Archive for December, 2020

No more plosive consonants: flay your fart!

A video by Peter Prowse has been making the rounds:

You might recall a similar French-language video last spring, which Mark Liberman shared in his May 1 post, "Rire la Rémumligne!" In fact, there were several versions of this floating around, all based on a text originally shared on Facebook by the physicist François Pla under the pseudonym Sam Anchman. (More information here and here.)

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Birthday patty

Liwei Jiao sent in this screenshot:

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Juicy chicken

Mark Swofford sent this photograph of a dish on a menu in a Taiwanese restaurant chain:

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Non-Han writing in the PRC: A new series

[Blog post today by Bruce Humes]

VHM:  Since I know about half of the authors and translators in this series, I am pleased to see them and their cohort getting wider recognition and circulation.


"'Multi-ethnic' Literature: Yilin’s 2020 Cache of Fiction by non-Han Writers"

As your year-end holiday lockdown fast approaches, it’s worth noting a new series of books by non-Han writers launched this year by one of China’s best-known publishers, Yilin Press — lit., “translation forest” — that is normally associated with marketing popular foreign-language fiction in Mandarin for Chinese readers.

The name of the series itself, Library of Contemporary Classics by China’s Multi-ethnic Writers (中国当代多民族经典作家文库), is notable, because it employs the term “multi-ethnic” rather than the former politically correct, ubiquitous reference to “minority ethnic” literature (少数民族文学) that must surely have rankled some.

I will write more about the worrisome outlook for mother-tongue, multi-ethnic literature out of China — given moves to severely restrict education in Uyghur, Tibetan and Mongolian, and the ongoing incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Turkophone people in Xinjiang — but for now, here are the titles in Yilin’s new series (so far available only in Chinese) with a bit of background info and links:

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The best statistical test

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Who created batik? Who appropriated batik?

This is something I wanted to write about back in mid-July, but it fell victim to my backlog of thousands of e-mails.  Now, slowly, slowly, slowly, I'm catching up, and I find that it's still a worthy topic to post on.

"‘China, master copycat’: uproar in Indonesia at Xinhua’s batik claim"

Xinhua released a video saying batik is a traditional craft ‘common among ethnic groups in China’, sparking protests by Indonesians on social media

There are long-standing disputes over the origins of food and traditions such as batik, rendang and nasi lemak among Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore

Randy Mulyanto, SCMP 7/14/20

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"Under plenty of perjury"

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The Scalia/Garner canons: Departures from established law

Previously:
Robocalls, legal interpretation, and Bryan Garner
The precursors of the Scalia/Garner canons

In my last post, I talked about the precursors of the canons from Reading Law that are the primary subject of this series of posts. As I explained there, the Last Antecedent Canon and the Nearest Reasonable Referent Canon are adapted from what is generally known as the Rule of the Last Antecedent (which you should remember not to confuse with the Last Antecedent Canon). And the Series Qualifier Canon was inspired by the pronouncement in a 1920 Supreme Court case that “that “[when] several words are followed by a clause which is applicable as much to the first and other words as to the last, the natural construction of the language demands that the clause be read as applicable to all.”

The purpose of that exercise in intellectual history was to provide the background that’s necessary in order to understand the present post, which will talk about the ways in which the three canons depart from the law as it existed before Bryan Garner and Antonin Scalia wrote Reading Law. Although those departures probably aren’t especially significant in the case of the Last Antecedent and Nearest Reasonable Referent canons (putting aside the confusion and complication they cause), the same isn’t true with respect to the Series Qualifier Canon.

As we’ll see, the default interpretation that is prescribed by the Series Qualifier Canon in a big category of cases is precisely the opposite of what would be prescribed by the Rule of the Last Antecedent. That change is, as far as I’ve been able to determine, unjustified by the caselaw (including the caselaw that was the Series Qualifier Canon’s inspiration). Nor is there any other justification I can think of.

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MuRIL

[Note that the "To view or add a comment" message is from LinkinIn, not LLOG…]

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Resignate

This morning NPR reported on a woman who was "resignated" from her position at Google — that is, she says she was forced to resign. The Urban Dictionary's definition of resignate, `to force or otherwise cause the resignation of someone or something', clearly fits the context of being resignated from a job. This verb is an interesting example of an analogic back-formation from the noun resignation, based on analogic models like designate/designation.

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Macaque and Old Sinitic reconstructions

I've long been deeply intrigued by the word "macaque".  It's an odd-looking term with a murky history, but somehow it just seems to fit the creature that it designates.

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed.:

French, from Portuguese macaco, of Bantu origin; akin to Kongo makako, monkeys : ma-, pl. n. pref. + -kako, monkey.

Online Etymology Dictionary:

East Indian monkey, 1757, from French macaque, from Portuguese macaco "monkey," a Bantu word brought from Africa to Brazil (where it was applied 17c. to a type of monkey there).

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Own goal of the week

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Congratulate

Akito commented on "Affidavid", 12/12/2020:

"Congrajulate" rather than "congrachulate" now seems to be the more common AmE pronunciation for "congratulate". As an EFL learner, I accept it as fact, but wonder if this is an isolated case or part of a tendency.

I responded:

There's a general tendency in American English (and some other varieties) for lenition of intervocalic consonants when the second vowel is unstressed. When the consonant is /t/, this regularly produces (flapping and) voicing, perhaps for the reasons discussed in "Hysteresis" (12/4/2020). So it's not a surprise to see a similar effect with a palatal consonant — but this version of "congratulate" indeed seems to have been lexicalized.

That last statement is obviously in need of support, wherefore this post.

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