Language Log

Figuring out the etymologies of words has always been one of my favorite things in life, almost as much as eating flavorful food.  All the way back in second grade of primary school, my Mom gave me a Merriam-Webster dictionary, and I treasured it above all my other belongings because of its etymological notes.  Much later, when The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language became available, I was euphoric, since then I was able to trace words to their Indo-European and Semitic roots.

In between, though, I came up against the pseudo-science of Chinese character etymology, which should better be called "Chinese character construction".  Despite almost universal misunderstanding to the contrary, Chinese characters have no direct connection to the sounds and meanings of words.  If you want to analyze the history of the development of how individual Chinese characters acquired their shapes and sounds, all well and good, but that's a different matter from how the sounds and meanings of Chinese words evolved through time.  Always and ever, I emphasize over and over the primacy of sounds for conveying meaning, the same as with all other living, spoken languages.  The writing systems are only there as a makeshift, always catching up and inevitably imperfect means for recording the sounds of the languages.

From a restaurant menu:

From Mark Swofford:

Part of a menu in Taiwan:

(Provided by Grace Wu)

You'll be hearing a lot of that Cincinnati Bengals chant today.

What does it mean?  How did it originate?

To understand the meaning, you have to put it in the context of the whole chant:

"Who dey, who dey, who dey think gonna beat dem Bengals?" Fans then roar: "Nobody!"

So it's a rhetorical question.

The province of Yunnan in the far south is home to more ethnic minorities and languages than any other part of China (25 out of 56 recognized groups, 38% of the population).  The Bai are one of the more unusual groups among them.

Bai children—in Yunnan, China

Stimulating, substantial article by Chang Che in SupChina (1/13/22):  "China looks to the Western classics".  Here are the first three paragraphs:

Article in South China Morning Post (12/18/21):

My Hong Kong by Luisa Tam

Cantonese is far from dead. It lags Mandarin in the Chinese language league table for numbers, but its cult status will see it live on

    Cantonese is a one-of-a-kind linguistic art form that’s quirkier and more edgy than Mandarin, nimble and ever-changing

    Its long-term fate is in the hands of every Cantonese speaker and Cantonese-language enthusiast who is willing to continue to breathe new life into it

In this, her most recent article on the nature and fate of Cantonese, Luisa Tam, a favorite author of ours here at Language Log, is upbeat about the future of the language.  I love Cantonese as much as she / anyone does, but I am less sanguine about what lies ahead for it than Luisa is.  As I said several days ago during a faculty meeting at Penn, there's no one who is more passionate about about defending and promoting Cantonese than VHM.  Why, then, am I so pessimistic about what is in store for this lively language?

Before I answer that question, let's see why Luisa Tam is so positive about Cantonese in the coming years.  Here are some selections from her article:

Two days ago, I met a person who had a thick white coating on their tongue.  Wondering what it was called and its implications for health, I asked members of the e-Mair list about it.  Here are some of the answers I received:

Denis (Sinologist):

Thick tongue coating, often due to lengthening of the keratinous papillae on the tongue's surface.

Heidi (Yoga teacher and Ayurveda specialist):

We call it "ama" in Ayurveda – accumulated toxins from undigested foods. The person who has it might be ill. I scrape my tongue every day

From Proto-Indo-Aryan *HaHmás, from Proto-Indo-Iranian *HaHmás, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂eh₃mós (“raw, uncooked”), from *h₂eh₃- (“to burn”). Cognate with Ancient Greek ὠμός (ōmós, “raw, crude, uncooked, undressed”), Old Armenian հում (hum, “raw, uncooked”), Old Irish om (“raw, uncooked”) (whence Irish amh), Persian خام‎ (xâm, “crude, raw”).

(source)

VHM:  In some Indic languages it means, among other things, "undigested", as Heidi noted for Ayurveda in general.

Cover page of a cookbook published in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia:

From Mark Swofford:

The back of a restaurant stand going up in front of the Banqiao train station as part of a temporary market for the Christmas season.

(source)

We've alluded to this Sichuanese dish in posts and comments several times before on Language, but this is the first time I have captured it in the wild (at Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House in Philadelphia's Chinatown):