Language Log

From reader JM:

I recently acquired these two vintage postcards from a seller in Mallorca. They are 100 years old, mailed from Mallorca in 1912-1913, and still in excellent condition. They were bought in a flea market in Mallorca and were originally advertised as being in Esperanto, which is how they came to my friend's attention (we are both Esperanto hobbyists). However, we quickly determined that they are not in fact in Esperanto, and all attempts to identify the language have thus far failed. We have ruled out many of the obvious candidates (Spanish, Mallorquín, Catalán, Basque), as well as some more exotic possibilities (Croatian, Hungarian, Hawaiian, etc. etc.)

The more we scrutinized them, the more mysterious they became, and finally I decided to buy them. At this point, we don't know if they are in a real language, or if they are some kind of cipher, or even a fake. But why would someone go to the trouble – this isn't the Voynich manuscript we're talking about here.

Here's what we have determined so far. They were both sent from Palmas, Mallorca, to a man named Juan Planas (a very common name in Mallorca). He was the second officer on a Spanish steamer named Florentina. One was mailed to the ship while it was in Cartagena, Spain (addressed in Spanish), and the other to the ship docked in London (addressed in English). They are dated in Spanish, but the rest of the message is in an unknown language. When the writer ran out of room, they turned the card upside down and finished off the message at the top. They are signed "Le."

Last year in August, Valerie Syverson sent in a photograph taken at a storefront in Sydney's Chinatown that showed a package labeled "Bradysia homozygous". That sent me on a wild-goose chase, but eventually I was able to identify the product as leek turnovers and describe how the translation error had come about (see "Fungus gnat turnovers").

Now Valerie, who seems to get around the world, spotted the product in the following photograph in a Chinese grocery store in Ypsilanti, Michigan:

The annual Thanksgiving feast may have had its origins in Massachusetts, but "Black Friday" is one of  Philadelphia's contributions to American culture. Ben Zimmer told the story in his 11/25/2011 Word Routes column, reporting on research by Bonnie Taylor-Blake:

Today is the day after Thanksgiving, when holiday shopping kicks off and sales-hunters are in full frenzy. The day has come to be known in the United States as "Black Friday," and there are a number of myths about the origin of the name. Retailers would like you to believe that it's the day when stores turn a profit on the year, thus "going into the black." But don't you believe it: the true origins come from traffic-weary police officers in Philadelphia in the early 1960s. […]

Philadelphia merchants disliked the label "Black Friday" and tried to get people to use a more positive term: "Big Friday." That effort failed, of course, and "Black Friday" caught on, spreading to other cities in the 1970s and '80s.

Recently, the Economist referred to the president of Taiwan as a "bumbler":  “Ma the bumbler:  A former heart-throb loses his shine"  The Taiwanese media translated "bumbler" as 笨蛋 ("stupid egg / oaf"), which caused Ma's supporters to have conniptions:  "'Ma the bumbler' Economist report causes storm in Taiwan".

To call someone a bèndàn 笨蛋 ("stupid egg / oaf") or even a dà bèndàn 大笨蛋 ("big stupid egg / oaf") is not really that bad.  Presidents in Western nations are called by terms of opprobrium that are much worse than that every day.  Indeed, my wife used to call me bèndàn 笨蛋 ("stupid egg / oaf") or dà bèndàn 大笨蛋 ("big stupid egg / oaf") in an affectionate manner.  So it's hard to fathom why calling Ma Ying-jeou a "bumbler" — translated into Mandarin as bèndàn 笨蛋 ("stupid egg / oaf") or dà bèndàn 大笨蛋 ("big stupid egg / oaf") — would occasion such an uproar.

The most recent xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Collaborative editing can quickly become a textual rap battle fought with increasingly convoluted invocations of U+202a to U+202e."

Jonathan Smith spotted this photograph of a sign in Hong Kong that is part of a blog post decrying impenetrable official language:

Warren Weaver, 1947 letter to Norbert Wiener, quoted in "Translation", 1949:

[K]nowing nothing official about, but having guessed and inferred considerable about, powerful new mechanized methods in cryptography – methods which I believe succeed even when one does not know what language has been coded – one naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography.

Mark Brown, "Modern Algorithms Crack 18th Century Secret Code", Wired UK 10/26/2011:

Computer scientists from Sweden and the United States have applied modern-day, statistical translation techniques — the sort of which are used in Google Translate — to decode a 250-year-old secret message.

The original document, nicknamed the Copiale Cipher, was written in the late 18th century and found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War. It’s since been kept in a private collection, and the 105-page, slightly yellowed tome has withheld its secrets ever since.

But this year, University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering computer scientist Kevin Knight — an expert in translation, not so much in cryptography — and colleagues Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden, tracked down the document, transcribed a machine-readable version and set to work cracking the centuries-old code.

Chris Moody, "New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez: Comments like Romney’s set ‘us back as a party’", Yahoo News 11/15/2012:

Martinez criticized Romney's comments when they were reported in September, and on Wednesday reiterated that she found them "ridiculous."

"It's a ridiculous statement to make. You want to earn the vote of every single person you can earn, whether they be someone who relies on," she said. "Why would you ever write off 47 percent?"

So Pete Wells (who is the NYT's restaurant critic) wrote an epically bad review of Guy Fieri's American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square (sample line: "Somewhere within the yawning, three-level interior of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, is there a long refrigerated tunnel that servers have to pass through to make sure that the French fries, already limp and oil-sogged, are also served cold?").

And Guy Fieri, who has a regular show on the Food Network ("Guy's Big Bite"), struck back with an interview on the Today Show (""I just thought it was ridiculous," Fieri, 44, said Thursday. "I've read reviews. There's good and there's bad in the restaurant business. But that, to me, went so overboard. It really seemed like there was another agenda.")

So does Pete Wells indeed have another agenda?

As soon as I heard that the 5th edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD) had come out, I rushed to the nearest Barnes & Noble bookstore (yes, they still exist — that was Borders that closed) and plunked down two Bens (hundred dollar bills) to buy three copies at $60 each:  one for my office at Penn, one for my study at home, and one for a friend.  The 5th ed. was actually published in November, 2011, but I was in China then, and didn't get a chance to buy my own copies until the day I arrived back on American soil.

Bruce Schneier quotes Stubborn Mule citing R.A. Howard:

Shopping for coffee you would not ask for 0.00025 tons  (unless you were naturally irritating), you would ask for 250 grams. In the same way, talking about a 1/125,000 or 0.000008 risk of death associated with a hang-gliding flight is rather awkward. With that in mind. Howard coined the term “microprobability” (μp) to refer to an event with a chance of 1 in 1 million and a 1 in 1 million chance of death he calls a “micromort” (μmt). We can now describe the risk of hang-gliding as 8 micromorts and you would have to drive around 3,000km in a car before accumulating a risk of 8μmt, which helps compare these two remote risks.

This reminds me of the Google Ngram Viewer's habit of citing word frequencies as percentages, with uninterpretably large numbers of leading zeros after the decimal point:

Uptake by Andrew Sullivan, "Psychopaths All Around Us", 11/13/2012. This stuff sells.

If you're thinking about buying it, you should read "Psycho kids today" and "Is self-involvement really increasing in American youth?".

For the "Word for X" (or "No Word for X") file, from Sidsel Overgaard, "Danes May Bring Back Butter As Government Rolls Back Fat Tax", NPR News 11/13/2012:

Toothbutter: noun. Butter spread so thickly as to reveal teeth marks upon biting.

The fact that this word exists in the Danish language should help to explain what politicians were up against when they introduced the so-called "fat tax" just over a year ago. This is a country that loves it some butter (and meat, and all things dreadful to the arteries).