Language Log

When I first encountered the Chinese expression "pua" several years ago, I had no idea what it meant nor how to pronounce it, so I asked my students.  I wrote it on the board and pronounced it according to English phonology.  They laughed and told me they thought I was saying "pǔwa 普哇", whereas they pronounce it as an English letter acronym:  P-U-A.

You can hear it for yourself here.

@phuongviviyam

might start using PUA in English too #greenscreen #chinese #chineselanguage #chineselanguagelearning #gaslight #gaslighting

♬ original sound – viviyam

It's a subject that won't go away.

When I was in high school, I concocted an embarrassingly sophomoric signature:

I wrote that iteration of my youthful signature on the front flyleaf of my beloved Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1960), which, from that year till today has been one of my most precious possessions.

When I went away to college in 1961 and ever since, I adopted a signature that was the exact antithesis of that early one:  

It was / is mechanical and measured, with no flourishes whatsoever.

Most people I know have one of three basic types of signatures:

1. extravagant, fast, illegible — these are usually "important" people who have to sign their signature scores of times each week; doctors; lawyers; executives; entertainers….

2. beautiful, well-composed, flowing, legible — my sisters, most women

3. crotched, cramped, crooked, angular, unesthetic, slow — my brothers and me, engineers, scientists, who write with what I call "chicken scratches"

[This is a guest post by Christopher Paris (website).]

I just wanted to thank you for your 2009 essay on the misinterpretation of “wēijī” as meaning both opportunity and crisis.

This controversy takes on dramatic new importance as the misinterpretation has been used to justify the invention of a school of thought that “risk is positive.” When challenged with English language dictionaries dating back to the 1700s, showing risk as typically meaning a potential threat or harm, the proponents of “positive risk” run to the wēijī trope. They say, “the Chinese came up with this 3000 years ago, so English dictionaries don’t matter.”

One of my favorite expressions of ineffability in Chinese is yǒuyuán 有緣, which is what two people feel when they are drawn together by some inexplicable, indisputable attraction.  Considerations of beauty and practicality are not what matter.  They simply are fated / predestined to be together.  They have an undeniable affinity for each other.

I first gained a serious appreciation for the idea of affinity in college when I read Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), the third novel of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).  The concept was taken up in chemistry (Robert Boyle [1627-1691] — check out his hair!), then sociology (Max Weber [1864-1920]), then in psychology to describe the magnetism between individuals, and in dozens of other fields (commerce, finance, and law; religion and belief; science and technology; business; music; literature; history; mathematics; language studies; etc.).  Needless to say, "affinity" is a powerful, productive concept, just as it is an actual force in relations between entities in the microcosm and macrocosm.

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.

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002656.

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)

Shared by Tuomas in Shaanxi, China:

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

(source)

My attention was drawn (see below) to this subject by the following editorial in today's The Yomiuri Shimbun:

Japanese Language Survey:

As Words Constantly Evolve, Let’s Share Them Across Generations

(9/30/23)

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.

This is a follow-up post to "How to say 'We don't have any pickled pigs' feet'" (9/23/22).

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".