Language Log

From the Wikipedia article on Martin Foss (1889–1968), the German-born American philosopher, professor, and scholar:

Foss provides a fascinating and important theory for how change happens in life—a theory that has been unmatched by no other philosopher.

(source)

Possible solutions:

–> matched by no other philosopher

OR

–> unmatched by any other philosopher

A recent xkcd:

An image symbolizing how American English pronoun usage has changed since 2004 — in undergrad residences at Penn, these buttons were distributed for use in start-of-semester meetings this fall:

So exclaimed a graduate student from the PRC.  She was decrying the new teaching methods for Mandarin courses in the West that do not emphasize copying characters countless times by hand and taking dictation (tīngxiě 聽寫 / 听写) tests, but rather relying on Pinyin (alphabetical) inputting to write the characters via computers.

These are topics we have discussed numerous times on Language Log (see "Selected readings" below for a sample of some of the posts that touch on this subject.  I told the student that this is indeed a fact of life, and that current teaching methods for Mandarin emphasize pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, etc., and that handwriting the characters is no longer a priority.  Whereas in the past handwriting of the characters used to take up over half of a student's learning time, now copying characters is reduced to only a small fraction of that.

[This is a guest post by Bernard Cadogan]

Epic comes from a Greek word for a word or spoken language, epos. Logos is another word like that which we know. The first emphasises articulation, the latter organisation.
 
Epic features in many cultures and comes in different varieties. China and the Sinitic civilisations lack it, as do the nomadic Semitic and Amazigh peoples of the Middle East and North Africa. Egypt had no epic. The hero form involving journeying –  Gilgamesh and the Odyssey and Beowulf – is one form. The most stringent form resembles the Iliad, which is the most perfect epic composed. It consists of multiple actors involved in a single action within the context of a wider struggle. This is what Crete 1941 resembles. There is no single hero. There is no single baddie. The complexity of war is fully invoked as well as the necessity to fight it.

From Geoffrey Wade, of all people:

[This is a guest post by Lizhou Sha]

As a long-time reader and fan of Language Log, I'd like to call your attention to an unusual appearance of reconstructed historical Chinese pronunciations in the newly released Age of Empires IV, the latest of a popular real-time strategy (RTX) game series by Microsoft. I found an excellent YouTube video by a player named Der Rote where he systematically featured the voiceover lines of the Chinese units and did an excellent job rendering them into modern Mandarin:

Article by Rhoda Kwan, Hong Kong Free Press (31/10/21):

‘The loss of language is the loss of heritage:’ the push to revive Taiwanese in Taiwan

"You can't completely express Taiwanese culture with Mandarin – something is bound to be lost in translation," says one advocate for the local language.

When I go to Taipei, I seldom hear Taiwanese being spoken, especially by people under forty or fifty.  That is always saddening to me, especially considering the fact that about 70% of the total population of Taiwan today are Hoklos.

…

The rare usage of Taiwanese, particularly on the streets of its capital Taipei, is a legacy of decades of colonial rule. During 50 years under Japanese rule, and the Kuomintang’s subsequent martial law from 1949 to 1987, generations of Taiwanese were banned from speaking their mother tongue in public.

“A whole generation’s learning in this language was washed away, and with this language a culture and identity was also washed away,” said Lí Sì–goe̍h, a Taiwanese language advocate.

Before the arrival of the Kuomintang, Taiwanese – a language from China’s Fujian province also referred to as Taigí, Taiwanese Hokkien, Hoklo or Southern Min – was spoken by most Han immigrants who arrived on the island from the 17th century onwards. Other languages, including other Chinese languages such as Hakka and dozens of different Austronesian indigenous languages, were also spoken on the island, a reflection of the diversity of ethnic groups that have lived on the island for centuries.

Friday's xkcd: