Language Log

Since unidentified aerial phenomena (=UFOs) have been in the news recently, so has the "Fermi Paradox". And the Wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox has an interesting linguistic resonance, aside from all the speculation about what communication with aliens might be like. Here's Wikipedia on the original Los Alamos conversation:

In the summer of 1950 at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Fermi and co-workers Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York had one or several casual lunchtime conversation(s).

Herb York does not remember a previous conversation, although he says it makes sense given how all three later reacted to Fermi's outburst. Teller remembers seven or eight of them at the table, so he may well be remembering a different previous conversation.

In one version, the three men discussed a spate of recent UFO reports while walking to lunch. Konopinski remembered mentioning a magazine cartoon which showed aliens stealing New York City trash cans, and as he wrote years later, "More amusing was Fermi's comment, that it was a very reasonable theory since it accounted for two separate phenomena."

Teller remembered Fermi asking him, "Edward, what do you think? How probable is it that within the next ten years we shall have clear evidence of a material object moving faster than light?". Teller said, "10^–6" (one in a million). Fermi said, "This is much too low. The probability is more like ten percent" (which Teller wrote in 1984 was "the well known figure for a Fermi miracle").

At lunch, Fermi suddenly exclaimed, "Where are they?" (Teller's remembrance), or "Don't you ever wonder where everybody is?" (York's remembrance), or "But where is everybody?" (Konopinski's remembrance).

In his major July 1 speech celebrating the 100th anniversary of the CCP, one of Xi Jinping's many pronouncements featuring "blood" was this:

yù xuè fèn zhàn

浴血奋战/ 浴血奮戰

lit., "bathe blood energetic / rousing / fierce battle / fight"

i.e., "fight hard in bloody battles; a bloody fight"

It is hard to pronounce four 4th tones in a row.  Indeed, in normal speech, it is virtually impossible to do so.  When four 4th tones occur in succession, some sort of natural sandhi will arise to obviate that condition.  Most people I know who pronounce this quadrisyllabic expression will convert the third syllable to a light first tone.

Aside from the consonants, vowels, and tones, when one begins the study of Mandarin, one of the first things one learns about the pronunciation of the language is that you cannot have two 3rd tones in succession:  the first one has to become a 2nd tone, e.g., Nǐ hǎo –> Ní hǎo 你好 ("How are you?").

I've been going through old boxes of paper, looking for (the very small fraction of) stuff that I want to keep, and recycling the rest. I'm uncovering many interesting memories, as well as a few things that I have no recollection of at all. Representing the latter category is a faded xerox of the cartoon reproduced below. From the surrounding strata, my copy can be dated to 1988.

This one amounts to a Sinitic spoonerism.

In his major July 1 speech celebrating the 100th anniversary of the CCP, Xi Jinping wanted to impress people with this set phrase:

yízhǐqìshǐ

頤指氣使 / 颐指气使

lit. "chin / jaw / cheek — point out / at [with a finger] — haughty attitude / bearing — command / order / dispatch"

i.e., "(arrogantly / contemptuously) give orders; boss people around (by looks and gestures)"

Instead, what came out of his mouth was this:

yíshǐqìzhǐ

頤使氣指

which might be playfully rendered as something like "beatbrow"

This expression goes back to at least the Tang period (618-907).

I just watched a video of a man interviewing people in Washington Square Park, New York.  He asked each of them a series of leading questions about why they were still wearing masks outside when it was so hot and they had all been vaccinated, and some of them had even contracted the disease and developed immunity to it, plus even the government and the New York Times said there was no longer a need to wear the mask under such conditions.  When many of the people being interviewed said they were going to continue wearing a face mask nonetheless, his next question was "What's the thought process there?"

Japanese giggle words

Daniel Morales has a fun article in Japan Times (7/2/21):  "‘PPAP,’ ‘golden jewels’ and other words that make the Japanese giggle".  It begins:

Unintentional comedy is actually relatively easy to pull off. All you have to do is trip and fall.

Intentionally getting a laugh, on the other hand, takes practice. Especially in a second language. What’s funny in Japan may be different from what’s funny in other countries, but one common thread is that humor can be found in the way you wield the language — any language — not just ドタバタ喜劇 (dotabata kigeki, slapstick).

Knowing the funny words, so to speak, can give students of Japanese a leg up and, fortunately for us, in 2019 the online comedy site オモコロ (Omocoro) conducted an extremely “scientific” survey of 356 Japanese-speaking individuals on the internet to determine the funniest Japanese words. What it found suggests that there are certain patterns that make some words funnier than others in Japanese.

Tweet thread by Rix@Reitoji9

CALLING ALL CHINESE AUTISTICS! The current chinese word for autism is 自閉症 (lit. self, closed, disease). I am looking for a community effort into creating a new word in chinese that is far more positive. Please post suggestions. If you are not chinese, retweets are appreciated!

— Rix (@Reitoji9) June 30, 2021

[This is a guest post by Tom Mazanec]

From Kris V.:

The attached image is of a door in the LRSM building on Penn's campus this morning. The sign in the upper right made me think of your recent Language Log post about "emergent". It's probably just a typo, but I didn't hang around to see what might emerge from the door.

[This is a guest post by Chips Mackinolty.]

Tom Mazanec saw an announcement of a course in Hong Kong, in which the teacher, Dr. Lai Chi Fung 黎智豐, proposes to teach Classical Chinese by focusing on vocabulary for everyday use, just as if one were learning a foreign language. So you learn greetings, introductions, and the like. The idea intrigued Tom, especially since the language of instruction is Cantonese (which would make spoken Classical a little more intelligible than if it were in Mandarin).

If the course were taught in Mandarin, I think it would be a big flop, but since it is being taught in Cantonese, there is a somewhat higher possibility of limited, meaningful spoken communication.  Cantonese preserves more features (phonological, lexical, grammatical, syntactical) of earlier stages of Sinitic than does Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM).  Just in terms of phonology, Cantonese has more than 2,200 possible different syllables, almost twice as many as MSM (source).

Amanda D'Ambrosio, "Mayo Physician Fired Over COVID Book", MedPage Today 6/24/2021:

After publishing a book about his experience on the front lines during the COVID-19 pandemic, a physician was fired from his position at the Mayo Clinic this month, he confirmed to MedPage Today.

Steven Weiss, MD, an internist who practiced at the clinic's Eau Claire, Wisconsin location for 32 years, stated that he was terminated because he identified himself as an employee of the Mayo Clinic in his new book, called Carnage in America: COVID-19, Racial Injustice, and the Demise of Donald Trump.

According to a June 4 termination letter shared with MedPage Today, Mayo Clinic administrators told Weiss, 62, that his actions violated the health system's publishing policy, as he did not submit his manuscript to the institution for review before it was printed.

"I'm still in shock that I was terminated for this," Weiss said in an interview with MedPage Today. "I had no idea that they would claim a right to pre-vet a book before publication."

After reading "Bad poetry, bad translation" (6/18/21), Zihan Guo wrote:

Thank you for sharing this post.

While reading it, its comments, and all the selected readings related to it, I could not help but feel that translating classical Chinese poetry is the way to make sure one really understands it. Back in middle school and high school in China, my teachers would teach poetry and prose through paraphrasing, making them coherent narratives. However, adding things is as detrimental as its opposite. It was not until college that I started to truly appreciate classical Chinese poetry, through producing English translations myself, struggling with its syntactic concision and lack of precision, squeezing meanings from diction and speculating moods from imagery.