Language Log

This issue caused quite a hullabaloo more than a month ago and, during the runup to the national election that was going on at that time, it generated a lot of hot rhetoric.  It's important to note that First Girls High School is an elitist, influential institution that is very hard to get into.

The debate over how much and what sort of Classical Chinese to include in the curriculum grew quite heated, so naturally I quickly wrote a detailed post on the subject, but then my computer crashed because of one of the many dreaded, hated "updates" that I have to endure for the sake of "security" (the bane of my life), and I lost my carefully prepared post on the Classical Chinese debate — same thing happened to the draft of my post on the Tokyo restaurant sign that supposedly "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people".  It has taken me till now to find the time to reconstruct them.

"Hebei official’s shirt logo removed for ‘aesthetic reasons,’ triggering speculation among netizens"

By Global Times (Sep 05, 2023)

Official photos of a city Party chief in North China's Hebei Province, with his shirt's logo removed by editing, have sparked a wide-ranging discussion among Chinese netizens, with some speculating that it was a move to obscure the price of the clothing. 

In an article posted via Nangong city's official WeChat account on Sunday, the official's daily work was released, with one picture of his shirt logo in, followed by another two pictures without shirt logo. Some netizens questioned the reasons why they removed the shirt logo, and some checked the similar coat prices online discovering the high retail price for the item, according to media reports.

"Pèihuò 配货" is not a new term to me.  I knew it quite a while ago as it is used in supply chain studies with the meaning of "distribution; prepare goods for delivery according to an order"), as in the expression "pèihuò zhōngxīn 配货中心" ("distribution center").  Now, though, it has morphed into something altogether different.   if you Google "配货" today, it's all about this:

"‘Quiet luxury’ trend gets a fresh spin in China"

The stealth-wealth look has come to signify a new form of status

By Annachiara Biondi, Financial Times (8/14/23)

I'm in Georgetown for a few days to meet with colleagues and do some research.  Shortly after I left my hotel and headed down Wisconsin Avenue toward the Potomac for a morning run, I stopped dead in my tracks when I crossed over the canal and saw this:

Under the rubric, "An Odd Question", Doug Adams (the Tocharianist) asked:

Why do we always refer to Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) and Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) in Cantonese (?) phonological form rather than Mandarin?

Simple reply

Before about 1975, Cantonese was by far the most widespread and prevalent Sinitic language around the world outside of China, and Sun's Cantonese art name, Yat-sen, was so deeply ingrained and familiar in English for decades — both in speech and in writing — that it would have been very difficult to change it to Mandarin Yìxiān 逸仙 ("Liberated Transcendent").  Anyway, he had many other different names for different purposes, and some of them were as popular as Yat-sen, e.g., Chung-shan / Zhongshan, which actually derives from a Japanese pseudonym / nom de guerre (Nakayama Kikori [see below]) given to him by a Japanese friend.  Chung-shan / Zhongshan 中山 was / is so widespread in China that his hometown was renamed after it, making Zhongshan one of the few cities in China to be named after a person.  Zhongshan is also used as the name of the style of jacket that Sun Yat-sen liked to wear:  Zhongshan suit (simplified Chinese: 中山装; traditional Chinese: 中山裝; pinyin: Zhōngshān zhuāng), but in the PRC it came to be known as the Mao suit.  (I'm the proud owner of a Zhongshan suit, which I had tailor made in Taipei in 1971.)  There are dozens of other things and places called Zhongshan in China, a few of them referring to states from much earlier times that are completely unrelated to Sun Yat-sen / Zhongshan, for which see here.

Earlier this week, my brother Thomas sent me the following note:

I recently read Beautiful World, Where Are You?, the latest novel by Irish millennial author Sally Rooney. As soon as I finished the book I started finding articles about her, including the famous Sally Rooney bucket hat. If you don't yet know about it, put Sally Rooney bucket hat into Google and you'll feel like you've been shipwrecked on a deserted island since the book came out in September.

I'm not sure if SR will go down in literary history, but I will say I can't stop thinking about the book. It's one of the few books I've read lately in which the characters discuss the big ideas: politics, religion, sex, and the collapse of civilizations.

The last is of great importance because the two main female characters are unmarried single women, and they're wondering why they don't yet feel the need to settle down and start families. Will they ever?

When I first mentioned this remarkable video on Language Log nine years ago, it was buried in this post, "The Westernization of Chinese" (9/6/12), under "this phenomenal video".  I always regretted that I didn't make it more accessible (didn't know how to post YouTubes directly back then), so now here is Miss Lin in all her glory:

Sign on the front of a fashion store (shoes and handbags) in Taipei:

Paul M. sent in this photograph of the front of a fashion shop on Yongkang Street, Da’an District, Taipei City, Taiwan:

Marlon Hom took these photographs on Tuesday in San Francisco:

There's a salon / spa in Japan called "snob®".  Bill Benzon asks:  "Is 'snob' free of the negative connotations it would have here?"

From an anonymous reader:

Don Clarke has called to my attention a new bilingual, digraphic expression:  “娘man结合”.  That's "niáng man jiéhé ('woman man [the English word] combination')".

It’s a women’s fashion style that combines femininity in one part of the outfit with manliness in the other — like wearing a colored print dress with an army jacket.  Supposedly, “man” is read in the first tone.

Don remarks:

This expression must have the authorities very distressed; not only does it contain foreign words spelled in letters, but it also has the disfavored style "niáng 娘" ("mother; woman; mum; ma; a woman; young girl / woman; young lady; a form of address for an elderly married woman; effeminate [coll.]") . No less than the Xinhua News Agency recently inveighed against the sissified “娘炮”之风 (basically, the Korean boy-band look) as unmanly.

Here’s an account of the controversy (in Chinese).