Language Log

From time to time, one encounters Japanese names that evoke bygone days.  In Japan, though, things that are archaic somehow manage to stay alive in the present.  Two realms in which that happens fairly often are place names and surnames.

Mary Constance Parks called to my attention a short post about a "virtual assistant" announced on Tuesday by Baidu, China's largest search engine.

Five years ago, we looked into the nuances of the name "Baidu":

"Soon to be lost in translation" (7/11/10).

Now Baidu is expanding its services with the launching of this new assistant, "Duer", and Mary is eager to know more about the name.

So says Donald Trump — and Fut Azteca:

Jeb Bush uses the word rather 6 times in my sample of 14,429 words, for a rate of 416 per million words; Donald Trump doesn't use this word at all in my sample of 14,746 words.

Jeb Bush uses the word formidable 3 times in my sample, for a rate of 208 per million words; Donald Trump doesn't use this word at all.

[See "The most Trumpish (and Bushish) words" for details…]

In a comment on "The most Trumpish (and Bushish) words", D.O. wrote "It seems that we are missing (at least I was missing) a key piece about Mr. Trump's and Mr. Bush's speaking style. Mr. Bush is using significantly more words than Mr. Trump".

What he means is not that Bush talks more than Trump — in fact, the opposite is true. Thus Donald Trump's announcement of his presidential run totaled about 6,400 words, whereas Jeb Bush's announcement racked up less than 2,300. In the first Republican presidential debate, Trump contributed more than 1,800 words, while Bush contributed less than 1,600.

What D.O. means, I think, is that Bush displays his vocabulary at a greater rate; that is, he uses a larger number of distinct word types for a give number of word tokens. A traditional way to look at things of this kind uses a plot of word type count against word token count. And a type-token plot suggests that Mr. Bush's rate of vocabulary display is indeed greater than Mr. Trumps's:

Chris Cillizza, "Donald Trump’s troll game of Jeb Bush: A+", WaPo 9/8/2015:

The second the Internet alerted me to the fact that someone — a woman in a hat to be specific — had nodded off while on camera at a Jeb Bush event last week, the first thing that came to my mind was: Donald Trump is going to have a field day with this.

Obama, gleefully tossing remaining fucks out of window. https://t.co/osH6aCO1bg

— Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) September 7, 2015

@TimFullerton I will give money especially for that wing. Much prefer it to the "changing the tone" alcove. — Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) September 7, 2015

Stephen Halsey, who is spending the year in Taiwan doing research, observed an interesting linguistic phenomenon that shows the predominance of sound over symbol, even in the writing of Chinese, where the symbols are complex and semantically "heavy" in comparison to phonetic scripts like the Roman alphabet or bopomofo / zhuyin fuhao (Mandarin phonetic symbols), where the symbols are simple and semantically "light".

If you haven't read about the bizarre and disturbing case of Teresa Buchanan at LSU, here are some links: Colleen Flaherty, "Fired for Being Profane", Inside Higher Ed 9/2/2015; Steve Sanoski, "LSU defends firing of associate professor as faculty senate takes up resolution asking officials to reverse decision", Business Report 9/2/2015; Julia O'Donoghue, "LSU Faculty Senate to decide on censure of King Alexander next month", New Orleans Times-Picayune 9/2/2015; Caitlin Burkes, "Faculty Senate postpones vote on LSU president's censure", The LSU Daily Reveille 9/3/2015; LSU Faculty Senate Resolution 15–15 Regarding the Case of Teresa Buchanan; Catherine Sevcenko, "AAUP Censures Louisiana State Over Buchanan Case, Prompting LSU to Play Dirty", The Torch 9/3/2015; Charles Pierce, "LSU Gets Politically Correct", Esquire 9/4/2015; Ryan Buxton, "Fired LSU Professor Teresa Buchanan Says She Still Doesn't Know What She Did Wrong", Huffington Post, 9/8/2015.

Teresa Buchanan has put up a web site, where you can donate to her legal defense fund via the Louisiana State Conference of the AAUP — unfortunately you can only do so by sending a physical check via paper mail.

Making the rounds on Twitter is this discovery by @KingRossco, from the UK Kindle edition of The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot by Blaine Harden:

President Obama has a strange moniker among netizens in China:  Guānhǎi 观海 (“Sea-watcher”).  Variants include Àoguānhǎi 奥观海 ("O'sea-watcher"; cf. "Homa Obama") and Guānhǎi tóngzhì 观海同志 ("Comrade Sea-watcher").

How in the world did Obama acquire this bizarre Chinese nickname?

I they you Trump very great he China said me money going Mexico

Those are the top 13 words at Donald Trump's end of a vocabulary comparison with Jeb Bush. The top 13 words at Jeb Bush's end of the list are:

The state strategy government should create president American in growth of ISIS forces

Click the following links for the whole list, sorted by Trumpishness and sorted by Bushishness.

Over the past week there has been a change in the officially ordained wording of the referendum question about European Union membership that will be put before the people of the United Kingdom some time over the coming two years. On the face of it, the change seems trivial or even pointless, because it does not allow for any new decision to be made by the voters. They will vote either to continue the UK's membership in the EU or to discontinue it. But the change provides a very clear and useful example showing the real-life importance of a linguistic distinction.