Language Log

"Google Translate learns 24 new languages"
Isaac Caswell, Google blog (5/11/22)

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"A person, usually a woman, who is trained to assist women in childbirth."  AHDEL

But not always a woman:

Men rarely practice midwifery for cultural and historical reasons. In ancient Greece, midwives were required by law to have given birth themselves, which prevented men from joining their ranks. In 17th century Europe, some barber surgeons, all of whom were male, specialized in births, especially births requiring the use of surgical instruments. This eventually developed into a professional split, with women serving as midwives and men becoming obstetricians. Men who work as midwives are called midwives (or male midwives, if it is necessary to identify them further) or accoucheurs; the term midhusband (based on a misunderstanding of the etymology of midwife) is occasionally encountered, mostly as a joke. In previous centuries, they were called man-midwives in English.

(source)

I have often wondered about the meaning and origins of the term "midwife".  My wonderment was piqued recently by several comments on this post:  "Wondrous blue" (5/9/22).

From Will Bunch, "In wagering on Doug Mastriano, Josh Shapiro plays a dangerous game for Pa.", Philadelphia Inquirer 5/8/2022:

The Democrats should have learned their lesson in 2016. In this millennium, it’s impossible to underestimate the power of “tha crazy” coming out of a Republican Party base in which not only a majority of voters now believe 2020′s Big Lie that the last election was somehow stolen from Trump, but in which an alarming number are waiting for John F. Kennedy Jr. — last seen when he died in a 1999 plane crash — to expose a baby-eating cabal of Democratic pols and Hollywood stars and maybe arrest Anthony Fauci for treason.

If I were a cruciverbalist, I might use that as a clue for "hammock", though it didn't turn up here:

https://www.wordplays.com/crossword-solver/sailor%27s-bed

nor here:

http://crosswordtracker.com/clue/sailors-bed/

but it was first here:

https://crossword-solver.io/clue/sailor%27s-bed/

With somer a-comin' — though spryng has barely sprung, at least not in these parts — it's time to drag out our dusty, trusty hammocks and hang them between two trees.  But, historically, just what is a "hammock", and where did the word come from?

From the abstract of Sunghye Cho et al., "Lexical and Acoustic Speech Features Relating to Alzheimer Disease Pathology", published in Neurology on 4/29/2022:

Background and Objectives: We compared digital speech and language features of patients with amnestic Alzheimer’s disease (aAD) or logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA) in a biologically confirmed cohort and related these features to neuropsychiatric test scores and CSF analyses.

[…]

Discussion: Our measures captured language and speech differences between the two phenotypes that traditional language-based clinical assessments failed to identify. 

From an editorial by Federica Agosta and Massimo Felippi, "Natural Speech Analysis: A Window Into Alzheimer Disease Phenotypes", published in Neurology on 5/4/2022:

Compared to a standard language assessment, the automated analysis of natural speech is more complex and requires a larger amount of time to be post-processed. On the other hand, as is well demonstrated by this study, analysis of natural speech provides information at several levels of language production. Even though data are extracted from only one recorded minute of speech, the tool is able to detect subtle differences among groups, reflecting the patient’s daily experience in a more realistic way than the standard speech and language assessment. Its use has already produced important achievements in distinguishing different language phenotypes. Furthermore, differently from other studies, the work of Cho et al proposed an automated and reproducible method that highly reduces the time of speech analysis and increases the inter-rater reliability.

#OldEnglish #WOTD: wundor-blēo, n.n: a wondrous colour. (WUN-dor-BLAY-oh / ˈwʌn-dɔr-ˌbleːɔ) Image: Panther in a bestiary; England, c. 1226-1250; @bodleianlibs MS. Bodley 764, f. 7v. pic.twitter.com/nHqwdYElVh

— Old English Wordhord (@OEWordhord) May 5, 2022

S.I. reports:

In a message from my building management:

Dear Valued Residents
A note to let you know that the water is back on. We apologize for your patience.

…and asks:

Is there a name for this kind of error?

From John O'M.:

Is this a bed for self-heating dogs?

Or a self-heating bed for dogs?

As seen on Weibo: Shanghai residents go to their balconies to sing & protest lack of supplies. A drone appears: “Please comply w covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.” https://t.co/0ZTc8fznaV pic.twitter.com/pAnEGOlBIh

— Alice Su 蘇奕安 (@aliceysu) April 6, 2022

On my dining room wall there's a painting of a woman, a child, a horse, and some ducks. The woman is Marussia Burliuk, wife of David Burliuk. As I wrote a few years ago, Marussia and David were friends of my grandparents, among many that I thought were aunts and uncles when I was small.  I've been thinking about the Burliuks recently, because of their origins in Ukraine.

So I re-read Burliuk's 1926 "Radio-Style" Manifesto more thoroughly than I had before. You can read it yourself here.

[This is a guest post by Sara de Rose.]

Calendars, old and new, are based on astronomical cycles: the yearly cycle of the sun; the monthly cycle of the moon. But there is one unit of time that doesn’t adhere to any celestial rhythm: the seven-day week.

Celsus, a second century Greek philosopher, wrote that the week-day order is based on “musical reasons…quoted by the Persian theology.” 

Persia (Iran) was the neighbor of Mesopotamia (Iraq). Archaeological artifacts suggest that the two cultures shared the same musical system, and cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia have allowed archaeologists to re-construct this system. The consensus is that, from at least 1800 BC, the Mesopotamians used a seven-note scale that is the ancestor of our modern major scale – and the structure of this scale was understood to be related to the sequence 4,1,5,2,6,3,7. 

I was aware of this article more than four years ago when it first appeared, but didn't post on it then because I didn't think many people would be interested in it:

"Forget Marx and Mao. Chinese City Honors Once-Banned Confucian", Ian Johnson, NYT (10/18/17)

(Credit: Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times)

Now that we're on a Chinese calligraphy and philosophy roll and have a number of robot calligraphy posts under our belt (see "Selected readings" below), writing a post about a robotic philosopher-calligrapher is not so outlandish after all.

AntC sent in this snippet of Taiwan history overlaying today's native culture rights movement:  Taiwan News (in English); Liberty Times Net (in Mandarin).  The articles tell a tale of vast amounts of gold stashed away by Japanese colonialists and treasure seekers trying to find it now three quarters of a century later.  The photograph of the excavation site in the latter article looks pretty hit or miss.

Allegedly, the fleeing Japanese occupiers buried gold somewhere near Taitung (city; county) in the  Jhihben Hot Springs (Zhīběn wēnquán 知本溫泉) area. This is a steep gorge running into the mountains southwest of Taitung. There are plentiful thermal springs in the gorge, with huge resort-hotels that (before Covid) were a magnet for Japanese tourists.