Language Log

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.

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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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