Language Log

[This is a guest post from Christopher Atwood]

Building on observations of Andras Rona-Tas (Tibeto-Mongolica, pp. 213-14), one can observe a basic division in Mongolian words for cultivated plants. They divide into two types: 1) words for grains and grain cultivation; and 2) words for fruits and vegetables.

Words in the first category (tariya "grain" buudai "wheat," arbai "barley," shish "sorghum," am "millet," budaa "grain," anjisu "plow" mill "teerem" etc) are consistent throughout the Mongolic family, and have great time depth — most of them are not obviously loan words from any other language (some have Turkic cognates, but at a considerable time depth).

[This is a guest post by Gábor Parti]

This morning at the Greek stand of the farmers market, I bought spanakopita ("spinach pie") and one other item with the "spanako-" root, which also had spinach as a main ingredient.  The resemblance to English "spinach", plus the fact that it was obviously not one of those ubiquitous wrinkled leafy green vegetables related to cabbage, kale, collard, etc., got me interested in what its etymology was.

Just quickly checking a few easily accessible sources, some seemingly contradictory aspects of the common understanding of the etymology of "spinach" started to bother me:

From Middle English spinach, from Anglo-Norman spinache, from Old French espinoche, from Old Occitan espinarc, from Arabic إِسْفَانَاخ (ʔisfānāḵ), from Classical Persian اسپناخ (ispanāx, ispināx).

Wiktionary

Even if you can't understand spoken Taiwanese, you can learn a lot from these two videos because of the excellent visuals, plus it is nice just to hear the clearly spoken Taigi and compare terms in Taigi with their parallels in Sino-Korean.

The first is a video from Taiwan's public TV (公視台語台) on the interesting distribution of the names of tea in the world:

Running down the road in Clarksdale, Mississippi, I screeched to a halt (felt like Rroad Runner) when I passed by a Chinese restaurant with the odd name Rice Bowl (in Chinese it was Fànwǎn lóu 饭碗楼 — the only characters I saw on the premises).  It was a tiny, nondescript establishment, with six or so chairs against the walls where you sat while you waited for your order to be prepared.  Most people, however, stood in line or just came in to pick up what they had ordered over the phone.

The owner did a brisk business, but it was strictly take out.  There were about 8 spaces for cars to park outside, though they were constantly coming and going.

A hot bowl of congee / zuk1 粥 (Cantonese) / zhōu (Mandarin) / rice porridge / rice gruel, in its multifarious varieties, is one of my favorite Chinese dishes — at its best, congee is absolutely divine.  We've written about it often enough that I think most Language Log readers have a good idea of what it's like.  Here I only want to add some new information about it from a historical, literary, and linguistic vantage.

The paragraphs quoted here are from Nandini Das, "Dark Propensities", a review of Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes:  Opium's Hidden Histories (John Murray, 2023) in London Review of Books (3/20/25).

A CHINESE FRIEND and I have taken to batting words at each other like ping-pong balls. I'm trying to improve my Mandarin and she is curious about Bengali, but some things stop us in our tracks. Rice porridge is one of them. Cooked rice can be revived by boiling in water, or simply by pouring water over it, although fancier versions use broth or green tea, as in Japanese ochazuke. It can be reassuringly warm in cold winters, or refreshingly cold in hot summers, and can be paired with side dishes from a single green chilli to pickled vegetables, or salted fish and eggs. My friend tells me that in Mandarin it is called 粥 (zhöu). I say that the Bengali word for the cold, overnight version is panta-bhaat, and the cooked version is phena-bhaat (bhaat means cooked rice). Then I remember that phena-bhaat is a regional term, associated with the Bengali of Kolkata, where I grew up. For my mother, whose culinary vocabulary was that of her childhood in East Bengal, now Bangladesh, cooked rice porridge was jaou, a softer pronunciation of the Mandarin zhöu. During my childhood, I realise, East Bengal's long-standing trade connections with the Chinese mainland were behind the steaming bowls of jaou-bhaat my mother cooked.

Nick Tursi suggested that I visit Sungsimdang in Daejeon, so I went two hours out of my way as I was travelling to Seoul. Sungsimdang (Korean: 성심당; Hanja: 聖心堂; lit. Sacred Heart Hall) is a phenomenally popular bakery that could easily establish branch stores all around Korea and, indeed, the world, but it refuses to do so, not expanding beyond the city of Daejeon.

We were lucky that it was raining that day, which made the line outside the store only stretch for one block, whereas in good weather it may stretch back and forth for a length equal to three blocks or more, and you'd have to wait for 2-3 hours to make your way through it.

(photo courtesy of Song Yaoxue)

From a Hong Kong restaurant:

I encouraged Nathan Hopson to see the last sentence of the second comment here, "Ramen Lo Mein lou1 min6" (1/9/25), which reads:  "We need Nathan Hopson / other Japanese lexicologists…".

Nathan replied with this guest post:

"Oxford English Dictionary adds seven new Korean words including ‘dalgona’ and ‘tteokbokki’:  This is the first time since September 2021 that the dictionary has added new Korean words"
Shahana Yasmin, The Independent (1/7/25)

Korean has accepted many English words into its vocabulary, including "hotdog" (except in the north, where it is forbidden).  Now, with Korean culture and economy booming globally, it is not surprising that Korean language will be spreading too.

…According to the OED’s website on Tuesday, the words “noraebang,” “hyung,” “jjigae,” “tteokbokki” and “pansori” were also added in the December update.

…Dalgona, which entered the pop culture lexicon with the release of Netflix’s hit show Squid Game in 2021, is defined as a “Korean confection made by adding baking soda to melted sugar, typically sold by street vendors in the form of a flat disc with a simple shape such as a heart, star, etc., carved on its surface”.

Kim Jong-un’s bizarre new ban for North Koreans:
The hermit kingdom has outlawed popular items in recent months as part of a massive crackdown on Western cultural influences.
Heath Parkes-Hupton, news.com.au (1/6/25)

"Weird", as some attendees at the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year vote last evening might have said.

In my latest (of many) posts on that redoubtable sinograph, biáng ("Annals of Biang, Vienna edition" [1/3/25]), I posed this question:  "How do we know that this character is to be pronounced in the second tone?"

Chris Button sensibly queried in reply:  "So, something aside from the syllable being a phonotactic violation?"

Later, he elaborated,  "Even if biang (regardless of tone) were allowed in 'standard' Mandarin, the second tone would not be allowed in any case. So we have a double violation of sorts: one on the phonemic level, and one on the tonemic level."  This too is sensibly spoken.

The Xi'an topolect does have the tripthong -iang. (source)

The tones of Xi'an topolect, though four in number, are conspicuously different from those of MSM. (source)