Language Log

From Perry Link, who recently delivered a lecture entitled "How Important is Internet Satire in China?" (October 29, 2013 [see below for abstract]) at Penn:

A note for the true-story joke section of your language log: My son and daughter-in-law were invited to my after-talk dinner at the Han Dynasty restaurant there on Market St.  They googled the place for directions, not using spaces, and then thought: "Hey, wait a minute!  Why are we going to a restaurant named the Handy Nasty?

Athanasia Chalari, "Greeks are ready to change", The Economist (Prospero) 10/24/2013:

Another interesting point about the difficulty in reaching a consensus has to do with social linguistics, how Greeks talk. […]

Greeks are very loud and they interrupt each other very often. The reason for that is the Greek grammar and syntax. When Greeks talk they begin their sentences with verbs and the form of the verb includes a lot of information so you already know what they are talking about after the first word and can interrupt more easily.

The reader who sent in this link noted:

Seems wrong to me–a quick look at WALS finds verb-first languages pretty even scattered over the world, plus many languages that pack more into the average word than Greek does its verbs, but I didn't have the time to test the claim thoroughly. But maybe you could do it, since you have a lot more information about turn-taking than I do.  I was just skeptical that Greek is really that unusual in being 1) verb first and 2) relatively synthetic, so that one gets a lot of information out of the way in the first word of a sentence.  (And all those verb-first, synthetic languages could just as easily lead to nice, harmonious exchanges of short sentences. I can imagine being more likely to interrupt if the crucial bits were at the end, since I would be inclined to say "get on with it!" or "You're wrong!" out of impatience.)

I'm surprised that, until today, I had never heard of the novel entitled Yīnggélìshì 英格力士 (English) by Wáng Gāng 王刚, which was published in 2004.  Now, thanks to Bruce Humes's article, "The 2013 Istanbul Book Fair, Xinjiang Connections and 'English'", posted November 3 on his blog called "Altaic Storytelling:  Tales from Istanbul to Heilongjiang", I'm delighted to learn about this fascinating book.

Jeroen van de Weijer writes, "This morning I came across two signs in my street, Mengzi Lu in Shanghai":

Hezy Laing, "Examining Edenics, the Theory That English (and Every Other Language) Came From Hebrew", The Tablet 10/31/2013:

What if one day, instead of speaking hundreds of different languages, all of humanity suddenly began speaking the exact same language? More incredibly—what if we already do? A new movement called “Edenics” makes the claim that modern day English is simply a derivative of biblical Hebrew. In fact, the proponents of this theory say that all human languages are simply offshoots of Hebrew and claim to have thousands of examples to back them up.