The Three-Body Problem (Chinese: 三体; lit. 'Three-Body') is a story by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin which became the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy—though the series as a whole is often referred to as The Three-Body Problem, or simply as Three-Body. The series portrays a fictional past, present and future wherein Earth encounters an alien civilization from a nearby system of three sun-like stars orbiting one another, a representative example of the three-body problem in orbital mechanics.
A Netflix adaptation of wildly popular Chinese sci-fi novel “The Three-Body Problem” has split opinions in China and sparked online nationalist anger over scenes depicting a violent and tumultuous period in the country’s modern history.
I just thought of a (not so) funny phenomenon that amounts to a linguistic paradox. Namely, as languages die out, one after another, so do they arise at a steady rate. This has been a verity throughout human history. So inexorable are these trajectories that a clever mathematician might be able to work out an equation to account for them.
The cycle of language saṃsāra संसार is ceaseless.
We know well enough how languages disappear — usually forever (see "Archive for Language extinction"; see also here). We have also witnessed the birth of languages, which happens for a variety of reasons (social, political, linguistic, etc.). Increasingly, however, artificial languages are being invented in astonishing numbers.
No, I'm not talking about the eye parasite called Loa loa (a filarial nematode), which is also called eyeworm. I'm talking about an image that gets stuck in your brain the same way an earworm (also called brainworm, sticky music, or stuck song syndrome) gets stuck in your head. We've talked about earworms a lot on Language Log (see "Selected readings" below for a few examples), but I don't think we've ever mentioned eyeworms before.
No, come to think of it, I did use the word "eyeworm" once before (here), but that was in reference to the ubiquitous subtitles of Chinese films, even those intended for Chinese audiences, which — upon first glance — may strike one as unnecessary excrescences crawling around in the viewer's field of vision, except for the reasons I listed in the cited post, which lead Chinese audiences to prefer or even need them to understand the films they are watching.
Coby Lubliner called my attention to the Belgian Netflix series "Rough Diamonds." It takes place in Antwerp, so the default language is Dutch (Flemish), but the characters move into Yiddish, English and French with the greatest of ease. The subtitles don't indicate the language spoken in any one scene, except that when [Yiddish] appears what is actually heard is Ashkenazi Hebrew. (To someone who doesn't know either Dutch or Yiddish it will not be clear which one is spoken.)
In the 1971 British dark comedy horror film "The Abominable Dr. Phibes", the title character (played by a scenery-chewing Vincent Price) elaborately kills his victims through torturous deaths inspired by the ten (or so?) Plagues of Egypt… More than once in the film, those biblical plagues are referred to (per closed-captioning) as "the G'Tach"… That term intrigues me, but I've never been able to find any uses of, or references to, it except in connection with this film… Is it a real word?…
It's been six years since the movie Arrival arrived in theaters and immediately attracted buzz here on Language Log and elsewhere in the linguaverse. The protagonist Dr. Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams) is a field linguist called upon to communicate with aliens, and the filmmakers took efforts to make that portrayal mirror Dr. Banks' real-life scholarly counterparts. Now comes a new "official retrospective companion book" about the film's creative process called The Art and Science of Arrival by Tanya Lapointe. And it has a section on how linguists reacted to Arrival — including quotes from a couple of Language Log posts.
"American Sci-fi film 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' subtitles come under fire in Taiwan"
By Lyla Liu, Taiwan News, Staff Writer
2022/04/28
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — American science-fiction film “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” starring Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) and Jamie Lee Curtis, received criticism from Taiwanese audiences because of its subtitles after its Taiwan premiere on April 22.
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The American drama has won the one-day championship for three consecutive days since Monday (April 25), according to the chart released by Taipei Box Office Observatory. In addition, it was selected as the opening movie for the 2022 Golden Horse Fantastic Film Festival.
East Asians have been addicted to strange stories for millennia. Many of these fall under the rubric of guài 怪 ("strange"), e.g., zhìguài 志怪 ("records of anomalies"), the name of one of the earliest genres of strange stories in China.
One of the strangest aspects about East Asian strange tales is that perhaps the most famous collection of all was written by a Westerner, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904).
[This is a guest post by Zihan Guo, who was a student in my "Language, Script, and Society in China" class this past semester.]
A movie titled "Àiqíng shénhuà 愛情神話" ("Myth of Love / B for Busy") just came out on the 24th in China, which soon became warmly received by the public. It narrates the story of three distinctive Shanghainese women who come to know each other through one man. Here is a trailer.
The most attractive aspect is the usage of the Shanghainese topolect throughout the movie. The main actor, Xu Zheng 徐崢, himself is a Shanghainese director who always appreciates films with regional characteristics. The three actresses are also Shanghainese, so they speak in a perfect tone, which appeals to locals very much. But of course there are subtitles to cater for a broader audience. People with no knowledge of the topolect like it as well, maybe because the accent itself is amusing. Most of them are not bothered by the unfamiliar language, since it has long become habitual for people to read subtitles even if they can understand the language, as we have also discussed in our class.
