Language Log

The Japanese may be forgetting how to write kanji ("Japanese survey on forgetting how to write kanji"), but, so far as their signatures are concerned, perhaps they don't really need to write them anyway, since they still rely heavily on seals for affixing their John Hancock to documents.  When I lived in Japan (around 1995), even I had to purchase a seal, or I wouldn't have been able to get properly registered as a resident alien.

According to a recent survey of more than 2,000 people, 66.5 percent of Japanese think they are losing the ability to correctly handwrite kanji. Moreover, the level is above 50% for every age group except for the youngest (16-19), who are of course still actively studying characters and thus must be prepared for tests; and even there the figure is still very close to the 50% mark. (See graph at the end of this post.)

This phenomenon is no surprise to anyone who regularly reads Language Log — see, for example, "Character Amnesia". Still, it is interesting to have the numbers. Also, the shift from the previous survey 10 years ago is dramatic. Read the article below for more details.

The online Wall Street Journal's Real Time Report has this story:

Ex-Porn Star’s Viral Call for Sino-Japanese Peace [SFW]

You know, people keep telling me that I shouldn't blame Strunk & White for the way so many Americans are clueless about identifying passive clauses. Others tell me I'm being prescriptive: I should let people use the word 'passive' however they want. (And you can, of course; you can use it to mean "box containing electrical equipment" if you want.) But I'm unrepentant in my conviction that page 18 of The Elements of Style has been confusing people for decades. Let me give you (if you can bear it) another example of why.

Nineteen years ago, the well-preserved body of a young woman who died at the age of 25 around 2,500 years ago was recovered from the permafrost of a kurgan (burial mound) of the Pazyryk Culture high on the Ukok Plateau of the Altai Republic, a part of the Russian Federation.  Nearby were the bodies of two warriors who guarded her in death.

Earlier archeological excavations in the same area had recovered the frozen remains or other individuals belonging to the Pazyryk Culture, including one who is referred to as a chief.  All of these ice mummies bore elaborate tattoos on their bodies, and these were the subject of a recent, spectacularly illustrated article in the Daily Mail (August 14, 2012) that was occasioned by the transfer of the remains of the "princess" to a permanent glass sarcophagus in the National Museum in Gorno-Altaisk, capital of the Altai Republic.

Randy Alexander sent me the following photograph and asked how long it would take for me to identify the text in the background:

The Queen's English Society (QES), mentioned only a couple of times here on Language Log over the past few years, is no more. It has ceased to be. On the last day of this month they will ring down the curtain and it will join the choir invisible. It will be an ex-society. Said Rhea Williams, chairman of QES, in a letter to the membership of which I have seen a facsimile copy:

At yesterday's SGM there were 22 people present, including the 10 members of your committee. Three members had sent their apologies. Not a very good showing out of a membership of 560 plus!

Time was spent discussing what to do about QES given the forthcoming resignations of so many committee members. Despite the sending out of a request for nominations for chairman, vice-chairman, administrator, web master, and membership secretary no one came forward to fill any role. So I have to inform you that QES will no longer exist. There will be one more Quest then all activity will cease and the society will be wound up. The effective date will be 30th June 2012

(Quest is the society's magazine.) Is this a sad day for defenders of English? Not in my view. I don't think it was a serious enterprise at all. I don't think the members cared about what they said they cared about. And I will present linguistic evidence for this thesis.

[This is a guest post by S. Robert Ramsey.  It is essentially an extended reply to two comments by Joanne Salton [here and here] to my post on "The cost of illiteracy in China".  While I have the floor, I would like to point out the remarks by Ray Dillinger (with important qualifications by Julie Lee) which, considering the limited compass, are among the most sensible observations on the history of writing I've ever encountered.  And now the floor is Bob's.]

From California, Julie Wei sends me "tidbits:  curious words":

Cindy, who works in my favorite barber shop next to the Penn campus, has the following symbols tattooed on her back:

I instantly recognized the first and last as two quite well-formed Chinese characters.  After two or three seconds of puzzling, I realized that the third symbol is another Chinese character written upside down and backwards (how the tattoo artist achieved that is a bit of a mystery, especially since he / she got the first and fourth one in their correct orientation).  The second character was more refractory.

A very nice demystification of those horrible Latin abbreviations ibid., idem, loc. cit., op. cit., etc., by smart copy editor Carol Saller on Lingua Franca today. There's an utterly ridiculous pun in the accompanying photo, and also some useful advice, which I hope all future academic authors take. (Whenever I see op. cit in a footnote my blood pressure goes up.) Check it out if you ever write academic material in any subject, especially in the humanities.

I want to share something with you Language Log readers. But for heaven's sake don't mention it to anyone at The Chronicle of Higher Education or its Lingua Franca blog. This is just between us. There is no telling what would happen over at the Chronicle if they read this, so just keep it dark, OK?

Don't get me wrong: I am entirely positive about octopus porn. Graphically depicted sex with our multiply-tentacled cephalopod friends is cool as far as I'm concerned.