Japan Subculture Research Center. A guide to the Japanese underworld, Japanese pop-culture, yakuza and everything dark under the sun. Telepathy (以心伝心) and Other Coincidences (奇遇) By jakeadelstein (Jul 10, 2024)
A generous helping of creepiness from Japan. Here goes:
I was writing to a former intern at Japan Subculture Research Center, Fresca, and asked her to send me her thesis to read—just as she mailed me. I think I was two seconds ahead of her. It was a remarkable coincidence or maybe telepathy. Which got me interested in the many words for the complementary subjects in Japanese. So for your entertainment—here you are.
Lately I've been seeing greater use of this kind of sentence structure: "He is an awesome hero — not". And (mis)negation has always been a favorite topic for discussion on Language Log. Consequently, I'm calling to your attention two recent publications on "not".
"'Not' in the Brain and Behavior." Cas W. Coopmans, Anna Mai, Andrea E. Martin, PLOS Biology 22, no. 5 (May 31, 2024): e3002656.
Negation is key for cognition but has no physical basis, raising questions about its neural origins. A new study in PLOS Biology on the negation of scalar adjectives shows that negation acts in part by altering the response to the adjective it negates.
Language fundamentally abstracts from what is observable in the environment, and it does so often in ways that are difficult to see without careful analysis. Consider a child annoying their sibling by holding their finger very close to the sibling’s arm. If asked what they were doing, the child would likely say, “I’m not touching them.” Here, the distinction between the physical environment and the abstraction of negation is thrown into relief. Although “not touching” is consistent with the situation, “not touching” is not literally what one observes because an absence is definitionally something that is not there. The sibling’s annoyance speaks to the actual situation: A finger is very close to their arm. This kind of scenario illustrates how natural language negation is truly a product of the human brain, abstracting away from physical conditions in the world.
Lord knows we've encountered many bizarre translations and explanations of the much maligned Mandarin term, weiji (see "Selected readings") below, but this is one of the weirdest crosslingual definitions that has ever come to my attention:
Suicide is usually an attempt to deal with a crisis. The Chinese character for "crisis" translates into "dangerous opportunity." Suicide is a permanent solution, and eliminates other options. So if you're hurting so much that you are willing to pass the pain on to those who care, perhaps you could use this dangerous opportunity to try some other options first.
(Source: Hannah Zeavin, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021), ch. 5, p. 178)
As Language Log readers are undoubtedly aware, I am prey to mondegreens, earworms, and other imaginary auditory oddities. Lately, the last half year or so, I've been occasionally subject to what, faute de mieux, I've taken to calling "autoarticulation", modeled after "autosuggestion".
It doesn't last very long, doesn't repeat on an endless loop, and is not very annoying, though it is a bit creepy.
Here's what happens. A phrase — usually between about three and eight words — pops into my mind. It comes out of nowhere. It is completely irrelevant to anything that comes before or after it. The phrase is articulated clearly in standard, neutral American English, without any accent. I don't know if anyone else experiences this kind of phenomenon, but in my case, the voice is usually male, although once in a while it may be female.
If you can't make up your mind what to do about something, then in French you would say "je suis partagé": I'm torn or divided over it. You can't decide what to do about it. You can't make up your mind whether to be pleased or angry with something. But the verb "partager" means "to share". So how do we get from "share" to "torn"?
Etymology tells us that partager is from partage + -er, i.e., Displaced partir in the sense of "to share, to divide", e.g., Nous allons partager les bénéfices ― We are going to share the benefits
I'm not the first person to use that word, but I probably mean it in a distinctive way. What I'm talking about is not the usual sort of earworm / öhrwurm [recte ohrwurm] that gets stuck in your brain and you just can't make it go away. That's the usual kind, and I get it fairly often, maybe once a week or so. The attack I had this morning was more diabolical.
It seemed that every song I heard on the radio immediately became an earworm — including music without words. After one song was embedded in my consciousness, the next one I heard would also intrude, until they all became a jumble.
If you had been driving along Route 30 in Valparaiso, Indiana on July 4, Independence Day this past summer, you might have caught sight of this itinerant jogger outside the Walmart there:
That's the name of a treasured Language Log reader and contributor (see under "Selected Readings"). When I asked him how to write that in Sinoglyphs, he told me that it is this:
飢腸轆轆 / simpl. 饥肠辘辘
Wanting to get the tones, I typed "jichanglulu" into Google Translate (GT), but forgot to click the space bar to make the conversion to characters with Hanyu Pinyin transcription complete with tones. When I pressed the speaker button to hear how that sounded, what came out was something like Mandarin with an English accent, but still perfectly intelligible: "jichanglulu". It resembled the Mandarin produced by the strangers on the street who read off the Pinyin texts handed to them by my wife, Li-ching Chang. She was always delighted when she heard them pronouncing Mandarin without ever having studied it. "Jichanglulu" — see, you can say it too!
Adding the tones, we get jīcháng lùlù. What does this somewhat odd assortment of sounds signify?
GT says "hungry", more literally, "hungry intestines are rumbling".
When I was a little boy, among the gifts from my parents that I treasured most were science kits that allowed me to construct my own instrumentation and use it for various experiments and observations, e.g., microscopes, radios and other electronic circuitry, chemistry sets, ingenious language games, and so on. (This was in the late 40s and 50s in rural Stark County, northeast Ohio, mind you, when I was between the ages of about 5 and 15.) But my favorite of all was a box full of materials for computer construction. It consisted of a peg board, switches, wires, screws, small nuts and bolts, metal bands and clips, batteries, little light bulbs, etc. Please remember that this was long before personal computers were invented.
To make sense of the story that follows, one must understand that the Korean word "agassi 아가씨" used to refer to a young lady from the upper class, but now in North Korea means “slave of feudal society” and has a very negative connotation there.
"Hidden meaning of Korean term 'agassi' leads to murder", by Choi Jae-hee, The Korea Herald (5/3/22)
Because the linguistic psychology that lies behind the tragic crime recounted in this article is intricate and subtle, it is necessary to recount it at some length:
An error in a mobile translation application recently prompted a 35-year-old Chinese man in Jeongeup, North Jeolla Province, to murder a Korean resident.
In this age of typing on computers and other digital devices, when we daily input thousands upon thousands of words, we are often amazed at the number and types of mistakes we make. Many of them are simple and straightforward, as when our fingers stumblingly hit the wrong keys by sheer accident. People who type on phones warn their correspondents about the likelihood that their messages are prone to contain such errors because they include some such warning at the bottom:
Please forgive spelling / grammatical errors; typed on glass // sent from my phone.
