Archive for Language on the internets

Internet IDs for China

August 19, 2024 @ 7:05 pm· Filed by under Censorship, Language on the internets

China Plans to Issue Unified Internet IDs to Netizens

Singapore’s primary Chinese language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao recently reported that the Chinese government plans to issue unified internet ID numbers and certificates to members of the Chinese public in order to verify the true identity of users. This raised concerns over control of speech.

China’s Ministry of Public Security and the Chinese Cyberspace Administration just released a document titled “National Internet Identity Authentication Public Service Management Measures (Draft for Comments).” According to the document, the purpose of the internet ID is “to strengthen the protection of people’s personal information.”

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'Tis the summer season for choking off VPNs

August 17, 2024 @ 7:04 pm· Filed by under Censorship, Communication, Language on the internets

"The mysterious slowdown of VPNs in China", Drum Tower, The Economist (newsletter), Gabriel Crossley (China correspondent) (8/15/24)

Every summer Communist Party bigwigs leave Beijing and go to recharge in the resort town of Beidaihe on the coast. This coincides with the silly season for China watchers. There is little hard news, so rumours fly. Some are baseless speculations about the health of Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader. Others are more well-founded, such as a report that Hu Xijin, a prominent nationalist commentator, has been muzzled on social media (probably for accidentally overstepping the party line). And some are true but harder to explain: like the fact that virtual private networks (VPNs) are getting slower.

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Internet as Russian dialect enabler

June 26, 2024 @ 6:45 pm· Filed by under Dialects, Language on the internets

"Internet Not Killing Off Dialects within Russian as Many Suppose but Increasing Their Diversity, Moscow Scholar Says",  Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia (6/7/24)

It is widely assumed that the Internet is contributing to the homogenization of languages and killing off both dialects and local variants; but in fact, a Moscow scholar says, a new survey of Russian as spoken in the cities of that country finds that in many places, dialects are unexpectedly expanding.

Ivan Levan, a specialist at the Moscow Institute of the Russian Language at the Russian Academy of Sciences, says that he and his colleagues have recently found “about 2,000” new words that vary from city to city and were not recorded in V.I. Belikov and V.P. Selegey’s 2005 work on Languages of Russian Cities (yandex.ru/company/researches/2021/local-words).

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More wonders of Google

November 7, 2022 @ 9:43 am· Filed by under Language on the internets, Pronunciation

I was trying to find an old post I wrote about a dictionary of Japanese pronunciations of Chinese characters and put this in the Google search engine:  victor mair language log dictionary japanese pronunciation (no quotation marks).  I was thunderstruck by the first result (out of 188,000):

victor mair language log       –>       ヴィクトル・メアの言語ログ  

Vu~ikutoru mea no gengo rogu

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Subtleties of slapping

April 10, 2022 @ 6:47 am· Filed by under Gesture, Idioms, Language on the internets, Semantics, Slang

Lately I've been encountering this expression quite a bit on the Chinese internet:

dǎ liǎn 打脸

It seems transparently to mean "slap face", but my Chinese students and friends all characterize it as jargon and netizen slang, and they say that it has only been gaining currency within the last two-three years.

Here I rank "dǎ liǎn 打脸" numerically against other terms for "slap" that I've been acquainted with since I started learning Chinese more than half a century ago.

dǎ liǎn 打脸 ("slap face") 48,700,000 ghits — that was yesterday's tally; this morning it is 59,500,000

dǎ ěrguāng 打耳光 ("box [someone's] ear") 3,420,000 ghits

dǎ yī bāzhang 打一巴掌 ("strike with the palm") 2,300,000 ghits

dǎ zuǐbā 打嘴巴 ("smack on the mouth") 975,000

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Uncommon prosperity

December 29, 2021 @ 4:35 pm· Filed by under Censorship, Language and politics, Language on the internets

Even those who are not China watchers will remember the savage satire directed against the pathetic River Crab (= Harmonious Society) and the Grass-Mud Horse (= *uck your mother"). 

There's always something the censors have to block on the Chinese internet.  It wouldn't be the Chinese internet if a large part of it were not being blocked.  If I were to list all the Language Log posts that document the expressions that have been censored by the PRC authorities, it would soon swell to over a hundred items.

For the year 2021, here are some of the favorite targets of the internet police:

Clubhouse

February 8, 2021

Social audio app Clubhouse was blocked around 7 p.m. on February 8 in response to a spirited discussion about Xinjiang that had happened the previous weekend. (See Darren Byler’s column about the offending chat room). In addition, Clubhouse had hosted discussions about Tibet and Taiwan. Some Chinese users noted that their mainland China phone numbers could not receive verification messages to register for new accounts.

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Melon eaters and censorship in the PRC

December 8, 2021 @ 9:48 pm· Filed by under Censorship, Language on the internets

Because of the scandal surrounding the illicit, involuntary relationship between female tennis star, Peng Shuai 彭帅, and top CCP official, Zhang Gaoli 张高丽, which became a hot button issue around the world beginning about a month ago, the Chinese government went into overdrive to censor all trace of it from the internet (see here).  The issue was particularly sensitive and embarrassing to the Communist Party because it rekindled the Me Too / #MeToo / #Mǐtù 米兔 ("Rice Bunny") movement (which the government had only with great difficulty tamped down a few years ago), led to the cancellation of the lucrative Women's Tennis Association (WTA) tournaments in China, and is even threatening to cause a boycott of the upcoming winter Olymics, which would be utterly disastrous for the PRC.

The gross disparity between the absence of all mention of l'affaire Peng Shuai et Zhang Gaoli in China (indeed the disappearance of the star herself) and the raging indignation over it outside China led me to inquire of my friends in China what they were hearing about it sub / sotto voce.

All responses in this post are from Chinese citizens who must remain unidentified for fear of harsh government reprisals.

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Your Pinky Heart

October 22, 2021 @ 5:38 am· Filed by under Censorship, Language and entertainment, Language and music, Language and politics, Language on the internets, Subtitles

Phenomenally viral song by the Malaysian hip-hop artist, Namewee, "It might Break Your Pinky Heart. Namewee 黃明志 Ft.Kimberley Chen 陳芳語【Fragile 玻璃心】@鬼才做音樂 2021 Ghosician" — premiered on 10/15/21, and it already has nearly 9,000,000 views:

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Green needle vs. brainstorm

October 2, 2021 @ 7:25 am· Filed by under Language on the internets, Phonetics and phonology, Pronunciation, Psycholinguistics, Speech technology

Remember "Yanny vs. Laurel", the viral acoustic sensation (28.2M views) of mid-May, 2018?  It was covered extensively on Language Log (see the items under "Selected readings" below).  Now we have another supposedly ambiguous recording that has gone viral (5.3M views [posted 7/3/21]):

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Thailand or Thighland? Dinesh D'Douza sets us straight.

August 6, 2020 @ 10:19 pm· Filed by under Errors, Ignorance of linguistics, Language on the internets, Misspeaking, Pronunciation, WTF

 

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@Everybody

July 26, 2020 @ 2:30 pm· Filed by under Language change, Language on the internets

From Randy Alexander, a photo taken in the courtyard of an apartment complex in Huaying, Guang'an, Sichuan (广安华蓥):

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Google, the wannabe Egyptologist

July 23, 2020 @ 4:25 pm· Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Decipherment, Language on the internets, Language teaching and learning, Writing systems

Sensational article by Hagar Hosny in Al-Monitor (7/23/20):

"Google presents new tool to decode hieroglyphics:  Google has created a new tool to translate hieroglyphics into English and Arabic at the stroke of a key."

It starts like this:

In a July 15 press release, Google announced the launch of a new tool that uses artificial intelligence to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs and translate them into Arabic and English.

Google said that the tool, dubbed Fabricius, provides an interactive experience for people from all over the world to learn about hieroglyphics, in addition to supporting and facilitating the efforts of Egyptologists and raising awareness about the history and heritage of ancient Egyptian civilization.

“We are very excited to be launching this new tool that can make it easier to access and learn about the rich culture of ancient Egypt. For over a decade, Google has been capturing imagery of cultural and historical landmarks across the region,” Chance Coughenour, program manager at Google Arts and Culture, said in the statement.

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Acronyms in China

November 2, 2019 @ 5:47 am· Filed by under Acronyms, Language on the internets, Writing systems

Recently, one of my students found an interesting post from the Communist Youth League about the use of Hanyu Pinyin acronyms on the Internet. When people type on Weibo, WeChat, and other social media, they frequently use Pinyin acronyms. For examples:

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