Language Log

Trader Joe? pic.twitter.com/ICvLmuAoHT

— mass ave curmudgeon (@mass_ave) May 26, 2022

In most varieties of American English, coronal stops (/t/, /d/, /n/) that are not in the onset of stressed syllables are generally realized as ballistic "taps". And in these contexts, lexical (or historical) /t/ also loses its voicelessness.

So for most of us, traitor and trader are homophones.

The following tweet is from four years ago, but it's still relevant today.  Moreover, in reading through the replies to this tweet, I see interesting references to African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and remarkable resonances to Russian, including Vladimir Putin's "meddling".

Reminds me of an old joke.

LINGUISTICS PROFESSOR: In English, a double negative forms a positive. In Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language in which a double positive can express a negative.

STUDENT: Yeah right. https://t.co/s88gMn5u5L

— kyle alex brett (@kyalbr) August 5, 2018

In a comment on "Trends in French sentence length" (5/26/2022), AntC raised the issue of cross-language differences in word counts: "I was under the impression French needed ~20% more words to express the same idea as an English text." And in response, I promised to "check letter-count and word-count relationships in some English/French parallel text corpora, when I have a few minutes".

I found a few minutes yesterday, and ran (a crude version of) this check on the data in Alex Franz, Shankar Kumar & Thorsten Brants, "1993-2007 United Nations Parallel Text", LDC2013T06.

My entire career as a Sinologist has been based on the study of archeologically recovered materials.  I'm talking particularly about the medieval Dunhuang manuscripts, but also the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Tarim mummies and their associated artifacts.  It's no wonder, therefore, that I have featured the importance of archeology for the study of language and linguistics so often in my posts (see "Selected readings" below for a small sample).

Now comes news of the recovery of a spectacular cache of bamboo strip manuscripts from a Chu culture site kindly provided by Keith Knapp (with some Romanizations, links, and annotations by me):

Below is a guest post by Corey Miller:

In the third volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, la duchesse de Guermantes mentions she fortunately doesn’t know any Jews. It’s the middle of the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the nineteenth century. She goes on to mention some tedious ladies who put the words “Mort aux Juifs” (death to the Jews) on their parasols. Mortified by this concept, I searched the internet, curious to see a picture of such an ombrelle.

"Memoirs of a Woman of Long Sentences" (5/21/2022) reproduced a plot from my 5/20/2022 talk at SHEL 12:

In the talk's slides, I used that plot (without the outlier-marking arrow) as a way of  illustrating the obvious point that "Older texts in English tend to have longer sentences".

And in my final slide, I suggested that "French seems different". That (imprudent) suggestion was based on my subjective impression of a few 18th-century works, where it seemed to me that sentence (and especially paragraph) lengths were much shorter in French-language works than in English-language ones from the same period.

Another new term for expressing lack of interest in the present and future in China:

The rise of ‘bai lan’: why China’s frustrated youth are ready to ‘let it rot’

Phrase bai lan gains popularity as severe competition and social expectations leave many young people despondent

Vincent Ni, The Guardian (5/25/22)

This one is borrowed from NBA usage:  "let it rot", referring to players who are on astronomical contracts but are not performing well.  As the son of an organic gardener who also raised earthworms, I can attest that the NBA metaphor was borrowed from the language of composting.

In "Spectrums", 2/24/2022, I described a struggle with magazine editors, long ago, over whether the plural of spectrum should be "spectrums" (which they wanted) or "spectra" (which was then the norm in technical discussions of acoustics, and remains so). In a comment, rpsms noted that

Newton arguably "revived" the word spectrum (at least in scientific work) in "Optiks" and I note that he uses "spectrums." "Spectra" does not seem to appear at all in the printed work.

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce.]

As they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words." Here are two pictures, copy/pasted from Google Images: First, the Japanese periodic table, then the Chinese periodic table. I apologize for the tiny font, but notice how, in the Japanese periodic table, the symbol 'S' has the word for sulfur (硫黄) under it. That pair of kanji, Romanized as iō, is simply an annotation of the international symbol, S, not meant to 'compete with' S. (Glance also at the very long katakana items that appear elsewhere, e.g., for the element Sc or Mt. The nuance that I'm driving at will become clear after you compare the Chinese periodic table further down, and see how S, Sc, and Mt are handled there. No need to know any Chinese or Japanese at all to see what's afoot here.)

(source)

[click to embiggen]

Reading the comments on Sunday's post about verb agreement with data ("Scientist spotting",5/22/2022), I was reminded of a long-ago tussle about a different aspect of Latin morphology in English borrowings. What's the plural of spectrum? Is is "spectra" or "spectrums"?

Today's SMBC:

"Baby Pikachu? Japan panel weighs accepting unconventional readings of kanji for names"

KYODO, STAFF REPORT
The Japan Times (May 19, 2022)

What’s in a name? In Japanese, that’s complicated.  [VHM:  You can say that again!  One of the hardest tasks in my graduate training as a Sinologist was learning how to pronounce Japanese proper nouns correctly.  This is one of the reasons I wrote the dictionary described in this post.]

An advisory body to the justice minister has compiled a draft proposal on whether and how to accept — and record on the family register — unconventional kanji readings of names for newborns and naturalized citizens. In one cited example of so-called kirakira (sparkly) names, it would be acceptable for the kanji characters 光宙 read as pikachū, which could be a hit for fans of the Pokemon universe.

The proposal is part of the ministry’s push for digitalization of the family register, an effort that would be better facilitated by adding hiragana and katakana readings to kanji names.

[This is a guest post by Sara de Rose, responding to requests for more information on the subject prompted by her previous post.]

This post discusses a possible connection between the Mesopotamian tonal system, documented on cuneiform tablets that span over 1000 years (from 1800 BC to 500 BC), and the musical system of ancient China. For a more detailed discussion, see the paper "A Proposed Mesopotamian Origin for the Ancient Musical and Musico-Cosmological Systems of the West and China", Sino-Platonic Papers, 320 (December, 2021) written by myself, Sara de Rose.

Since 1996, twenty-three harps (Chinese: “konghou”) that resemble the angular harp that was invented in Mesopotamia circa 2000 BC have been found in the graves of the Tarim mummies, in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, an area of modern-day, western China. These harps date from 1000 BC to 200 BC (see photo).