Language Log

This is a language war that has been going on for years, and there will never be an end to it, so long as there is a communist North Korea and a democratic South Korea.  It is as deadly as a shooting war, because people die for using the language of the enemy.  I'm not talking about the content of their speech, but rather its very nature.

North Koreans face execution for using South Korean idioms

The Times (6/30/23)

How does this work out in practice?

North Koreans who use the “obsequious” accent and expressions of South Korea face execution under a harsh new law aimed at eliminating South Korea's growing influence on the language used by its communist neighbour.

Topolects matter:

Taiwanese buys anti-CCP book, gets scam call from Chinese propagandist:

Caller posing as Eslite Bookstore’s ‘marketing department’ tells consumer book content inappropriate

By Stephanie Chiang, Taiwan News, Staff Reporter (5/14/23)

Before delving into the substance of this report, I should mention that Eslite is a huge, and hugely influential, bookstore in Taiwan.

AntC, who called this article to my attention, remarks:

A 'scammer' (not sure that's the right term here) called someone who'd bought a book at Eslite book store, Taipei. Then proceeded with a fake 'customer survey' about the purchase. The customer's facebook post (in Chinese) relating the interaction is here.

The linguistic interest: "despite the caller’s Taiwanese-like accent, it became apparent to her that she was not truly a Taiwanese native."

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".

No, I wasn't reading "a long list of ex-lovers".  I was sitting there writing a Language Log post about DeepL (probably next up after this one).  Across from me was a man with a big red beard.  I was writing a LL post on my beloved little, old MacBook Air and he was writing a long list of components, parts, and numbers, mixed in with some sketched diagrams on a white legal pad.

He seemed to be diligent, and he looked like a constructor, a builder of houses.  Finally, curiosity got the best of me, so I walked over and asked him, "What is that you're writing?" 

"I'm working on a kwow", he replied.

"A what?" I asked.

"A kwow," he repeated.

I thought maybe he was saying "crow", but doing something funny with the "r".  So I asked him to write it down on a piece of paper.

Krišjānis Kariņš has been in the news a lot recently, but this was special.

Naomi O'Leary, "The curious case of the Latvian prime minister’s Irish accent", The Irish Times 12/21/2022:

Subhead: Brogues to be found in unexpected places as Hiberno-English on the rise since the departure of Britain from the EU

On his entry to Prague Castle to join a summit of European Union leaders, Latvian prime minister Krisjanis Karins was accosted by the bank of waiting journalists.

“What do you think about the price cap?” one reporter asked him, looking for a comment on the issue of the day.

In an unmistakably Irish accent, Karins replied: “A price cap on gas, if that could be achieved, would be grand.”

I shared a clip of the incident on social media and it quickly took off. “If you close your eyes, he could be a school principal in Tipperary,” one user marvelled.

Here's the clip that Ms.O'Leary shared:

This one is a bit long (6:15), but the comedian is so fantastic that I couldn't stop watching until the very end, which is like a linguistic analog to the conclusion of a fireworks show.  With good subtitles in English and Mandarin.

Photograph of a slide shown in a classroom in China:

Chris Button writes:

I’ve been working on adding Japanese readings to my dictionary*. I decided to add pitch accents on the kun readings, and started getting interested in the history there. I came across some amazing work by Bob Ramsey—notably this one**.

From "Imitating accents", in Penn Today newsletter (4/6/22):

Research from linguistics postdoctoral fellow Lacey Wade of the School of Arts & Sciences found that people imitate accent features they expect to hear, even without hearing them explicitly. The work, the first time such expectation-driven convergence has been shown in a controlled experiment, reveals just how much the subconscious factors into the way people speak.

People imitate accent features they expect to hear, even without hearing them

Research from postdoc Lacey Wade confirmed this idea, what she calls expectation-driven convergence, in a controlled experiment for the first time. The work reveals just how much the subconscious factors into the way people speak.

———–

Zeyao Wu sent me this photograph that she found online:

Something seemed amiss from the very first words of this video:

A week ago, Julie Lee made this interesting comment on Language Log:

…when I studied Yuan dynasty drama and had books from the library, my husband (a physicist) picked them up to read and was amazed at the 13th century dialogue. "That's just the way we spoke at home in Shandong", he exclaimed. He grew up in Tengxian County*, Shandong, and went to school in Qingdao. I couldn't understand his Shandong speech. I too was amazed that Chinese colloquial speech (in Shandong) lasted from the 13th century till the 20th century — 700 years. The dialogue in Yuan drama was popping with lively expressions.

[*Likely the birthplace of the populist, egalitarian, pragmatic, empirical, scientific minded philosopher, Mo Zi / Micius (ca. 470-391 BC.)]

The focus of this post is the nature and modus operandi of the piànzi 騙子 ("swindler; scammer").

According to this article in Chinese, scammers do not speak good Mandarin because having an "accent" enables them to carry out target screening.  Such an argument may seem like a bit of a stretch, but let's see how this supposedly works out through the eyes of two Mandarin speaking PRC citizens who have been the intended victims of the schemes of such piànzi 騙子, who pose as representing banks and other financial institutions, public security bureaus, and so forth.

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