Having gotten a good earful of Latin last month, Chau Wu was prompted to write this note in response to our previous post on "From Chariot to Carriage" (5/5/24):
“chē 車 ("car; cart; vehicle") / yín 銀 ("silver")”
In my view, these two words are among those most representative of cultural and linguistic transfers from West to East. This comment will focus on 車 chē only. 車 is pronounced in Taiwanese [tʃja] (POJ chhia), quite similar to the first syllable char- of English chariot. I believe, like E. chariot and car which are derived from Latin carrus (see Etymonline on car and chariot), Tw chhia is ultimately also a derivative of L. carrus.
Today's xkcd is (or should be) the illustration for a week or two in every introductory course on the sound side of language:
Mouseover text: "Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay."
Oh wow this is an AMAZINGLY FASCINATING find! The 'Chinese characters' seem intractable, but are just phonetically written Mandarin syllables (initial, nucleus, coda): c(e) 策+ e 額 + (e)ng 鞥 = ceng Next to it a Manchu transcription: ᡮᡝ᠋᠊ᠩ
The two components of the 祆 glyph are shì 示/礻 ("show, reveal, manifest; spirit") and tiān天 ("sky, heaven, celestial").
Although hugely important in the history of religions in China, the etymology of xiān 祆 is highly elusive. Through close attention to the phonology of the glyph and its components, Chris aims to ferret out the source of a possible loanword.]
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I've been pondering over 祆 EMC xɛn "Ahura Mazda, Zoroastrianism" for a while and its possible relationship with 天 EMC tʰɛn "heaven" (compare 忝 EMC tʰɛmˀ with 天/祆 as phonetic in the top half).
Ha! As a final-year undergraduate in 2015, I mentioned having come across devoicing of the second /i/ in "université" to my French linguistics tutor and he didn't believe me. Finally I've been vindicated.
My impression is that this is common and perhaps almost categorical in Québecois vernacular, but more gradient (or maybe I should say less complete?) in Parisian French. So I looked from some examples of the word université in a collection of transcribed radio broadcasts and political speeches from France. And I found a few, all of which were consistent with my impression. So my recent series of French phonetic anecdotes continues below.
On a trip to Québec in the 1970s, I asked a passerby for directions (in French), and he gave me an answer that at first I thought was in Polish or some other Slavic language unknown to me. He also pointed to the visible train-track overpass a couple of blocks away, and waved his arm to indicate a right turn, so I got the meaning from his gestures. And after a bit, I realized that his opening phrase, which I heard as something like
[tvɐ.drɛk.tʃsko.trɐk]
was a Québecois vernacular version of "tu vas direct jusqu'au trac", with the [i] and [y] vowels deleted (and the initial /ʒ/ of "jusqu'au" devoiced). I asked a Canadian colleague about it, and was told that the deletion of high vowels was known to linguists in Francophone Canada, but (as far as he knew at that time) had not been documented.
By chance, I came across the surname "Gnaizda". Its phonological configuration puzzled me for a while, but then I began to formulate hypotheses about its origin. I briefly thought that it might have been Semitic and considered the possibility that it was cognate with "genesis". It was easy to rule out "genesis", though, because that goes back to the PIE root *gene- ("give birth, beget").
Rather than making stabs in the dark about what language Gnaizda might derive from, I thought it would be more sensible to search for individuals with that surname and see whether there were any pertinent biographical, genealogical, or onomastic information available about them.
The most prominent Gnaizda I found was the civil justice advocate, Robert Gnaizda (1936-2020), who was the General Counsel and Policy Director for the Greenlining Institute based in Berkeley, California. There are many references to him on the internet. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article on Robert Gnaizda does not provide any etymological information about his surname.
Mogholi is a fascinating language – Mongolic spoken in Afghanistan with strong Perso-Arabic influences. It was already in decline in the 1960s and we don't know if/how many speakers there are left now Pics: A poem (a qaṣīda) in original script, transcription and translation pic.twitter.com/9Mrct9DaAI
— Egas Moniz-Bandeira ᠡᡤᠠᠰ ᠮᠣᠨᠢᠰ ᠪᠠᠨᡩ᠋ᠠᠶᠢᠷᠠ (@egasmb) April 6, 2024
After his State of the Union speech, the president was so eager to keep talking to people he didn't care that the lights went down or that hot mics picked him up.
[…]
“Thank you, man,” said Biden, before shaking someone else’s hand and pointing at him. “You know there’s no T in ‘Scranton.’ It’s Scran-un!”
My original interest in the conversation behind yesterday's post "Our digital god is a CSV file?" was a sociophonetic one. As often noted, spontaneous speech often strays far from dictionary pronunciations, and Elon Musk's side of that conversation is full of interesting examples. A few are documented below.
EMO, by Linrui Tian, Qi Wang, Bang Zhang, and Liefeng Bo from Alibaba's Institute for Intelligent Computing, is "an expressive audio-driven portrait-video generation framework. Input a single reference image and the vocal audio, e.g. talking and singing, our method can generate vocal avatar videos with expressive facial expressions, and various head poses".
Continuing our series on dragons, this note and illustration come from Juha Janhunen, the Finnish linguist:
Happy Blue Dragon Year to everybody! Below is the official flag (1889-1912) of the Manchu Empire (in the west misleadingly known as "China"), which happens to have a blue dragon on it. Manchu muduri 'dragon' still seems to lack an external etymology. Any suggestions?
(See at the very bottom of this post for a possible connection to "otter".)
