Language Log

A few years ago (in "…'such matters as Opinion, not real worth, gives a value to'", 11/20/2016), based on reading Mary Astell's 1694 work A serious proposal to the ladies, for the advancement of their true and greatest interest, I asked:

Why did authors from Astell's time distribute initial capital letters in the apparently erratic way that they did?

 And I quoted Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Introduction to Late Modern English, 2009:

The use of extra initial capitals, according to Osselton, steadily increased during the first half of the eighteenth century to about 100 per cent around the 1750s after which this practice was drastically reduced and, fifty years later, abandoned completely. The reason for giving up the practice to capitalise all nouns was pressure from writers, who felt that they could not longer make use of capitals to emphasize individual words, as they had been accustomed to do before such idiosyncratic use of capitals was standardised by the printers.

This doesn't really answer the question asked today in an email from Joseph Huang, who links to my 2016 post, and asks: "I saw your blog post about capitalization. I am wondering whether you have studied capitalization in the Constitution."

Shannon McDonagh, "'What the Hell Is This?': Crocodile-Like Fossil Rewrites Triassic History", Newsweek 7/11/2024:

The groundbreaking discovery of the Benggwigwishingasuchus eremicarminis reveals the presence of waterside crocodile-like creatures around the globe during the Middle Triassic.

Broadly known as pseudosuchian archosaurs—four-legged, carnivorous beings with an armadillo-like coating—these creatures are now known to have existed coastally between 247.2 million and 237 million years ago.

ICYMI:

From "Why Does Everyone Hate Nickelback?", Medium 4/15/2021:

This was before Netflix, or even taping shows to watch later, so people were being repeatedly told that Nickelback is awful for three years, which boroughed its way into many people’s subconscious.

Merriam-Webster's online dictionary entry for folx defines it as a re-spelling of folks "used especially to explicitly signal the inclusion of groups commonly marginalized".

The etymology is given as "respelling of folks, with x after MX., LATINX".

The entry also notes that the first known occurrence was in 1833, without clarifying that older uses (and many recent ones) are examples of eye dialect rather than inclusionary reference.

From the movie "Jak rozpętałem drugą wojnę światową" (How I Unleashed World War II):

The initial Q&A:

Q: Name und Vorname?
A: Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz.

Shop sign in Budapest:

Among the entries in the  2023 Eurovision Song Contest,  there's one of particular linguistic and political interest — from Croatia, Let 3's Mama ŠČ!:

[The video of the song's final Eurovision performance is blocked (at least for now) in the U.S. … but there seems to be a version of it here…]

From Kiewwoo Goh:

I spent last week at the ASA conference in Nashville. The "ASA", as members all call it, is the Acoustical Society of America — but asa.org is "American Students' Assistance", while asa.com is the "American Sailing Association", and Wikipedia offers 75 other options for the ASA initialism.

This is general problem. Another organization that I belong to is the LSA, as the members of the Linguistic Society of America call it — but lsa.org is the "Louisiana Sheriffs' Association", and lsa.com is apparently malware associated with Windows' Local Security Authority, so I won't link to it. The Linguistic Society of America, having been pre-empted by the Louisiana Sheriffs, used to be online at the URL lsadc.org, but is now linguisticsociety.org. Wikipedia offers 48 other options for LSA. They include "Latent Semantic Analysis", which is the earliest of the word-embeddings at the root of the tree whose recent fruits include ChatGPT — which recently evoked some confusion on this blog as to the meaning of the GPT initialism.

There are obviously 26^3 = 17576 three-letter initialisms, and nearly all of them are spoken for, multiple times over.

David Marjanović mentioned Ramzan Kadyrov's verbal tic [dɔːn] (a contraction of the Chechen filler /duj huna/, literally "there is for you"), no matter if he's speaking Chechen or Russian.  That made me wonder what the equivalent would be in other languages?  Something like "ya know" in English?

The common Mandarin word for this type of expression is kǒutóuchán 口頭禪 / 口头禅 ("catchphrase; favorite expression; stock phrase; pet phrase; mantra", where kǒutóu 口頭 ["on the mouth / lips; oral"] is the disyllabic modifier of the head noun).  The three constituent morphemes mean "mouth / oral", "head", and "Zen / Chan (< Skt. dhyāna ["meditation"]), i.e., a meditative mantra (from Sanskrit मन्त्र (mantra, literally “instrument of thought”), from Proto-Indo-Aryan *mántram, from Proto-Indo-Iranian *mántram, from Proto-Indo-European *mén-tro-m, from *men- (“to think”). Doublet of mind) that is always on one's lips.

A synonym for kǒutóuchán 口頭禪 / 口头禅 is kǒupǐ 口癖, a slang neologism ("one's favorite expression; stock phrase; pet phrase", where pǐ 癖 means "craving; disposition; addiction; weakness for; habit"), which is an orthographic borrowing from Japanese kuchiguse 口癖 ("phrase that one uses regularly").

Which being translated is "May this tusk root out the lice of the hai[r and the] beard".

You can read all about this object here: Daniel Vainstub et al., "A Canaanite’s Wish to Eradicate Lice on an Inscribed Ivory Comb from Lachish", Jewish Journal of Archaeology 2022. The abstract:

An inscription in early Canaanite script from Lachish, incised on an ivory comb, is presented. The 17 letters, in early pictographic style, form seven words expressing a plea against lice.

Bizarre scriptplay in Korea:

[Newsmaker] "What is ‘daengdaengi?’ Government’s use of Hangeul slang stirs controversy"
By Lim Jae-seong, The Korea Herald (Oct 7, 2022)

The article is rather long.  Here I quote only the first portion, but will summarize some of the more important points at the bottom.

The National Institute of Korean Language’s use of slang words on its recent social media post has stirred controversy, questioning whether it is right for the state-run language regulator to use a distorted version of the language.

To mark the upcoming Hangeul Day on Sunday, the institute had posted an image to announce its special event on its Twitter account last month. In the posted image, it asked the followers what their views are on using the so-called “Yaminjeongeum.”