Language Log

IA sent me this article (in Chinese) about a new translation of George Orwell's 1984.  It begins:

Yīngguó zuòjiā Qiáozhì Ōuwēiěr de míngzhù `1984' chūbǎn yuē 75 nián, jìnrì yíng lái shǒubù Táiwén bǎn. Yìzhě Zhōu Yíngchéng shuō, zhè shì tuīdòng `Táiyǔ zhèngchánghuà'de chángshì, ràng Táiyǔ mǔyǔzhě bùbì tòuguò Zhōngwén yìběn, yě néng jiēchù shìjiè jīngdiǎn wénxué

英國作家喬治‧歐威爾的名著「1984」出版約75年，近日迎來首部台文版。譯者周盈成說，這是推動「台語正常化」的嘗試，讓台語母語者不必透過中文譯本，也能接觸世界經典文學。

1984, a famous novel by British writer George Orwell, was published about 75 years ago and recently had its first Taiwanese version. Translator Zhou Yingcheng said that this is an attempt to promote the "normalization of Taiwanese" so that native Taiwanese speakers can access world classic literature without having to rely on Chinese translations.

IA points out that, as in the following quotation from the translator, "Zhōngwén 中文" (lit. "Chinese writing"), refers not only to written language but spoken as well:

Tā shuō:`Dāngshí zài guó wài jiǎng zhōngwén, chángcháng bèi dàng zuò zhōngguó rén, yúshì wǒ kāishǐ sīkǎo zìjǐ gēn táiwān de liánjié shì shénme, dé chū de jiélùn shì tái yǔ. Dàn wǒ tái yǔ bùgòu hǎo, yǒu shí wǒmen xiǎng jiǎng qiāoqiāohuà,(jiǎng zhōngwén) pà biérén tīng dǒng, jiù huì qiēhuàn chéng tái yǔ, dàn yòu méi bànfǎ wánzhěngde shuō

他說：「當時在國外講中文，常常被當作中國人，於是我開始思考自己跟台灣的連結是什麼，得出的結論是台語。但我台語不夠好，有時我們想講悄悄話，（講中文）怕別人聽懂，就會切換成台語，但又沒辦法完整地說」。

He said: "When I was speaking Chinese abroad, I was often mistaken for Chinese, so I began to think about what my connection with Taiwan was, and I concluded it was Taiwanese. But my Taiwanese is not good enough. Sometimes when we want to whisper, we are afraid that others will understand (what we are saying in Chinese), so we switch to Taiwanese, but we can't speak it completely."

[This is a guest post by Robert S. Bauer in response to the video and paper featured in this recent Language Log post:  "Cantonese is both very cool and very old" (4/1/25)]

After I read the paper the first word that came to mind was “Cringeworthy” in regard to the author’s phrase “purer descent”; and the second word was “Superficial” in regard to the author’s knowledge of Cantonese and Chinese linguistics. For instance, the author who has narrowly focused on just those items that support his claims doesn’t seem to know that the Ancient Chinese tone category of Rusheng/Entering Tone which has disappeared from Mandarin was not a particular tone contour; the distinctive feature of Rusheng was that the monomorphosyllables belonging to it had as their finals or endings the three stop consonants -p, -t , -k, all of which have been retained in Cantonese, as well as in various other Chinese topolects of South China.

From Chas Belov:  

Google Translate says that this song is in Suzhou topolect (it actually says "dialect" but thanks to you I know better). But I had to recognize a few words before I could convince myself it wasn't in French (which I also don't know). Later in the song it sounds more Chinese, but the rapper never really loses that French sound. Am I imagining things?

【苏州方言RAP】红中 Zyh 《三十三》PROD BY XVIBE

LISTEN HERE

Spending some time in Ireland, I hear people saying "It's a soft day" or "It's a soft day, thank God!".  Not knowing what that expression implies, I do a search and find that "A soft day is what the Irish call a very very damp fog or a mizzle, which is a cross between a mist and a drizzle." (source)  Mizzle is also the color of a shade of paint. (source)

"Soft day" is a phrase derived from Irish lá bog (lit.) ("overcast day; light drizzle/mist").

That reaction to a moist, overcast day tells you something about the Irish mindset and helps you understand Irish sentiment and humor.

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

Overview: Here we look at some technical terms and how they’ve fared since their release to, or adoption by, the public: information theory; (TW) the colored quarks of Nambu and Han; cosmic‑ray decay according to Millikan; the Sinitic languages (Mair) vs. ‘the Chinese language’ (misnomer); Wu’s cosmic chirality as the violation of a nonNoetherian principle.

① information theory is the mother of all factoids. Why would one call it that? Because there is no such thing, only the following phantom utterance that is ubiquitous: “Shannon’s information theory.” In 1948, Shannon wrote a paper on the mathematics of data‑communication technology, and named it accordingly. Put off by its name, science journalists introduced it to the world as “information theory.” The name stuck, suggesting in the minds of innocents something so deep and epochal that it might even shed light on Mozart. Shannon 1948 is the big example of how of data and information have been confounded for 3/4 of a century, but it is accompanied by innumerable smaller cases, as when Susskind argues that “in physics we treat them as pretty much the same thing” (paraphrase; details in Appendix A). Here is a rough‑and‑ready demonstration of how different they actually are: “Go.” ←That’s just data, but place it in a context, and a layer of information now “rides on it” (or floats above it, on a different plane) such that this is conveyed: “Go to the store now before it closes”; or this: “Fly now to Hiroshima and drop the bomb.” True, in shop‑talk and hallway conversations, a database developer or data‑comm engineer might toss the terms data and information around as if one believed them to be interchangeable. Then, overheard by someone in the world at large, such casual usage is easily misconstrued, leading astrophysicists to fret in public over the “information” that might be “lost” in a black hole. (As for an actual Theory of Information, we must wait for a superintelligent computer to produce it since that task is far beyond human ability. And once coughed up, it will be so lengthy as to require several lifetimes to read it, and in any case, largely incomprehensible to us.)

Sign on the back of a pickup truck in Fujian Province:

Having just come back from two weeks in London and Belfast, this article is particularly germane for me:

"The Irish and Scots Aren’t Fooled by Your Fake Accent:  Some cultures are better than others at spotting impostors. The skill could allow them to pick out outsiders trying to infiltrate their groups."  By Eric Niiler, WSJ (12'16/24)

I love to hear Scots and Irish speak, although often I cannot understand all that they are saying.  Twenty and more years ago, the head circulation librarian at my university had such a mellifluous lilt that I would sometimes check out books when she was on duty just to hear her sweet tongue, but I had no idea which particular variety of Scottish (I think) she was speaking.

[This is a guest post by Denis Mair]   

  Cai Xutie was a Taiwanese woman who ran a family farm with her husband in a village near Jiayi in central Taiwan. She was a rice farmer and had never attended a public school. After her husband died in middle age, she sold some of the land, moved to Taipei with her children, and bought a modest apartment. Because of economic pressure, she helped to set up a number of revolving credit pools, which were used by economically disadvantaged people in the 1950s and 60s to obtain credit when they couldn't get it from banks.

We have regional varieties of English:  Australian, American (with many subvarieties), Indian (South Asian), and so forth.  Cantonese is spread all around the world, especially in Southeast Asia, so it is not surprising that it has also developed its own regional variants.  In this post, we will concentrate on a comparison of Hong Kong and Malaysian Cantonese.

"Lost in communication:  Just because we speak Cantonese doesn’t mean we can understand each other", by Mandy Li, The Hong Konger (16 October 2024)

Mandy Li remembers the first time she worked with a Malaysian colleague:

In Malaysia, a sizeable portion of the population have Cantonese heritage so can speak the language. They also enjoy watching Cantonese dramas. So, when my colleague learned I was from Hong Kong, she naturally switched to Cantonese when speaking to me. I was astonished to find that I could not understand everything she said.

Sign for a store that just opened in Mark Swofford's neighborhood in Banqiao, New Taipei City: