Language Log

奥本海默中国大陆版本剪辑情况 pic.twitter.com/Nbjxy5PJ4J

— 小径残雪 (@xiaojingcanxue) September 1, 2023

[link to full tweet here]

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.)

[10:42 video — entertaining and informative]

From TIC Redux:

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.

Missed this priceless item back in January:

This ALIEN synopsis from a Hong Kong bootleg DVD needs to be in a museum and guarded as a cultural treasure. pic.twitter.com/KHCj9gHEr7

— Beyond Fest (@BeyondFest) January 10, 2022

"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.

…

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.

…

1st time spotting #pinyin added to a complicated Chinese character in the subtitle. Context: they’re reading out an announcement in supposedly #ClassicalChinese…how novel! pic.twitter.com/Ymbn0RFrey

— Shuangyi Li 李双翼 (@shuangyi_li) March 30, 2022

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.]

From an anonymous correspondent:

G and I have always enjoyed foreign films, but only if they're subtitled. We shy away from films that are dubbed into English. The dubbing clearly adds another layer of clumsy artifice that stops me from entering into the film.

Until Chairman Xi started going after the entertainment world, and especially foreign entertainment, the Chinese people were deeply enamored of Korean soap operas, boy bands, K-Pop girl groups, and so forth.  They idolized the Korean stars, watched their performances, and would even go on pilgrimages to important places associated with them.  Moreover, as with J-pop, manga, and anime, which inspired many young Chinese to learn Japanese language, so were Chinese youth inspired by Korean pop culture to learn Korean language.  So it is not altogether surprising to hear a Chinese film star switch into Korean.

First listen, and see if you can distinguish between the Mandarin and the Korean.  Below I'll give a rough account of the background to this scene.