Language Log

Hallelujah!  Julesy (julesytooshoes) to the rescue again!

"It’s Not Just Tones: Chinese ALSO Has Intonation" (two weeks ago)

I was in a Salt Lake City shop called Caputo's that bills itself as a Market and Deli, Purveyors of Regional Italian and Southern European Foods.  It reminds me somewhat of the great Di Bruno Bros. in Philly, but more on the "paisan"* side (sort of like the South Asian word "desi" as used in America to describe a small down-home food shop that caters to folks from the subcontinent).

[*I absolutely love that Italian word!  So much depends on the intonation with which you say it.  A scholarly disquisition on a more formal set of Italian words for the same idea is the following:

You are probably thinking of the variations of the Italian “compare” often used in various dialects in the south, particularly cumpà/compà or ‘mpare/‘mbare. From Latin “compater”, formed by “cum” (with) and “pater” (father), which originally referred to the person present with the father at a child’s baptism, the child’s godfather. Over centuries these forms became a common greeting among friends in southern dialects. Since many immigrants from Italy to the US in the early 20th century were from the south and spoke their dialects, cumpà/compà /‘mpare/‘mbare became known as Italian-American colloquialisms. 

In Italian, naturally I would say fra as in fratello (brother). It is very common to shorten the word by cutting off the end and emphasizing the vowel that remains at the end.  To say "hey bro" in Italian, I would use one of these: “Ehi fra…” “Oi fra…” “Ciao fra…” “Ei fra…”

Another slang term for “bro” or “dude” is “zio” (uncle, like Spanish “tío,” and has the same slang meaning in Spanish too)

It comes from one of my two favorite New Jersey undergraduate paisans who took my classes a few years ago.]

Hilary Hanson, "Paris Hilton's Split-Second Voice Change Leaves People Absolutely Stunned", Huffpost 6/29/2024:

Paris Hilton floored social media users this week by seamlessly shifting her vocal register midsentence as she spoke before Congress. […]

When Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) asked Hilton for her thoughts on incorporating mental health care into new legislation, Hilton responded first by complimenting the lawmaker’s outfit.

“I love your jacket. The sparkles are amazing,” Hilton said.

Tenney joked, “I had a little bling here for today,” to which Hilton replied, “Yes, I wanted to find out who made it later.”

Hilton delivered her fashion comments in a relatively high voice with lots of vocal fry. However, as she continued speaking and began to discuss mental health care, her voice shifted to a noticeably deeper register.

“But I think the most important thing is, they need access to therapy counseling, mentorship and other community-based programs,” she said, with her voice dropping on the word “but.”

A video of the testimony can be found on CSPAN (or CSPAN's X account).

Something very funny happened to me earlier today, funny enough that I would like to share it with all Language Log readers who may be desirous of something more than a cup of coffee to perk them up on a gray, midweek morning.

I entered the following Mandarin expression into Google Translate and wanted to hear it pronounced by the machine:  衷心感謝 ("heartfelt thanks").  So I clicked on the speaker button, but, by mistake, I had it set to English rather than to Chinese.  What I heard was Mandarin with an English accent!

When set to Chinese, the machine pronounces 衷心感謝 properly and precisely:  zhōngxīn gǎnxiè.  When set erroneously to English, it sounds like an American reading out romanized Mandarin, with the "correct" suprasegmental intonation and all, but, of course, paying absolutely no attention to lexical tones.  Amazingly, it's still understandable, which replicates the experiments my wife used to make by going up to strangers on American streets and asking them to read pinyin Mandarin to native speakers.  She was always triumphant when the native speakers could understand most of what the English speakers were reading.

I had the machine read 衷心感謝 in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and other languages, and they all had their own special "flavor".

People studying Sinitic and other languages featuring particles tend to deemphasize them as some sort of window dressing — ornament, elaboration — not much different from intonation or emphasis.  Witness this comment by an accomplished student of several Asian languages:

Unfortunately, these particles play only a peripheral role in Western (Latin-based) accounts of grammar and therefore miss out on the scrutiny given to other parts of speech. I know that my Vietnamese teachers dismissed them as 'meaningless'. This is a pity since they play an incredibly important role in conveying meaning. In fact, the ability to use them properly is half the battle in learning to sound like a native!

It would be an interesting exercise to do an interlinguistic comparison of these kinds of particles, but first you would need to develop a systematic analysis of the nuances they convey (affirmation, confirmation, tentativeness, contradiction, etc.).

Particles may convey essential aspectual, modal, structural, and other functions.  Here's some evidence for the importance of particles from the language acquisition experience of a bilingual child.

A PRC graduate student in Chinese literature at Indiana University sent along this clever arrangement of "Happy Birthday":

One of my favorite books for everyday living is Irma S. Rombauer's Joy of Cooking.  The author's cheerful approach to her craft in the kitchen is similar to my jubilant upāya उपाय ("expedient pedagogical means; skill-in-means; skillful means" > fāngbiàn 方便 ["convenient"]) in the classroom.

In my classes, especially Introduction to Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS/CC), we don't just read through texts with the aid of vocabularies, commentaries, annotations, and grammar notes.  We live the texts, act them out, draw them on the board, debate them, chant them, analyze them, get at their profound philosophical significance, plumb their esthetic depths.

More fun with Chinglish examples from WeChat (see part 1 here).

Yantai

(source)

The following tweet is from four years ago, but it's still relevant today.  Moreover, in reading through the replies to this tweet, I see interesting references to African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and remarkable resonances to Russian, including Vladimir Putin's "meddling".

Reminds me of an old joke.

LINGUISTICS PROFESSOR: In English, a double negative forms a positive. In Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language in which a double positive can express a negative.

STUDENT: Yeah right. https://t.co/s88gMn5u5L

— kyle alex brett (@kyalbr) August 5, 2018

I live in a duplex.  Even though the two houses are separated by a thick brick wall, I sometimes hear sounds coming from my neighbor's place.  The most conspicuous are the vocalizations made by her dog, Izzy.

Izzy is some kind of South Carolina coon hound.  We live in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, but my neighbor got her female dog from a rescue service in South Carolina.

Izzy is quirky.  She is unique.  I have never heard any other dog like her.  She doesn't just bark; she talks.  Izzy's voice projects emphasis, querulousness, inquiry, complaint, displeasure, joy, dismay, and a whole range of other emotions and intentions.  Sometimes she seems to be talking to herself (muttering and mumbling), and sometimes she seems to be communicating with her owner or other people around her.

[This is a guest post by Pamela Kyle Crossley]

Just read the blog post on this. I feel like "I feel like" is one of those passive-aggressive tics that came in in the 1980/1990s, related to that thing where people turned statements into questions by raising their pitch at the end of a sentence (which I think was originally a California-ism). That fake question stuff was passive-aggressive, and students used it addictively, particularly in discussion. "I'm asking, right? Not stating? So nobody can criticize me, right? I'm just asking a question? If I'm wrong, don't be harsh on me, right? I'm just asking?"  Very destructive. Students need to be able to make statements.

Following up on yesterday's "Dinosaur Intonation" post, here's Ryan North performing four repetitions of the contour featured in his comic:

His comment: "I fear I may have over estimated how universal it is but it's common here in Southern Ontario and I've never encountered anyone in my travels who didn't recognize it, or at least who couldn't figure it out from context and then asked me about it. I'm really curious to see the results of this survey!"

Subtitle:  Virtuous / disgusting behavior / character

There's a common Mandarin put down that is much favored by Peking shopgirls:

Qiáo nǐ nà dé xìng ("Just look at that virtuous / disgusting behavior of yours!")

Readers will notice that I did not provide characters, since in truth there is a real problem knowing which character to choose for the last syllable.  There's no question whatsoever that it is pronounced in an emphatic fourth tone, which would make one think that it should be written as 性 ("nature; character").  The problem is that underlying the unmistakable fourth tone is an actual second tone, which should in fact be written as 行 ("conduct; behavior").

What's going on here?