Language Log

Quite an amazing thread:

A thread of Chinese internet nicknames for NBA players.

China is crazy for the NBA, but official sources use boring phonetic transcriptions, failing to take advantage of Chinese characters having both sound and meaning. Chinese netizens have "improved" on these official names.

— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) May 7, 2018

[To access the complete thread, click at the top of the tweet near the author's name.]

Half a day after the first part of this series, "Cantonese is not the mother tongue of Hong Kongers" (5/4/18), was posted, someone unhelpfully and snarkily asked, "…but are we sure he used the English word 'dialect'?"

That's not the point.

[Cross-posted on LAWnLinguistics.]

I’d imagine that most people who’ve been actively involved with corpus linguistics are familiar with the BYU corpora—a collection of web-accessible corpora created by Brigham Young University linguistics professor Mark Davies. These corpora (and BYU’s corpus-linguistics program more generally) have played an essential part in the development of what I’ll call the corpus-linguistic turn in legal interpretation. The BYU corpora served as my entry-point into corpus linguistics, and they have provided the corpus data that has been used in most of the law-and-corpus-linguistics work that has been done to date. And beyond that, the BYU Law School has played an enormous role, in a variety of ways, in Law and Corpus Linguistics becoming a thing.

One of the things that the law school has been doing has been happening largely behind the scenes. For the past two or three years, people there have been developing the Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA)—a historical corpus that is intended as resource for studying language usage in the time leading up to the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution. At this year’s conference on law and corpus linguistics (the third such conference, all of them hosted by the BYU Law School), we were given a preview of COFEA. And via a tweet by the law school’s dean, Gordon Smith, I’ve now learned that a beta version of COFEA is up and available for public playing-around-with, as are beta versions of two other corpora: the Corpus of Early Modern English and the Corpus of Supreme Court of the United States.

E.E. Fournier d'Albe, "The Talking Film", Nature 1/31/1925:

The demonstration of the De Forest phonofilm at  the Royal Society of Arts on November 26, 1924, and its recent exhibition at the Royal College of Science during the Physical and Optical Societies' Exhibition, showed that the old problem of producing a motion picture endowed with its original sound effects has been brought within hail of a perfect solution.

In an address celebrating the 120th anniversary of Peking University, the president of said institution, Lin Jianhua, misread hónghú zhì 鸿鹄志 ("grand, lofty aspiration") as hónghào zhì 鸿皓志 (doesn't really mean anything).  The blunder swiftly spread on the internet, leading Lin to issue an apology.  See this article in Chinese.

Gráinne Ní Aodha, "German students say English exam that asked them to explain Brexit was unfair", The Journal (Dublin) 5/4/2018:

German students have complained that an English exam that asked them to discuss Brexit, among other things, was too difficult and “unfair”.

Over 35,000 people have signed an online petition to voice their opposition to the challenging English paper, saying that the reading comprehensions and current affairs topics were unfair.

Christopher Schuetze, "Thousands of German Students Protest ‘Unfair’ English Exam", NYT 5/5/2018:

Complaining that your final school exams are too tough is a rite of passage — almost a tradition.

But German students in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg who hunkered down in April to take pivotal final secondary-school exams have gone a step further in their protests about the English-language portion of the test, which they said was absurd, with obscure and outdated references.

More coverage e.g. here.

No, The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is not something dreamed up by Borges, or the Firesign Theatre. It actually exists, or at least it exists in the same state of electronic virtual actuality as Language Log, YouTube, and the Wayback Machine.

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality was established on October 28, 2014 for the purpose of collecting, translating and creating a new vocabulary for the Anthropocene.

Our species (Homo Sapien) is experiencing a collective “loss of words” as our lexicon fails to represent the emotions and experiences we are undergoing as our habitat (earth) rapidly changes due to climate change and other unprecedented events. To this end the The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is solemnly tasked generating linguistic tools to express these changes at the personal and collective level.

Cartographers are redrawing maps to accommodate rising seas, psychologists are beginning to council people on climate change related stress, scientists are defining this as a new age or epoch. The Bureau was thus established, as an interactive conceptual artwork to help to fill the linguistical void in our rapidly changing world.

So say mainland and government spokespersons.  It sounds absurd, but here's the "reasoning", as summarized by Bob Bauer:

Have you heard about HK's latest brouhaha that Cantonese is NOT the mother tongue of HK's Cantonese-speaking population? A bigshot mainland scholar has written that HK Cantonese can't possibly be their mother tongue because it's MERELY a dialect and dialects can't be mother tongues!

Yesterday the Chief Executive Carrie Lam was asked by a legislative councilor what her mother tongue was, but she refused to answer his question and said it was pointless!

Betsy Rymes, "Translanguaging is Everywhere", Anthropology News 4/27/2018:

For over three years now I’ve been keeping a blog about something I call “citizen sociolinguistics”—the work people do to make sense of everyday communication and share their sense-making with others. […]

Topics range from memes and emojis, to cross-posting and Urban Dictionary, to Konglish to Singlish to White American Vernacular English. […]

While these may seem trivial topics, citizen sociolinguistics like this provides a potentially powerful means to voice alternative, local points of views on language and communication.

Moreover, all these examples and dozens more could all arguably be called “translanguaging,” as defined by Ofelia García (2009). That is, “accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximize communicative potential.”

Bob Bauer sent in this photograph of a recent headline from a Hong Kong newspaper:

Yesterday I got two phone calls from an unknown but allegedly local number (267 area code). I was in meetings so I let the calls go to voice mail, and the message turned out to be in Chinese. It seems to be someone claiming to represent FedEx with information about a package that I need to negotiate for:

Calling back yields a message in English "The subscriber you have dialed is not in service. If you feel you've received this message in error, please hang up and try your call again later. Message MN13856". The two letters and the first three digits of the "Message" code are different on each repetition.

Did China "take back" (shōuhuí 收回) Hong Kong from Great Britain or did it "recover" (huīfù 恢復) the former colony?  Even though representatives of the Chinese government have used the former expression in the past, they now insist that there was no "taking back", only "recovering" what was always China's.

On July 1, 1997, was there a “handover of sovereignty” (zhǔquán yíjiāo 主權移交)?  Despite the fact that this phrase was widely used by diplomats to describe what took place between the governments of Britain and the PRC, the Protocol Division of the Hong Kong government is now attempting to retroactively excise this offending language from official publications, including school textbooks.

Dilbert for 5/2/2018: