Language Log

This will be the first of two successive posts on Pekingese.  This one is about insults that, on the surface, seem as though they should be praise.

Rand Paul is  in the throes of a plagiarism scandal. (For details, see e.g. Juliet Lapidos, "Rand Paul's Plagiarism", NYT 11/5/2013.)  But in my opinion, much of the commentary on this imbroglio misses the point so badly as to veer into falsehood, at least by implication. Thus Rebecca Kaplan, "More evidence emerges of plagiarism in Rand Paul's work", CBS News 11/5/2013:

Reports continue to emerge that Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has a habit of using other authors' work in his own speeches and writings without giving them credit.

By this standard, essentially every professional politician and high-level executive in the world is a plagiarist.

For several years now, many linguists and their fellow travelers have talked about the need for a magazine about language issues that could capture the public attention. Mark Liberman has beaten the drum at least since his 2007 LSA plenary address (see: "Linguistics: The Magazine"), and there have been a few recent efforts along these lines. But Michael Erard, author of Um… and Babel No More, has taken matters into his own hands by launching an online magazine called Schwa Fire to specialize in high-quality long-form language journalism.

As birth rates decline in many modernized countries around the world, it's interesting to think about what's driving that in each place, since the factors are never exactly the same.

In Japan, which is famous for having one of the lowest birthrates in the world (Germany has the lowest rate), a large part of it may be attributed to what is known as the "celibacy syndrome":

sekkusu shinai shōkōgun セックスしない症候群 (literally, "syndrome of not doing sex"; 39,100 ghits)

Today's GWS:

From Perry Link, who recently delivered a lecture entitled "How Important is Internet Satire in China?" (October 29, 2013 [see below for abstract]) at Penn:

A note for the true-story joke section of your language log: My son and daughter-in-law were invited to my after-talk dinner at the Han Dynasty restaurant there on Market St.  They googled the place for directions, not using spaces, and then thought: "Hey, wait a minute!  Why are we going to a restaurant named the Handy Nasty?

Athanasia Chalari, "Greeks are ready to change", The Economist (Prospero) 10/24/2013:

Another interesting point about the difficulty in reaching a consensus has to do with social linguistics, how Greeks talk. […]

Greeks are very loud and they interrupt each other very often. The reason for that is the Greek grammar and syntax. When Greeks talk they begin their sentences with verbs and the form of the verb includes a lot of information so you already know what they are talking about after the first word and can interrupt more easily.

The reader who sent in this link noted:

Seems wrong to me–a quick look at WALS finds verb-first languages pretty even scattered over the world, plus many languages that pack more into the average word than Greek does its verbs, but I didn't have the time to test the claim thoroughly. But maybe you could do it, since you have a lot more information about turn-taking than I do.  I was just skeptical that Greek is really that unusual in being 1) verb first and 2) relatively synthetic, so that one gets a lot of information out of the way in the first word of a sentence.  (And all those verb-first, synthetic languages could just as easily lead to nice, harmonious exchanges of short sentences. I can imagine being more likely to interrupt if the crucial bits were at the end, since I would be inclined to say "get on with it!" or "You're wrong!" out of impatience.)

I'm surprised that, until today, I had never heard of the novel entitled Yīnggélìshì 英格力士 (English) by Wáng Gāng 王刚, which was published in 2004.  Now, thanks to Bruce Humes's article, "The 2013 Istanbul Book Fair, Xinjiang Connections and 'English'", posted November 3 on his blog called "Altaic Storytelling:  Tales from Istanbul to Heilongjiang", I'm delighted to learn about this fascinating book.

Jeroen van de Weijer writes, "This morning I came across two signs in my street, Mengzi Lu in Shanghai":

Hezy Laing, "Examining Edenics, the Theory That English (and Every Other Language) Came From Hebrew", The Tablet 10/31/2013:

What if one day, instead of speaking hundreds of different languages, all of humanity suddenly began speaking the exact same language? More incredibly—what if we already do? A new movement called “Edenics” makes the claim that modern day English is simply a derivative of biblical Hebrew. In fact, the proponents of this theory say that all human languages are simply offshoots of Hebrew and claim to have thousands of examples to back them up.

Anyone who loves language will surely cut a lot of slack for a magazine that will describe the Sunday Assemblies (increasingly popular non-religious Sunday gatherings of atheists in England) as "non-prophet organizations" (The Economist, 26 October 2013, p.34). It remains my favorite magazine, and its delicious puns are only part of the reason. But what the hell is going on with language like this (same issue, p.15)?

This newspaper has argued before that it is better directly to tax investors, workers and consumers.

Better directly? What does that mean? I had to go back a few words and re-read.

This is funny:

Together with his "greetings from small-town Japan", Chris Pickel sent in this photograph of a sign, which was put up in his neighborhood for the aki-matsuri 秋祭り ("autumn festival").