Language Log

Jichang Lulu congratulated me on the completion of my continental diabasis.  Since I didn't know the meaning of that word and couldn't readily find a suitable definition for it online (I was familiar with the Anabasis of Xenophon [c. 430-probably 355 or 354 BC], the title of which means "expedition up from"), I simply had to ask him.  The following is what Lulu said in reply:

The use of the term is probably not classically warranted. I meant diabasis (διάβασις, ‘crossing, traversal, passage…’, literally ‘going through’) as a pun on Xenophon's Anabasis (the ‘march up’, i.e., inland, although most of the book is about the march back down to the coast). 

Whenever I drive through the near northwest suburbs of Philadelphia, the names of the towns and streets there make me feel as though I've been transported to Wales:  Bryn Mawr, Bala Cynwyd, Narberth, Uwchlan, Llanalew Road, Llewelyn Road, Cymry Drive, Llanelly Lane, Derwydd Lane….  By chance, through some sort of elective affinity, today I happened upon the following article about that very subject:

"Welcome to Wrexham, Philadelphia and the Welsh language", Chris Wood, BBC (11/12/23)

Opinion:  "These gaming terms are transforming slang. Do you know them? Even those not involved in gaming culture are becoming familiar with the new vocabulary." Washington Post, by Adam Aleksic (June 20, 2024)

…Dozens of video game terms have sneaked into everyday conversation over the past several years, particularly among younger people. For instance, it’s common to hear “speedrun” for completing a task quickly, “sidequest” to tell your friends about an unexpected adventure or “spawn” when you’ve made a sudden appearance. 

All of these come from gaming culture, where they’re used to describe virtual actions — yet they’ve transformed into offline slang. 

Since at least the early 2000s, millennials have adopted gaming words such as “noob” (short for “newbie”), “OP” (short for “overpowered”) and “gg” (short for “good game”) in real life. These terms reached such ubiquity online that they made intuitive sense when extended to analogous in-person interactions.

Japanese words of the year are always exciting and surprising, but this year's takes the cake.

are あれ

pronunciation

• • IPA: [a̠ɾe̞]

distal demonstrative, something far off removed from both speaker and listener: that, yon

1. 1. (deictically) that one over there (far from the speaker and the addressee)

      あれはなんですか？

      Are wa nan desu ka?

      What is that?

   2. (anaphorically) that one we both know (both the speaker and the addressee know)

      これはあれでしょ？○○。

      Kore wa are desho?○○.

      This is that one thing, isn't it? You know, X.

Usage note

• • Indicates something far off, removed from both speaker and addressee. Contrast with それ (sore), indicating something removed from the speaker but closer to the addressee.

(Wiktionary)

The Chinese Football Association used dǎngguó 党国 ("party state" — nettlesome term to be explained fully below) in a powerpoint on its plans for '24. Awkward political illiteracy! 

Here's a screenshot.

Competition among various AI services will spur them to further heights.

ChatGPT, Bing, Bard and DeepL: Which one offers the best Japanese-to-English translation?

by Karin Kaneko, Japan Times (7/18/23)

Kaneko, working with her editors at Japan Times, devised an ingenious test for comparing the quality of several translation tools in different categories of writing.  Since this experiment is so innately interesting and inherently revelatory, I will provide extensive quotations, adding romanization of the Japanese passages from GT (not an easy task for me!).  To be fair to GT, and simply out of curiosity to see how it compares with the newer type of AI translation services, I will also invite GT to translate all three of the chosen passages.  N.B.:  All three of the GT English translations have been added by me.

[This is a guest post by S. Robert Ramsey]

Your Language Log coverage of the North Korean news item was chilling, but pretty much what we've come to expect of that outrageous regime. If ever there was a clearer contrast between the two worlds in conflict, I've never heard of it. South Korea is now such a star on the world stage and rising so fast, it must be a bitter pill for the regime in Pyongyang to swallow! 

Just a couple of things that occurred to me, though: (1) What authorities in Pyongyang do not recognize, or concede, is that though they point to the Pyongyang dialect as the basis of their standard, that very standard itself is based upon the earlier, traditional dialect of Seoul that represented the cultural and linguistic capital of the Joseon Period (–or "Choson" period, as DPRK spelling of the word would have it). 

And (2): While on the subject of spellings, it might be worthwhile to point out that the romanization the DPRK uses is based upon the McCune-Reischauer system still used by many Western academics. But the North Korean version is actually more pragmatic than Western academic usage in that the North Koreans eliminate the annoying diacritics of McR that have long exasperated so many Western romanizers–and which Seoul academics used as one of the justifications for the new Revised system they introduced in 2000–and which they so dogmatically insist on now.  

But almost everybody does it.  You can barely avoid it.  Especially if you're an athlete.

"North Korea sentences 20 young athletes for ‘speaking like South Koreans’"

Skaters and skiers were caught on video using banned words while playing a game during training.

Jieun Kim, RFA (4/13/23)

The first two paragraphs of the article:

About 20 aspiring North Korean winter athletes were abruptly sentenced to three to five years of hard labor in prison camps after they were found to have used South Korean vocabulary and slang while playing a word game, sources in the country say.

It’s the latest example of authorities imposing draconian punishments to try to stamp out use of the “puppet language” and “capitalist” influences in daily life – despite the flood of illegal South Korean dramas and songs that many North Koreans secretly watch after obtaining them on thumb drives smuggled into the country.

I played college basketball for Dartmouth for four years.  That means I had ample opportunity to play in Penn's hallowed Palestra.  All of the Ivy League schools had unique, distinctive gymnasia, and they remain sharply etched in my mind.  But the Palestra was something else altogether, as though it belonged in a different league, a different world.  Entering the vaulted space was intimidating enough by itself, but the fact that the bleachers (in)famously came right down to the edge of the floor, with no separation of the fans from the game, made it all the more nerve-wracking to play there, not to mention that the Penn teams were always extremely well coached and fiercely determined.

Since I do not know of any other sports arena in America that is called by such a classical, Greek sounding name, nor of any other that has such a distinguished history, it would be worth our while to inquire how it became so.

"Hirokazu, meet Hirokazu: 178 Hirokazu Tanakas set record for gathering of people with same name", Kyodo (10/29/22):

"Iga Swiatek Teaches Everyone How To Say (Pronounce) Her Name Properly" 

In the previous post ("Oil: a partial paradigm" [6/19/22)]), we have been discussing the origins and ramifications of the derivation of the word "oil" from the ancient Greek word for olive.  The last comment (before I wrote this post), by Coby, states:  "Spanish also has the word óleo, which can mean either oil paint or the oil used in church rituals."  Reading Coby's reference to óleo immediately sparked fond childhood memories of the Mair family ritual of mixing margarine.

We were a large and not well off family, so we seldom could afford real butter.  Consequently, we used oleomargarine to spread on our bread rather than butter.  We referred to it as "oleo" instead of "margarine", since the latter seemed too fancy-fussy in our household, and "oleomargarine" would have taken too much time to pronounce and would have been considered archly pedantic among us rural Ohio folk.

[This is a guest post by Bob Ramsey]

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