Language Log

Ever since Michael Jackson's unexpected death yesterday, his music has been omnipresent. The iTunes sales charts are overwhelmed by Michael Jackson songs: as of this afternoon, New York Magazine's Vulture blog reports, Jackson appears on 41 songs in the iTunes Top 100 singles chart. One of the top songs is "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," the infectious opening song from the 1982 album Thriller. The lyrics can be a bit befuddling ("You're a vegetable, you're a vegetable…"), but there's no denying the song's catchiness, especially the chant at the end: "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa." The story behind these seemingly nonsensical syllables is a fascinating one, originating in the Cameroonian language Duala.

According to recent reports out of Iran, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has resigned as chairman of an entity whose full name is given in English as the "Expediency Discernment Council of the System", or the "Expediency Council" for short.

The Wikipedia entry says that the organization "was originally set up to resolve differences or conflicts between the Majlis and the Council of Guardians, but 'its true power lies more in its advisory role to the Supreme Leader.'" But this post is not about the nature of the organization or the meaning of Rafsanjani's reported resignation, but rather about the English name, which I found bizarre.

This post combines three LL themes into one peculiar anecdote — with added beer. We've often analyzed cases where a phrase seems to come out with one negation too many or too few; we've tried to follow the FCC's reasoning about the "inherent sexual connotations" of the "F-word"; and we've devoted many posts to untangling confused translations.  Today's trifecta winner comes courtesy of two edgy young Scottish brewers, the European Entrepreneur of the Year competition, and former Roumanian president Emil Constantinescu.

Gus Tate lives in Guangzhou (Canton) where he teaches "conversational English and Time Travel to a group of high school students wearing white polo shirts and blue track pants." For fun, he runs a blog called Cantonstinople. Currently there is displayed on that site the following photograph of a sign for a "4D" movie about dinosaurs (Gus explains that the extra "D" is probably to indicate the fact that the seats in the theater move and there are other physical effects that are apparently quite terrifying):

The heading of the announcement reads quite matter-of-factly:  "Items [You Should] Pay Attention to [upon] Entering the Theater."  Mysteriously, this comes out in the English translation as "4 Uygur theater admission matters needing attention."  Before you go on to the next page, if you know even a small amount of Chinese, try to figure out how the translator got from "Enter Theater" to "4 Uygur theater."

Nicola at The Snark Ascending observes:

The other day at the library, I watched with horror as the kid next to me, doing his Chinese homework online, looked up the word “sheng,” yielding a list something like the following:

SHENG (n.) – river
SHENG (n.) – stoat
SHENG (v.) – to need
SHENG (v.) – to follow
SHENG (v.) – to develop glaucoma
SHENG (v.) – to give a mouse a cookie
SHENG (p.) – buttercup seen on a Tuesday at 5:08 (Celsius)
SHENG (b.) – sodium benzoate (to preserve freshness)
SHENG (x.) – forgotten actor Jeff Conaway
SHENG (n.b.c.) – E-Z-Bake Oven
SHENG (b.y.o.b.) – junk mail, especially certain ads for carpet cleaners, but NOT other certain ads for carpet cleaners, and you should know which ones are which, ass-face
SHENG (a.a.r.p.) – A little to the left
SHENG (i.h.o.p.) – Ooh, that’s good

And that’s just a small sampling. I haven’t even gotten into urinary-tract connotations, sporting-event cheers, dog breeds, etc.

Amusing — but this is one of the many cases where scholarship is at least as funny as fiction.

The first paragraph of chapter 1, "To go", in Katherine Russell Rich's forthcoming memoir Dreaming in Hindi:

The whole time I was in India, I was never confused, though often, for days, I thought I was. "Vidhu-ji," I asked the teacher with the angular face, remembering to attach the "ji," an honorific that could also mean "yes" or "what?" — point of bafflement right there. "Vidhu," I'd repeat, promptly forgetting, "how do I say 'I'm confused'?"

"Main bhram mein hoon," he said: "I am in bhram," and for the rest of the year, I used that sentence more than any other. "Vidhu-ji! Wait! I am in bhram," I'd say, flapping my hand, interrupting grammar, dictation, till he must have wished I'd yank myself out of it, must have regretted the day he ever told me. I was in bhram, off and on, at the school and beyond: when I'd try to ask a shopkeeper in Hindi if he had the thing in blue, for instance, while he stared at me with his mouth half-open, as if he were watching a trick. Some weeks, I was in full-press bhram, in nonstop confusion, or so I thought. It wasn't until I returned to the States that I learned the word's exact meaning: "illusion." The whole time in India, I'd been in illusion.

It is by no means easy to understand headlines in your native language if you cross into a new cultural area, e.g. by crossing the Atlantic. And as headlines go, this one does fairly well at illustrating utter unintelligibility:

GERS’ KIRK IN EGG BLAST

It took up nearly half of the front page of The Scottish Sun on May 15 (the right hand side of the page being reserved for a photo of the upper body of the newly crowned and daringly dressed Miss Scotland).

Now, Gers looks like it could be short for "Germans", right? And kirk is an old Scots word for a church. If religion is involved, the egg is probably a human one. Blast is often used in newspaper headlines for a furious denunciation or excoriating memo. So… an old Scottish church taken over by a congregation of pro-choice German Protestant immigrants has been the target for an angry newsletter article by a Catholic archbishop over the question of whether a newly fertilized ovum counts for moral purposes as a human being. That could be it, right? But perhaps you don't want me to tell you. Perhaps you'd rather guess.

Oliver Lutz Radtke is the host of the popular Website called "The Chinglish Files by olr." He has a brand new book out that is entitled More Chinglish: Speaking in Tongues.  Aside from the fact that it offers an entertaining compilation of photographs, the reason I'm calling More Chinglish:  Speaking in Tongues to your attention is that it includes (pp. 9-11) an interview of me by Oliver.  The interview spells out clearly why I believe that the collection and explication of Chinglish specimens is a worthy endeavor.  Although I haven't made many recent posts about Chinglish, especially not those of the more outlandish and challenging sort, I intend to do so in the coming weeks and months, and the interview provides the justification for not avoiding the study of Chinglish altogether.

When it comes to matters of the toilet, translators in China seem to reach for the old and arcane.  Perhaps you may recall our "Closestool Encounters" back in March.  And now witness the sign in the following photograph:

In "Sign of the Times,"  I discussed a sign in a New York shop window written in Russian but ostensibly addressed to Chinese.  Now we have a bilingual sign in Russian and English:

Searching for something else, I happened across this quotation about language, attributed to the German (and later American) philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973):

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say having double meaning.

I stared at these remarks with some astonishment. Have you heard of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest managed by the Department of English at San José State University? The one where people try to construct an opening sentence for the worst conceivable novel? The quotation above is like the winner of a bad writing contest where the task is to construct an opening sentence for the worst conceivable book about language and meaning.

In the beginning, there were lolcats; now, there are Яolcats!

Translation provided: "Is most powerful laptop in all of Tbilisi, can it be?"
Comment: "(The cat, he is quoting famous Russian comedian)"

TIME Magazine's Claire Suddath commented on Яolcats last week, claiming that it is funny (she's right) but that lolcats are not (she's wrong). Suddaths's (tongue-in-cheek?) complaint about lolcats is most relevant here on Language Log:

Lolcats is stupid. There, I said it. People who attribute grammatically incorrect statements to unsuspecting housecats are the same people who speak to children in baby voices and pat pregnant women's bellies without asking permission. Besides, even if your cat could speak, and it happened to ask for a cheeseburger, why would it spell "cheez" with a "Z?" Why? It's one thing to pretend that your cat can talk, but it's another thing to pretend that it has a debilitating speech impediment.

If Suddath pronounces "cheese" in any way that sounds different from what "cheez" is meant to represent, then I hate to tell her, but she's the one with the speech impediment.

Thomas Whiston, Bill Poser, and Victor Steinbok called my attention to a bizarre device made in China that goes by the name "Closestool Burst Destructor." It was introduced to the world by David Bernstein on the Volokh Conspiracy, March 10, 2009.