Like so many other good things in this annus horribilis, COVID killed it.
For quite a few years now, I have reported on the national spelling bee (usually in May). This has been such a dismal year that I didn't make an effort to inquire about what happened with it this spring. Now, however, as I am preparing a post on Indian feats of memorization, I could not help but wonder about the fate of the 2020 national spelling bee. Here's what I found out.
I wrote this sentence: "Hong Kong was one of the freeest cities on earth". My automated spell checker flagged "freeest", so I changed it to "freest", and the spell checker let that stand. But in my mind I was still saying "free‧est", with two syllables, whereas when I see "freest", it's very hard for me to think of that as having two syllables. So how are we to pronounce the superlative degree of the adjective "free"?
If you didn't know it already, "ABC" means "American-born Chinese". There's no reason why ABCs should necessarily speak Chinese, no more than why ABGs (American-born Germans) should speak German or why ABVs (American-born Vietnamese) should speak Vietnamese, etc. In this video, ABCs explain for themselves why they can't speak Chinese. This is a long (23:14) podcast. Feel free to watch all of it if you are so inclined, but for efficiency's sake I will guide you through it in instructions below the page break.
Alan Kennedy, a dealer of Oriental art based in Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, who was a student of the polymath Schuyler Van Rensselaer Cammann (1912-1991; "Ki" to his friends and acquaintances) at Penn half a century ago, and who is a regular reader of Language Log, sent me this message:
I see a comment from Brian Spooner, and had no idea that he was still at Penn. Decades ago, one of his students told me that he was sometimes called Brain in Afghanistan. Apparently someone there had transposed the 'a' and the 'i' in writing his name.
This Washington Post item confused me for a few seconds:
I first interpreted the headline as "Donald Trump is confident that Roger Stone is guilty on all counts, and" (whoops) "he (=Trump) faces up to 50 years in prison"?
I was sent down this particular garden path by the recent flurry of news stories about the president throwing various supporters under the metaphorical bus. But the whole -ant v. -ent mess didn't help.
During the last century and a half or so, there have been thousands of schemes for the reform of the Sinitic writing system. Most of these schemes were devised by Chinese, though a relatively small number of them were created by foreigners. They run the gamut from kana-like syllabaries to radical simplification of the strokes, to endless varieties of Romanization. Among the more linguistically sophisticated (but also difficult to learn) are tonal spelling schemes, such as Gwoyeu Romatzyh (National Romanization), which spell out the Mandarin tones with letters. There have even been efforts to produce Romanizations that could be read out by speakers from different areas according to the pronunciation of their own topolects, e.g., the Romanisation Interdialectique of Henri Lamasse (c. 1869-1952) and Ernest Jasmin (fl. 1920-1950) and Y. R. Chao's (1892-1982) diaphonemic orthography called General Chinese.
I have a colleague at Penn who teaches medieval Arabic cultural history; his name is Paul Cobb. He used to teach at the University of Chicago.
I have a friend at the University of Chicago who teaches medieval Chinese cultural history; his name is Paul Copp. He received his PhD from nearby Princeton, which starts with a "P".
Boy, do I ever get them confused!
I mentioned this to Diana Shuheng Zhang, and she replied as follows:
I recently learnt that although Taipei たいぺい is generally used as the Japanese reading for Taipei 台北, NHK still uses the colonial form Taihoku たいほく. Is this still true in 2018? Why would the national broadcaster persist in using an archaic term? To me, it seems it would be comparable to the BBC insisting on using the name Ceylon to refer to Sri Lanka.
I asked several colleagues who are specialists on Japanese what the significance of this usage might be.
The boy in the photos below is Alexander Aurelius Wang. He is one of our youngest fans in Shenzhen. He doesn't like writing characters from dictation (tīngxiě 听写 / 聽寫):
Following on the victory of Karthik Nemmani in the Scripps National Spelling Bee — the 11th straight Indian-American to win the competition — the New York Times has an interview with Sam Rega, whose new documentary Breaking the Bee explores how kids of South Asian ancestry have come to dominate the Bee in recent years. I wrote about Breaking the Beefor The Atlantic last month — as I said there, it's a compelling film, and I hope it gets a distribution deal soon. (Currently it's on the film-festival circuit.) In the Times interview, Sam makes a point about the spellers' multilingual backgrounds that I didn't have room to discuss in my Atlantic piece.
Is there something about South Asian values or families that explains success in spelling?
To me, the key is how much these families believe in the idea of family. And how much spelling is a family sport. They believe in working together as a family unit. They want to create a bond between parent and child. Spellers look to their parents as role models and coaches. Their siblings often play assistant coach. Parents like to instill values like dedication, hard work, and how to handle yourself in defeat or success.
These families also tend to be multilingual, sometimes with moms and dads who speak different languages. Exposure to multiple languages can also play a role in spellers’ facility with spelling. Spelling is a worldly sport, it connects you to languages and places far away from you.
