Language Log

• "Context Shift, Word Drift: The Meaning Transference of the Word Prèet in Thai Society." Kumhaeng, Korrakot et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (July 8, 2025): 1050. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05454-y.

This research investigates the semantic change and conceptual metaphor of the Thai word prèet (/เปรต/), which originates from the Pali-Sanskrit term meaning “departed.” The primary objective is to explore how the term’s meaning has shifted in contemporary Thai society, where it is now used pejoratively to criticize behaviors such as excessive greed, gluttony, immorality, and social deviance. Data for this study are drawn from both historical texts, particularly the Traibhumi Phra Ruang (a prominent Thai Buddhist text from the 14th-century Sukhothai period), and modern Thai linguistic usage. The analysis employs conceptual metaphor theory, focusing on metaphors like SOCIAL DEVIANCE IS MONSTROSITY, MORAL FAILURE IS DEGRADATION, GREED IS HUNGER, and SPIRITUAL LIMINALITY IS MONSTROSITY. to understand how these shifts reflect changing cultural and societal values. Additionally, Impoliteness Theory is applied to examine how prèet functions as a linguistic tool for social critique. Findings show that the semantic evolution of prèet reveals an intricate relationship between language, culture, and metaphor, as it transitions from a religious concept to a vehicle for social commentary. The implications of this study highlight the dynamic nature of language in reflecting societal shifts.

In almost perfect Taiwan Mandarin, you can see and hear Song Meina deliver her graduation speech here.  A transcription of her speech may be found in this newspaper article.  The article has four pages, and her speech begins at the bottom of the first page.  It is sprinkled with a small amount of Korean and a bit of Taiwanese, but it is otherwise fluent, idiomatic Taiwan Mandarin.

Particularly noticeable was that the transcription wrote the Mandarin phonetic symbols bo po mo fo ㄅ、ㄆ、ㄇ、ㄈ as the beginning of her learning Mandarin at an overseas elementary school in Korea.  I was also struck by the use of the phonetic symbol "e ㄟ" several times, once as an exclamation and the other times as the Taiwanese grammatical particle indicating possession pronounced ê [e].

The gap between spoken and written Sinitic is enormous.  In my estimation, it is greater than for any other language I know.  The following are some notes by Ľuboš Gajdoš about why this is so.

"The Discrepancy Between Spoken and Written Chinese — Methodological Notes on Linguistics", Comenius University in Bratislava, Department of East Asian Studies

The issue of choosing language data on which synchronous linguistic research is being done appears in many ways not only to be relevant to the goal of the research, but also to the validity of the research results. The problem which particularly concerns us here is the discrepancy between speech on the one hand and written language on the other. In this context, we have often encountered in the past a situation where the result of the research conducted on a variety of the Chinese language has been generalized to the entire synchronous state of the language, i.e. to all other varieties of the language, while ignoring the mentioned discrepancy between the spoken and written forms. The discrepancy between the spoken and written forms is likely to be present in any natural language with a written tradition, but the degree of difference between languages is uneven:  e.g. compared to the Slovak language, it may be stated that the situation in Chinese is in this respect extraordinary. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the quantitative (qualitative) research on discrepancies between different varieties of the language has not yet aroused the attention of Chinese linguistics to such an extent as would have been adequate for the unique situation of this natural language.

Shocking (to me) news:

"Japan’s English Proficiency Continues to Drop Among Non-English-Speaking Countries"

nippon.com (Dec 4, 2023)

A survey found that Japan currently ranks eighty-seventh out of 113 non-English-speaking countries and regions for English language abilities. This is a fall of seven places from last year and relatively low among Asian countries.

I'm dubious that English proficiency would be so low in Japan, which overall has such a high level of education and which has such a large number of loanwords from English.  Is this a case of lies, damned lies and [polling-generated] statistics"?

China has long had a love-hate relationship with the English language.  Since the late 19th century up till the mid-20th century, things were mostly peachy-creamy.  Then China fell under the tutelage of the Soviet Union and Russian linguistic influence, and English was largely shunned.  After the Sino-American love-fest initiated by Richard Nixon and Deng Xiaoping, English flourished once again as long as Deng was around and his successor Jiang Zemin, who actually knew some English, maintained a benign policy toward the language of Shakespeare.  But as increasingly hardline communist leaders rose to power, English came under attack until now, with the puritanical Marxist-Maoist Xi Jinping assuming full-blown dictatorial status, English is under the gun.

"Hurting the feelings of the Chinese people", part 572

From AntC:

Provocative Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/catielila/status/1442747744645386241?s=19

From a fluent speaker of Mandarin:

This past weekend, I watched the latest film from Marvel Studios: "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" (an Asian superhero movie). I was rather surprised to hear about 30% of all lines spoken in Pǔtōnghuà 普通话 (Mandarin), especially when given that some scenes were set in Macau and characters from ancient Chinese villages. Although I could not find an article or commentary on this specific topic I was interested in, I did find this Reddit post—the author discusses how strange and peculiar the creators' decision to use Mandarin in particular is in the context of the movie. 

[The following is a guest post by Georgi Mladenov]

I am another student who seems to have hit a brick wall in learning Mandarin, and I would like to ask you for advice. I have thoroughly read most of your forum posts and I totally share your opinions on language learning, especially as expressed in this post.

Your post captures my situation in its entirety. "The first year of learning Mandarin was pure torture in the classroom" – it feels as if I had written that! In short, I have been studying Chinese in Taiwan for more than a year. I am fluent in English, German, Russian and Bulgarian, I have a B2 level in Polish, Spanish and Serbian, my French is quite good, my Latin is quite decent, and I also know some Hungarian.

However, my disappointment with Chinese teaching methods has been growing daily. No matter what language I learned, the main focus of any beginner's course has always been on pronunciation and mastering any peculiar "tricky" sounds. Not here, though. I personally know quite a few people who have passed TOCFL Level 3 and 4 (reading and listening) and still have no tones! Or students who still say "zh" instead of "z", or "s" instead of "sh", not to mention that many students do not differentiate between "zh" and "j", "sh" and "x", "ch" and "q". And most teachers still try to persuade us how bad Pinyin is.

The focus of this post is the expression lào yīngwén, where the yīngwén part is written 英文 in characters and means "English".  The lào part is much more complicated, as is typical when it comes to writing Taiwanese morphemes with Chinese characters.  The Taiwanese verb "làu" means to master something.  When used with reference to a language, it signifies speaking fluently.  In current discourse, it often indicates that one speaks English in an ostentatious manner to show off.  For example, if a Mandarin speaker chooses to speak English on an occasion where everyone in the audience also also speaks Mandarin, then this person's behavior may be considered lào yīngwén. It carries a slight negative tone.

There is no standard Sinographic form for this Taiwanese morpheme.  In written Taiwan Mandarin, it may be written with the following characters:  lào 烙, liào 撂, luò 落.  Since these three characters respectively mean "burn; bake; sear", "put down; leave", and "fall; descend", they are obviously being used to approximate the sound of the Taiwanese verb and have nothing to do with its meaning.  The same is true of the traditional Sinographic representation of this Taiwanese morpheme, viz., lǎo 老 ("old").

The speaker of the Czech senate addresses Taiwan's parliament alluding to JFK's ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ — and finishes by saying "Wǒ shì Táiwān rén 我是台湾人" ("I am Taiwanese") in (an attempt at) Mandarin.

The video is in Czech but it's easy to spot where this happens — right before the ovation — at 1:12.

The video is embedded here: 

"Vystrčil na Tchaj-wanu připomněl slavná slova Kennedyho. Dočkal se potlesku ve stoje", Zahraničí

You may have to watch through several ads in Czech.  It's fun to listen to them.

"Is your English better than that of this Qing dynasty ‘princess’?" (YouTube 1:01)

(Source)