Language Log

[VHM:  This is a guest post by Chris Button.  It will be primarily of interest to specialists in the phonological history of Sinitic.  Since there are quite a few such scholars on Language Log, I expect that it will occasion the usual lively debate that follows posts on such subjects.  It will also undoubtedly be of interest to historical phonologists in general, as well as to a broad spectrum of Sinologists and their colleagues focusing on other Asian cultures and languages.]

I've been thinking about the etymological associations of Hàn 漢. It's often reconstructed with an aspirated coronal nasal as *hn-, in spite of the Middle Chinese x- then being somewhat unexpected (Baxter and Sagart put it down to dialects), largely on the basis of the *n- in 難. But its etymological association with 艱 and its velar *k- make this problematic. A regular source of MC x- would be *hŋ- which then at least would be a velar onset to parallel *k-. The *n- in 難 could perhaps be put down to some sort of assimilation of *ŋ- with the *-n coda (one might compare 般 *pán < *pám where there is dissimilation of the coda unlike in its phonetic 凡 *bàm) . At the very least, 漢 most likely went back to something like *hŋáns and then *xáns with a velar onset and the -s eventually becoming qu-sheng. An alternative option is rhinoglottophilia whereby a *ʔ became *n- as attested in cases like 憂 *ʔə̀w and 獶(夒) *nə́w a I mentioned here.

From Brenton Recht:

I live in a city with a large immigrant population in general and a large Bosnian population in particular (Utica, NY [VHM: population around 60,000; between Syracuse and Schenectady]). As such, I see "BiH" bumper stickers once in a while on the road. Most of the Bosnian population either came during the breakup of Yugoslavia or are children of those immigrants, so they are probably following the American trend of putting round stickers on your car for things you like or identify with, rather than the European usage of using them to identify country of origin.

pic.twitter.com/mB9S3owgvH

— Literary Hub (@lithub) April 7, 2020

My decision after the break —

One image evokes the other:

pic.twitter.com/yBBzkwPyTm

— Jonathan Gray 🐼 (@jwyg) April 8, 2020

I've been familiar with the country name "Bosnia and Herzegovina" for quite some time, but until this morning I've never seen it referred to as BiH.  I came upon this usage in news reports about the delivery of PRC medical supplies to that country, e.g., here.  Although the Chinese printing on the boxes in the background of the photograph in this report is small and blurred, we can verify from other sources (e.g., here) what it says:

wànlǐ shàng wéi lín, xiāngzhù wú yuǎnjìn 万里尚为邻，相助无远近 ("ten thousand miles but still neighbors, mutual assistance has no far or near")

Other recent uses may be found here and here.

Can anybody transcribe and translate the printing in Roman letters (Bosnian? Croatian?) that is also on the boxes?

Scene at a Taichung night market:

Tweet from Heitor@Heitormde:

Olha o nível que tá chegando. O mundo já está lascado demais para vir um cara e fazer um negócio desse. Isso é crime! pic.twitter.com/PDzujzIpbN

— Heitor (@Heitormde) March 20, 2020

The 0:36 video was taken just outside the gate of the Chinese embassy in Brasilia.

A little over a week ago, I described how I mistyped "stalk" for "stock".  That led to a vigorous discussion of precisely how people pronounce "stalk".  (As a matter of fact, in my own idiolect I do pronounce "stock" and "stalk" identically.)  See:

"Take stalk of: thoughts on philology and Sinology" (3/29/20)

I just now typed "One I first saw…" when I meant "When I first saw…".

This post is another pitch for our on-going effort to develop simple, easy, and effective ways to track neurocognitive health through short interactions with a web app.  Why do we want this? Two reasons: first, early detection of neurodegenerative disorders through near-universal tracking; and second, easy large-scale evaluation of interventions, whether those are drugs or lifestyle changes. You can participate by enrolling at https://speechbiomarkers.org, and suggesting it to your friends and acquaintances as well.

Today, diagnosis generally depends on scoring below a certain value on cognitive tests such as the MMSE, which usually won't even be given until you've started experiencing life-changing symptoms — and at that point, the degenerative process has probably been at work for a decade or more. This may well be too late for interventions to make a difference, which may help explain the failure of dozens of Alzheimer's disease drug trials. And it's difficult and expensive to evaluate an intervention, in part because it requires a series of clinic visits, making it hard to fund support for trials that don't involve a patented drug.

If people could accurately track their neurocognitive health with a few minutes a week on a web app, they could be alerted to potential problems by the rate of change in their scores, even if they're many years away from a diagnosis by today's methods. Of course, this will be genuinely useful only when we have ways to slow or reverse the process — but the same approach can be used to evaluate such interventions inexpensively on a large scale.

More background is here: "Towards tracking neurocognitive health", 3/24/2020. As that post explains, this is just the first step on what may be a long journey — but we will be making the data available to all interested researchers, so that the approaches that have worked elsewhere in AI research over the past 30 years can be be applied to this problem as well.

Again, you can participate by enrolling at https://speechbiomarkers.org . And please spread the word!

A rare find of linguistic news in a blog concerning the Supreme Court:

"Relist Watch: Kalsarikännit edition", John Elwood, SCOTUSblog

SCOTUSblog is about the work of the Supreme Court of the United States.  The author must have a streak of the linguist in him, for he chose to  begin today's post with three paragraphs about language usage related to the coronavirus crisis.  Here they are:

As America begins its fourth week under quarantine with widespread working from home, we’ve begun noticing shifts in grooming, attire and behavior as many of us remain cooped up for weeks on end.

In previous posts on this subject (see "Readings" below), we have listed a number of traits of the typical troll.  There are a few more items that have not been explicitly covered, so I will mention them here.

First, though, a prefatory remark about the defining nature of a troll and what his / her modus operandi consists of.  Namely, the primary purpose of a troll is to disrupt the smooth, collaborative functioning of a discussion group that is dedicated to the discovery of ideas and free, fruitful, civil exchange of opinions.  Trolls want to inflame others so as to bring a screeching halt to amicable, productive dialogue and discourse.  Sometimes trolls will come perilously close to derailing an interesting discussion, causing a furor of denunciation and recrimination, but then, if the group is fortunate and things calm down, they will end up having a stimulating, enlightening conversation after all.

A conspicuous characteristic of the typical troll is that either they do not read the comments policy of the forums where they deposit their invective or they read the guidelines but choose not to adhere to them.  Our comments policy may be accessed by clicking on the link at the top right of the Language Log (LLog) homepage.  However, since many commenters consistently break these rules, I think it is fitting to list them here for all LLog readers to see:

The good news is that it's a language.

The bad news is that you can't speak it.

"China’s version of TikTok suspends users for speaking Cantonese:  ByteDance’s short video app Douyin has been urging live streamers to switch to the country’s official language", Abacus via SCMP (4/3/20)

I've been hearing similar reports concerning the use of Cantonese on other social media:  it is definitely discouraged or even forbidden.  At least, though, the Abacus article does not miscall Cantonese a dialect, but affords it the dignity of referring to it as a language.