Language Log

On a very interesting and informative blog called "This is Xinjiang", we find the following sign over the entrance to an Ürümchi restaurant:

Yesterday, I received this message from a young person who has been corresponding with me about ancient DNA and the movements of peoples across Eurasia during the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age:

The police reaved my computer due to I reprinted a news report of US about the National Day of China yesterday. I came back home from police department just now. They said they will check my computer exhaustively. I'm afraid about my thesises on each area. It is not constitutional to do like that. All acts in violation of the Constitution and the law must be investigated. But this is in China. I doubt [VHM: he means "I suspect / fear"] that they will install a detectaphone on my computer and destroy my essays. I feel like crying but shed no tears. The only feeling is indignation for an intellectual.

Although the young man's English is generally quite good, my immediate assumption was that the third word of his message was a typing error for "removed" or that he simply misremembered some other word meaning "seize." However, considering that quirky archaisms are rampant in Chinese use of English, a phenomenon that I have often documented on Language Log, e.g. here and here, I thought that I had better give the young man the benefit of the doubt, so I trudged over to my dictionary and looked up "reave."

The Jamaican Creole phrase often spelled batty man, pronounced ['bati'man] (also botty boy ['bati'bwai]), would be more easily interpreted by other English speakers if it were spelled botty man, since the first element is botty, a familiar British hypocorism for bottom. (My point about the spelling is not a prescriptive one; I'm merely pointing out that the first syllable sounds like Standard English bot, not bat.) The literal meaning of the phrase into American English would be "butt man" or "ass man", and the free translation is "homosexual" (trading, of course, on the juvenile assumption that all gays are ever interested in is bottoms). The phrase appeared in a note near the naked corpse of John Terry, found at his home in Montego Bay last week. It saddened me to see, in a week when one country atoned just a little for its homophobic past with a genuine apology from its government, another country continuing to forge a place for itself in the annals of intolerance and moral backwardness.

Following up on last summer's discussion of Yaourter, Jonathan Rabinowitz sent a pointer to Garance Doré's post "Hello Sunshine" (9/9/2009), which begins

Londres, ville tropicale. Envoyez les ventilos. Il fait un temps splendide. SPLENDIDE !

and ends

Puis je suis montée sur mon échelle avec mes crayons de couleur, j’ai vu mon dessin prendre forme petit à petit, j’ai mis de la musique, et chanté Phoenix en yaourt pendant des heures. Et je n’ai même pas vu la nuit tomber.

Not only are the stereotypical Japanese fastidiously clean,  they are also extraordinarily polite.  They will not just tell you to be careful not to endanger yourself.  They will be sure to preface the warning with a "please" (actually the word for "please" in Japanese, KUDASAI, comes at the end of the sentence).

In today's Japan mail (from Kathryn Hemmann) come two signs, one warning, "Please Be Careful to Strong Sunlight" and the other, "Please be careful to traffic."

Half an hour before touchdown at Narita, the pilot turns on the "fasten seat belt" sign.  Because something (or some things) served during the in-flight meals on the 14-hour flight did not quite agree with your alimentary tract, you are already experiencing ominous rumblings down in your bowels.

You do your best to ignore the bouncing and jolting of the huge 747 as it descends through the various layers of stormy clouds.  Breathing deeply and slowly, you focus all of your thoughts on the first toilet you will encounter when you enter the terminal.

Finally, the plane screeches to a halt, then slowly, ever so slowly and with many pauses and turns, it taxis to the gate.  Since you know that you will have a major evacuation and it may take some time,  you  deplane along with everyone else.  But, horrors!  You are guided down lengthy hallways and escalators, then stand in line to wait for a bus that will take you to another part of the terminal to go through immigration.  After arriving at the immigration hall, you stand in line, alternating between doing a jig and exercising maximum sphincter control.  At last you pass through immigration and customs, then race to the nearest toilet you can find, open the door, dash to he only unoccupied stall you can find, enter, and come face to face with THIS.

Fail Blog has a picture of a panel with two switches labeled as follows:

天花燈                  夜燈
SMALLPOX        NIGHT LIGHT

This photograph elicited considerable discussion at Fail Blog, but — despite well over 150 comments — there was much consternation and little comprehension of why or how the confusion occurred.  The quality of the discussion at ADS-L was much higher (though far more limited), yet still left a number of questions unresolved.

Since, in the past, many Chinese friends (and even many Chinese teachers) have asked me why the Mandarin words for "smallpox" and "ceiling" share the same two characters, I've decided to make a fairly determined effort to explain how it happened.  Here's the etiology, not of smallpox, but of the failure.

In response to my question here, an authoritative answer from Alana Johns, who was asked by Ewan Dunbar, who was asked by Bill Idsardi:

iquq means stuff hanging down around the anus (dingleberries?).  S___ says when they were kids they would tease each other by calling each other "iquq" (in English we also say "you dirty bum!")

Adding -aluk would intensify the noun 'large, impressive' and then of course it is pluralized with -it:

iqu(q )+ alu(k) _it  'many large dirty bums'  →  iqualuit

BUT iqaluit (the name of the capital of Nunavut) is

iqalu(k) 'fish, normally char' + it plural → iqaluit

It started off, simply enough, as a comment by Language Log reader Lugubert, who questioned a linguafactoid reported in the Associated Press obituary for Walter Cronkite: that in Sweden and Holland, news anchors are (or were) called "Cronkiters." I investigated the claim in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, which led to an appearance on the NPR show "On the Media" over the weekend.

Earlier today, in an admirable display of media self-criticism, the Associated Press set the record straight in an article by the very same reporter who filed the Cronkite obituary. (The AP also issued a formal correction.) And from all this, I've somehow ended up as Keith Olbermann's second best person in the world today — just edged out by some entertaining crackpot whose faulty Bible translation "proves" that Obama is the Antichrist. It's been a fun ride, but I think the debunkorama is finally drawing to a close.

From Monday's NYT (Neil Amdur, "Asperger's Syndrome, on Screen and in Life", 8/3/2009):

“I wanted to tell a film about my friend,” Mr. Elliot, now 37 and an award-winning writer and director, said in a phone interview from Australia, where “Mary and Max” has grossed more than $1 million since its opening in April. “Asperger’s is a part of him; it’s the way he’s hot-wired. If I had ignored him, it would have offended him.”

Adam Elliot is Australian, and thus r-less. Neil Amdur is "a native of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.", and thus r-ful. "Strine" also has other phonetic differences from American English. So it's likely that the Australian filmmaker said "hard-wired" into the phone in Melbourne, and the American journalist heard and transcribed "hot-wired" at the other end of the line in New York.

As I reported here earlier this week, I used my most recent Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus to debunk a widely circulated myth about Walter Cronkite: that in Sweden (or Holland) news anchors are known as "Cronkiters" (or "Kronkiters"). I got the opportunity to talk about this linguistic legend on the NPR show "On the Media," airing this weekend and available online here. I also address the shaky claim that the word "anchorman" was coined for Cronkite in 1952, the topic of a recent piece I wrote for Slate. I'm starting to worry that I'm going to get a reputation as some sort of nitpicking Cronkite-hater, but I'd like to think Uncle Walter would appreciate my fact-checking of his mythos.

The photograph below, taken earlier this month in Beijing, shows some of the best English-language bloggers now writing about language and culture in China and Taiwan.

In "Xinhua English and Zhonglish," I discussed the phenomenon of a peculiar style of English that has developed in China.  Since it is not outrageously incorrect in terms of grammar or grossly unidiomatic, this type of English cannot be labeled Chinglish.  On the other hand, this particular style of English, which we may call Xinhua English or New China News English, is distinctive enough to be recognizable as an emerging dialect.

The latest instance (like the previous one) was brought to my attention by Victor Steinbok, who keeps a keen eye out for pertinent examples.  It is in today's headline from China View, an organ of Xinhuanet:  "China lodges solemn representation over Japan's permission for Rebiya Kadeer's visit."