Language Log

The late 13th and 14th c. portraits of the Mongol khans and their wives often show them with rather light (hazel or greenish) eyes.  For example, the 14th c. portrait of Ögedei Khan (1186-1241) clearly depicts him as having greenish blue eyes and a reddish (definitely light colored) mustache and beard.

(National Palace Museum)

Or is it five nouns, a verb, and two more nouns? "Napa wildfire LNU Lightning Complex Gamble Hennessey Fire – August 2020", SFGate 8/18/2020.

"Napa" is the county; "wildfire" is obvious; "LNU" turns out to stand for "Lake-Napa-Unit" but the initialism is obviously a thing even if we don't know what it means; "Lightning" is what started all the fires recently in California; "Complex" might be the head of a phrase "LNU Lightning Complex" (and that turns out to be right); "Hennessey" is another proper name.

But "Gamble" puzzled me. Is it another place name, or a description of a fire-fighting tactic, or what? And what's the structure of the sequence "Napa wildfire LNU Lightning Complex Gamble Hennessey Fire"?

The story is just a series of captioned slides, in which "Gamble" doesn't occur. So that didn't help.

[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson]

One of the first bits of Nagoya-specific Japanese I picked up was 来名 (raimei), i.e. "come to Nagoya." It added a bit of local color to my lexicon of directional Japanese, which was mostly commonplace but remarkable locutions such as 上京 (jōkyō, go "up" to Tokyo), which gives us the 上り (nobori, Tokyo-bound) and 下り (kudari, away-from-Tokyo-bound) train and expressways. Another of those standard phrases is 来日 (rainichi, come to Japan), which stuck out to me in the same way world maps with Japan in the center had when I first came here as a student almost 25 years ago. The discovery of this new politics of place was one of those experiences that really stuck with me.

Anyway, I feel like Japan is using 来日 less these days. In its place, I see 訪日 (hōnichi) for tourists — not much of that these days, tbf, but 訪日外国人 (hōnichi gaikokujin) was all anyone could talk about last year — and now, in my role as head of a program teaching almost exclusively international students here in Japan, 渡日 (tonichi). I feel like 渡日 is not in common circulation, but is primarily administrative jargon for organizations like mine — and the education ministry over us.

It's not just flapping and voicing of /t/ in words like litter (= "lidder") or pretty (= "priddy"), and word sequences like fat Albert (= "fad Albert"). American speakers tend to weaken all consonants and even consonant clusters in similar environments. So if you take today's ubiquitous "mask debate" news, and add the perceptual biases of someone from an r-less dialect like John Oliver, you get this:

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "I'm like a vampire, except I'm not crossing that threshold even if you invite me."

Yesterday morning I ate breakfast at a Cracker Barrel in Canton, Ohio and in mid-afternoon I had an early dinner at a Dutch Pantry off Route 80 in Pennsylvania.  When the waitress gave me the bill, I noticed that she had written "Be Dank mich!" on the back of it.  There was also what looked to be like the Chinese character shé 舌 ("tongue"), some scribbled Korean, and another script at the bottom that I didn't take time to examine closely (they kept the check and I was in a hurry to get home before midnight).

Or maybe that should be paraparasynthetic. Charles Belov writes:

From "San Francisco’s Lazy Bear rose out of a recession. Can it survive coronavirus?" by Janelle Bitker: "But now, the chefs serve takeout cold-brew coffee, pastries and sandwiches — like hot Wagyu pastrami on sourdough — that they hope taste worthy of a two Michelin-starred restaurant."

I'm okay with split infinitives but this just seems wrong. I would have expected "Michelin-two-starred restaurant."

Ambiguous headline:

"Chinese Citizen Files New Lawsuit Against Authorities Seeking COVID-19 Damages", by Frank Fang (August 13, 2020 Updated: August 13, 2020)

The first two panels of today's SMBC:

Tweet by Thomas Packard:

"There is no best but better". That's deep, Apple.
This is OEM @Apple , right? Gotta be. pic.twitter.com/pBu2Jzl0ll

— Thomas Packard (@sciencethomas) September 9, 2017

Geoffrey Nunberg died earlier today after a long illness.

You can sample his writing via his Google Scholar page, all the way back to his 1977 PhD thesis The Pragmatics of Reference. You can read or listen to a sample of his Fresh Air pieces; check out the links on his old Berkeley web page; delve into his Amazon author page; or look for his insights and influences in many other places.

From Pamela Crossley:

Just read again Chao Wu’s perplexing post on An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China. it mentions “pugu” as “a Hu title.”  This made me wonder about possible connection of “pugu” (however it was originally pronounced) and related series of titles boga / bojilie / beyile, beg / begler, boyar, etc., but can’t see this having been done on the site.  Not being a linguist, I can only express curiosity. but I wonder if “pugu” is an early citation of these medieval Eurasian titles.

Lawrence Downes, "How to turn Sean Hannity into food for worms", WaPo 8/6/2020:

I didn’t set out to compost Sean Hannity. It was something I settled on after considering several other options and rejecting them one by one. The first was leaving him in the basement indefinitely. That worked for a while. I could almost forget about him there, but then I would go down with a basket of laundry and see him and think, I have to do something.

I should explain: I don’t mean the man himself, but Hannity the book. It’s called “Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism.”