Language Log

Over at Languagehat's place, there's been a lively discussion of Sara Graça da Silva & Jamshid J. Tehrani, "Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales", Royal Society Open Science 1/20/2016. I'm not going to summarize that discussion, so go read "Ancient Indo-European Folktales", Languagehat 1/21/2016.

In "Kongish" (8/6/15), we looked at the phenomenon of extensive mixing of English and Cantonese by young people in Hong Kong.  We also became acquainted with the Kongish Daily, a Facebook page written in and about Kongish.  Many Language Log readers thought it was a satire or parody and that it was an ephemeral fad that would swiftly fade away. But here we are, half a year later, and the movement is still going strong, and even, it would seem, gaining momentum.

Nicola Esposito sent in the following observations and questions:

What is the etymology of ukiyo 浮世, the "floating world" known in the West mostly thanks to its depictions by artists such as Hiroshige, Hokusai and others?

While perusing the website of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, I discovered that the origins of ukiyo lie in a homophone of 浮世 denoting the "transient world" of Buddhist tradition.  The page does not offer any other detail, but from what I gather that homophone should be ukiyo 憂世, whose literal meaning should be closer to something like "unhappy world".  Unfortunately my knowledge of Japanese is too shallow to be able to to tackle Japanese sources, and I was wondering if you could offer insight on this etymology and in particular how this substitution happened, if it indeed happened. Was it some kind of pun?

[This is a guest post by Walt Wolfram, with Caroline Myrick, Jon Forrest, and Michael J. Fox.]

Martin Luther King Jr’s speeches are without peer in their public recognition and rhetorical significance. King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech is rated as the number one speech of the twentieth century and several other speeches are ranked within the top 100. Given King’s prominence as a speaker and his leadership role in the Civil Rights Movement, it’s ironic that his sociolinguistic legacy has been relatively unexamined and ignored. There are no analyses of how he systematically manipulated regional, ethnic, and stylistic language features in different situations other than a couple of limited studies of his pitch and intonation, including a Language Log post in 2007 ("Martin Luther King's rhetorical phonetics").

In a forthcoming paper ("The Sociolinguistic Significance of Martin Luther King Jr."), we analyze how King’s speech indexes his regional, social, and ethnic identity in speaking to different audiences in different situations. Our results are worth considering in terms of their broader implications for language and social inequality.

Sign at the Hakka Cultural Museum in Kaohsiung, Taiwan:

In "Correlated lexicometrical decay", I commented on some unexpectedly strong correlations over time of the ratios of word and phrase frequencies in the Google Books English 1gram dataset:

I'm sure that these patterns mean something. But it seems a little weird that OF as a proportion of all prepositions should correlate r=0.953 with the proportion of instances of OF immediately followed by THE, and  it seems weirder that OF as a proportion of all prepositions should correlate r=0.913 with the proportion of adjective-noun sequences immediately preceded by THE.

So let's hope that what these patterns mean is that the secular decay of THE has somehow seeped into some but not all of the other counts, or that some other hidden cause is governing all of the correlated decays. The alternative hypothesis is that there's a problem with the way the underlying data was collected and processed, which would be annoying.

And in a comment on a comment, I noted that the corresponding data from the Corpus of Historical American English, which is a balanced corpus collected from sources largely or entirely distinct from the Google Books dataset, shows similar unexpected correlations.

So today I'd like to point out that much simpler data — frequencies of  a few of the commonest words — shows some equally strong correlations over time in these same datasets.

From December 13-17, 2015, I participated in an international workshop at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) on the Edmond J. Safra campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  The title of the workshop was "A Lasting Vision: Dandin’s Mirror in the World of Asian Letters".  Here's the workshop website.

The workshop was about Sanskrit poetics, especially as detailed in the Kāvyādarśa (simplified transliteration:  Kavyadarsha; Mirror of Poetry) of Daṇḍin (circa AD 7th c.), the earliest surviving systematic treatment of poetics in Sanskrit.

Over at China Economic Review, Hudson Lockett has written an interesting piece worthy of the celebrated British sleuth:

"The game is afoot! Why Chinese Sherlock fans are as confused as everyone else" (1/3/16)

It's all about how the Chinese term — mǎtí nèifān zú 马蹄内翻足 — for a congenital deformity referred to in English as "clubfoot" (talipes equinovarus [CTEV]) figures in the "slaveringly awaited"

New Year’s Day special episode of the series starring Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch.

This one's been on my to-blog list for a while. "The Ascent: Political Destiny And The Makings of a First Couple," a "sponsored content" piece for Netflix's series House of Cards prepared by The Atlantic, won both the Judge's Selection and the People's Choice awards for "Best Sponsored Content Editorial" at the Native Creatives:

There's a folk belief that domestic animals gain the power of human speech on Christmas Eve — and often have things to say that their human owners would just as soon not hear. I discussed some folkloric and fictional examples in a couple of earlier Christmas-eve posts: "Talking animals: miracle or curse?" (12/24/2004)and "Watch out for those talking animals tonight" (12/24/2013).

For most of us, talking animals are kind of cute, evoking memories of stories like Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester (1903). So I was not expecting a web search for "talking animals" to yield the following Product Warnings on a novel by D. Reneé [sic] Bagby, Adrienne:

This title contains adult language, talking animals, violence, and scenes of near rape.

It's become our tradition to list the Posts of Christmas Past:

2003 "'Twas the night before Christmas", "Same-sex Mrs. Santa: 'The semantics are confusing'"
2004: "Talking animals: miracle or curse?", "A boxing day election — or not?"
2005: "Christmas trees and holiday trees";
2006: "Merry … umm … Christmas, Will!", "Like, a Christmas gift card", "Happy tensing and coal in sex";
2007: "One Christmas too long", "Christmas and 'politically correct(ed)ness'", "'Tis the season", "The unkindness of strangers", "Victims and etymology", "Lexical repulsion", "Insert flap 'A' and throw away";
2008: "Seven fishes", "Happy Christmas";
2009: "No, Virginia";
2010: "Mele Kalikimaka";
2011: "Seasonal linguistic pun", "Calling Christmas Christmas";
2013: "Watch out for those talking animals tonight", "Reindeer talk";
2014: "Magi, myrrh, and mummies"

Christiaan H Vinkers et al., "Use of positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014: retrospective analysis", BMJ 2015:

Design Retrospective analysis of all scientific abstracts in PubMed between 1974 and 2014.  

Methods The yearly frequencies of positive, negative, and neutral words (25 preselected words in each category), plus 100 randomly selected words were normalised for the total number of abstracts. […]

Results The absolute frequency of positive words increased from 2.0% (1974-80) to 17.5% (2014), a relative increase of 880% over four decades.

Bruce Balden was curious as to why the Chinese terms for "fire department" (xiāofáng duì 消防队) and "firefighting" (xiāofáng 消防) do not have the word for "fire" (huǒ 火) in them.  I had thought about that long ago, but never made an attempt to determine why it is so.  Now that Bruce has brought up this issue directly, I am curious how true it is for other languages of the world as well.

For East Asia, since Japan also uses the same expression (shōbō 消 防), it became a question of determining whether the modern terminology for firefighting developed first in China or in Japan.