Language Log

At the recent Language Diversity Congress in Groningen, one of many interesting presentations was Martijn Wieling and John Nerbonne's "Inducing and using phonetic similarity". More than a thousand LL readers played a role in the creation of this work, by responding to a request back in May ("Rating American English Accents", 5/19/2012) to participate in an online experiment.

Email from reader J.M.:

As I was perusing LL this afternoon, the title of a post you wrote caught my attention: "Metaphors which you are used to seeing in print". I know that the that/which distinction is becoming less and less distinct, but I still thought it was generally practiced in academia (I am not necessarily a proponent of the distinction, but I generally thought it was still preserved). However, in only the past couple of weeks, I have come across several examples of "restrictive which" (in your post title, a textbook for the sociolinguistics class I am teaching (published in 2007), as well as a non-fiction book on spirituality (published 2011)). Can I assume now that it is customary practice to ignore that distinction in published or collegiate writing? I didn't realize the elimination of that distinction had progressed so much from when I was in college (7 years ago).

Francis Miller sent in this photograph of a lollapalooza of a Chinglish banner (click to embiggen):

Ian Preston wrote to draw my attention to this new item for our No Word for X archive — Thomas Brewer, "Giving Childhood Diarrhea a Name", Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 7/20/2013:

Over the course of my career I’ve spent over thirty years working in various developing countries trying to better understand and fight infectious diseases. One of the things that alarmed me most was that in many places, parents and caretakers didn’t even have a word for diarrhea. Sadly, this wasn’t because diarrhea was rare. On the contrary, diarrhea was so common that it was seen as a normal part of early childhood, and thus didn’t need a name.

As we have frequently noted here on Language Log, science stories on the BBC News website are (how to put this politely?) not always of prize-winning standard with respect to originality, timeliness, reliability, or attention to the relevant literature. In fact some of them show signs of being written by kids in junior high school. Way back in 2006 Mark Liberman commented on a BBC News story about the notion that dolphins have and use "names" for each other. He expressed skepticism, but the BBC forged ahead without paying any heed, and today, more than seven years later, we learn from the same BBC site once again that Dolphins 'call each other by name'. Yes, it's the same story, citing the same academic at the University of St Andrews, Dr Vincent Janik. (Mark's link in 2006 was unfortunately to a Google search on {Janik, dolphins}, which today brings up the current stories rather than the ones he was commenting on then.) And you don't need to leave the BBC page to see that the story contradicts itself.

John Darwin, After Tamerlane:

For all its drama, the Occidental ‘breakout’ of the long sixteenth century (1480–1620) had for long a limited impact.

I've read about these "long centuries" from time to time — it's a convenient way to refer to time-periods that sprawl somewhat beyond the boundaries of years ending in double zeros — but when I came upon this phrase the other day, on a long airplane ride from the Netherlands back to the U.S., some questions occurred to me. Why "long" as opposed to "wide", "broad",  "extended", or whatever? Who started this usage, and when? What are the corresponding terms, if any, in other languages?

For the last couple of weeks we've been focusing on loans from Chinese and Japanese into English and from English into Chinese and Japanese. In this post, I'd like to demonstrate the intricate intertwining of Mandarin, topolectal Chinese, Japanese, and English, with Japanese providing for Chinese two key terms from comic book culture. All of these things are illustrated in the following promotional item that Nuno Sobral stumbled upon in the QQ music app:

Prospero, "The World's Worst Sentence", The Economist 7/17/2013:

FINANCIAL books are not renowned for their literary merits. Neverthless, the reader is still entitled to expect something better than the following (from Philip Mirowski's new book "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste"):

Yet the nightmare cast its shroud in the guise of a contagion of a deer-in-the-headlights paralysis.

That is not just a mixed metaphor; it is meaningless and pretentious at the same time. One would nominate it as the world's worst-written sentence but it is only the opening clause. After a semi-colon, the author drones on for a further 32 words, from which Economist readers should be spared.

On Friday of last week, Pieter Muysken and I organized a party in the Northwood housing area at the University of Michigan. We were in Ann Arbor to teach at the 2013 LSA Institute, and because Noam Chomsky's Forum Lecture had been the evening before, the get-together was advertised as the "Epi-Chomskyan Block Party". We chose epi- because its wide range of senses (above, on, over, nearby, upon; outer; besides, in addition to; among; attached to; or toward) seemed appropriate.

Anyhow, a good time was had by all. The thing that I want to focus on is the cherry wine that Marianne Mithun brought. Michigan cherry wine is apparently a thing, which I didn't know — but I already had a strong association, in the wrong direction, from Buddy Guy's 1968 song about leaving Chicago, A man and the blues:

I think I'll move on back down south,
where the water tastes just like cherry wine.
I think I'll  back down south, people,
where the water tastes to me like cherry wine —
uh this Lake Michigan water tastes to me just like turpentine.

But when I looked into it, I discovered that the connections among blues music, cherry wine, and the upper midwest are older and more complex than I thought.

Patrick Juola's guest post on identifying the authorship of The Cuckoo's Calling (now number 1 in the Amazon hardback bestseller list) is fascinating. But I seem to be the only person in the world who picked up the secret message that Joanne "J. K." Rowling sent when she picked the pseudonym under which she would publish her first crime novel. It is amazing that no one else picked up on it, but there we are: it was just me. I saw it as soon as… well, as soon as the Sunday Times revealed their discovery of the novel's pseudonymous nature, actually, which is not quite as good as seeing it before the story was all over the newspapers, but I still think I deserve a lot of credit for my penetrating intelligence. I can't imagine why I don't do crosswords; I'd probably win prizes.

In "Chinese loans in English" and in "Too many English loanwords in Japanese?" we examined the propositions that Chinese borrowings into English in recent times have been very few, while English borrowings into Chinese and Japanese have been relatively numerous.  Some commenters even made the assertion that the age of borrowing is past.

In this post, I would like to suggest that — unlike Chinese, and contrary to those who believe that the age of borrowing is largely over — there has been a substantial amount of borrowing from Japanese into English going on in recent decades.  As to why this is happening in the Japanese case, but not in the Chinese case, and why there are numerous borrowings from English into Chinese and Japanese, and into many other languages as well, these are questions that might be good to take up in the comments to this post.

During the Arab Spring demonstrations, we saw many signs that attempted to reach a Chinese audience in Chinese: "Maybe Mubarak understands Chinese", 2/10/2011; "Chinese sign in Benghazi", 3/21/2011; "Roll out of here, Mubarak", 4/3/2011. Similar signs were spotted during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations later the same year:  "No more corruption".

Now, in Syria, we see protesters condemning China with signs written in Arabic:

(from this website)

The latest xkcd explains:

Mouseover message: "But the rules of writing are like magic spells. If you never acquire them, then not using them says nothing."