader from Largo, Florida, spelled "psammophile" correctly to win the 95th national Bee and the 50,000 dollar prize on Thursday. Charlotte Walsh, the hometown kid from just across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, could not nail "daviely" in the preceding round. Walsh's prize was 25,000 dollars for the second-place finish, while the third-place finishers ― Shradha Rachamreddy and Surya Kapu ― each won 12,500 dollars.

From Taiwan News (3/25/23), by Keoni Everington:

"Taiwanese 'Hello Kitty' English-Chinese dictionary has 70 'egregious errors'

Publisher ACME Cultural Enterprise Co has admitted errors but not recalled dictionaries"

Cover of dictionary, example of misspelling. (Eryk Smith photo)

From the Facebook account of Mei Han:

Dave Thomas recently watched a Chinese movie with a liberal sprinkling (more than fifty instances) of alphabet letters substituting for Chinese characters in the closed captions.  The title of the movie is "Yǒng bù huítóu 永不回頭" ("Never Back Off" [official English title]; "Never Look Back").  Here's a small selection of the partially alphabetized expressions:

bié B wǒ 别B我 | B = bī 逼 || "don't force / push me"

I started to ponder this problem because, over in the comments section of "The value and validity of translation for learning classical languages" (12/9/22) where we are having an energetic discussion about how to pronounce "www", Philip Taylor averred, "I pronounce it as 'World-wide web' (i.e., three syllables)".

That took me a bit aback.  Made me stop and think.

It must mean that Philip, and most people, I suppose, think they pronounce "world" as though it had one syllable.  Fair enough.  That's what all dictionaries and online resources I've consulted hold:  "world" has only one syllable.

From Mark Swofford in Taiwan:

Photographs by Mark Swofford from Fuxing District of Taoyuan City:

This report can be relatively perfunctory, because the results are almost always a foregone conclusion.  After a hiatus because of the pandemic lockdowns and then an incredible shocker last year (see "Selected readings" below), there are basically no surprises… though the format has evolved.

The new thing this time was a "spell-off" that kicked in if no winner came out after a certain number of rounds. It was hard to bring the previous bees to a conclusive end because the participants were so consummately well prepared — there was an 8-way tie in 2019.  I like the new format because, not only does it eliminate overly long proceedings and multiple ties, it also adds an element of extra drama and speed to the finale.  The unsurprising thing this year was that 11 out of 13 finalists looked to be of Indian origin. (source)

In studying the history of the Chinese Imperial examination system, I came upon an individual named Stafford Northcote (1818-1887), 1st Earl of Iddesleigh, who was instrumental in devising the British civil service.  Naturally, I tried to pronounce the name of the village he was from, but couldn't quite wrap my head and tongue around it.  So I decided I'd better do a bit of research on the history of Iddesleigh to see what topolectal gems lay hidden in that perplexing concatenation of six consonants and four vowels.

[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson]

Like many around the world, I have been deeply saddened by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I have been watching news from around the world, including Japan. In addition to the actual war itself, and to the sometimes inane (studio talking-head) coverage of the war as some kind of horse race, I have been disturbed by the Japanese media’s failure to update the orthography of Ukrainian cities such as the capital, Kyiv.

Not a single domestic news outlet I am aware of―including the public broadcaster, NHK―has dropped the Soviet-era Russian name “Kiev” (キエフ) to replace it with Kyiv. CNN’s Japanese site, for instance, has similarly failed to revise its choice of katakana.

But first, English. English spelling is famously a hot mess. In each of the words though, tough, trough, through, thought, thorough, bough, hough, hiccough, and lough the "ough" is pronounced differently (at least for me; some English dialects merge some of these). 2/34 pic.twitter.com/pydydxZ9bv

— Michael Cannings (@formosaphile) February 17, 2022

From Agni Gopireddy (the title is as they gave it):

If one likes the idea, one may be able to use it for pinyin advocacy. The reason for this idea is mainly to make pinyin take up less space, which would mitigate one of the disadvantages it has relative to Chinese characters. Here are some mockups of how such an idea would look:

Tweet from Alan DAI:

“the people’s paper” 老百姓报, a wall newspaper in yan’an, june 1937 — note that it is written with latinxua sin wenz, a romanization system developed by chinese and soviet sinologists during the early 1930s that did not mark tones and used a lot of fun x’s and z’s pic.twitter.com/vTMA7cUhKQ

— alan DAI (@dai_alan_dai) December 21, 2021

[Click on the photograph to see the complete Twitter thread, which has additional illustrations of printed Latinxua texts.]