Language Log

We have often experienced vexation and consternation over the future of Taiwanese / Hoklo, especially in light of what's happening to Cantonese in the PRC.  Now comes some welcome news from Ilha Formosa.  A renewal of Taiwanese has recently been spurred by a least expected source, China.

Chinese Pressure Fuels an Unlikely Language Revival in Taiwan:

Local tongues gain popularity as more people on the self-ruled island, where Mandarin predominates, disavow their connection with China

By Joyu Wang, WSJ (12/22/21)

Pranav Mulgund remarks:

A recent aversion to the CCP has pushed people in Taiwan to stop speaking Mandarin. For instance, “One enthusiastic participant is Lala Sin, a 35-year-old mother of three, who has largely avoided speaking Mandarin Chinese, the most used language in both Taiwan and China, since last winter, instead talking with her children exclusively in Taiwanese Hokkien, or Taigi (pronounced 'dye-ghee')”. Teachers of the language have experienced a tripling in enrollment from 2012 to 2020. I think it’s quite an interesting idea to revolt through language. It’s obviously not an unprecedented idea, but quite fascinating to happen in modern times.

Tweet from Alan DAI:

“the people’s paper” 老百姓报, a wall newspaper in yan’an, june 1937 — note that it is written with latinxua sin wenz, a romanization system developed by chinese and soviet sinologists during the early 1930s that did not mark tones and used a lot of fun x’s and z’s pic.twitter.com/vTMA7cUhKQ

— alan DAI (@dai_alan_dai) December 21, 2021

[Click on the photograph to see the complete Twitter thread, which has additional illustrations of printed Latinxua texts.]

The Japanese love to borrow foreign words into their language, tens of thousands of them, but when they do, they usually put their own stamp on them.  This year's word of the year is a good example:

Laid-Back Loanword “Chirui” Chosen as One of Japan’s Words of 2021:

The English phrase “chill out” inspired the adjective chirui, which was selected by dictionary publisher Sanseidō as its word of the year for 2021.

nippon.com (12/10/21)

Here they've created an adjective based on the English phrase "chill out".

"In political terms, then, French and Americans were not arguing about equality but about freedom."

You might think that this sentence refers to recent socio-political differences, or maybe to contrasts between the French and American revolutions in the 18th century. But actually it refers to 16th- and 17th-century encounters between Catholic missionaries and native Americans, and the influence of those encounters on European political theories. It comes from the recent book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

The tiger is the coming year's representative in the sexagenary cycle, the 60-term cycle of twelve zodiacal animals combined with five elements / phases in the traditional Chinese calendar; currently used in Japan for years, historically also for days; widely applied in Chinese astrology. (source, see also here, here, here, and here)

In Sinitic languages, the 60-year cycle is known as gānzhī 干支 (Sino-Japanese [on'yomi] pronunciation kanshi), i.e., "(calendrical) heavenly / celestial stems and earthly / terrestrial branches".  In Japanese [kun'yomi], 干支 may also be read as "eto", but that is usually written in kana as えと.

I've often wondered about the etymology of the "eto" pronunciation of 干支.  Here is what Wiktionary tells us:

The combination of 兄 (え, e; elder brother) and 弟 (と, to; younger brother); the original meaning is 兄弟 (brother). Derived from this term, the elder is adopted as "positive" and "heavenly stems", the younger is adopted as "negative" and "earthly branches".

Not sure I can follow all of that, but at least it is something.

Today's xkcd:

The mouseover title: "Thanks to the ForcedEntry exploit, your company's entire tech stack can now be hosted out of a PDF you texted to someone."

This NYT link text needed a second reading for me to break the initial prepositional phrase after "Bruce Springsteen", and start the main-clause subject conjunction with "Bob Dylan":

Like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tina Turner and others have all sold rights to their music for eye-popping prices.

Zeyao Wu sent me this photograph that she found online:

I do not recall ever having Russian words of the year featured on Language Log, so it's a delight to have the opportunity to do so now.  They were called to my attention by Don Keyser, who spotted this piece in Novaya Gazeta this morning:

Норм и обнуление — Подведены итоги конкурса «Слово года»-2021. Особая конкуренция — в номинации «антиязык»

05:29, 19 декабря 2021  Андрей Архангельский, член экспертного совета «Слово года»

—-

Norm and zeroing

The results of the competition "Word of the Year" -2021 have been summed up. Particular competition – in the category "anti-language"

5:29 am, December 19, 2021

Andrey Arkhangelsky, member of the expert council "Word of the Year"

Don remarked:

Keeping up with the grimly evolving Russian language — neologisms, protoneologisms … the narrative is simultaneously enlightening, droll, and rather sad.

You can get a pretty good rendering via either DeepL or Google Translate. FYI, I've copied below the article the Google Translate rendering.  It doesn't do the embedded chart, of course, but the content of the chart is explained in the article.

Article in South China Morning Post (12/18/21):

My Hong Kong by Luisa Tam

Cantonese is far from dead. It lags Mandarin in the Chinese language league table for numbers, but its cult status will see it live on

    Cantonese is a one-of-a-kind linguistic art form that’s quirkier and more edgy than Mandarin, nimble and ever-changing

    Its long-term fate is in the hands of every Cantonese speaker and Cantonese-language enthusiast who is willing to continue to breathe new life into it

In this, her most recent article on the nature and fate of Cantonese, Luisa Tam, a favorite author of ours here at Language Log, is upbeat about the future of the language.  I love Cantonese as much as she / anyone does, but I am less sanguine about what lies ahead for it than Luisa is.  As I said several days ago during a faculty meeting at Penn, there's no one who is more passionate about about defending and promoting Cantonese than VHM.  Why, then, am I so pessimistic about what is in store for this lively language?

Before I answer that question, let's see why Luisa Tam is so positive about Cantonese in the coming years.  Here are some selections from her article:

Mark Swofford sent in this photograph of a clever, curious sign at an automobile repair shop in Taiwan:

Two days ago, I met a person who had a thick white coating on their tongue.  Wondering what it was called and its implications for health, I asked members of the e-Mair list about it.  Here are some of the answers I received:

Denis (Sinologist):

Thick tongue coating, often due to lengthening of the keratinous papillae on the tongue's surface.

Heidi (Yoga teacher and Ayurveda specialist):

We call it "ama" in Ayurveda – accumulated toxins from undigested foods. The person who has it might be ill. I scrape my tongue every day

From Proto-Indo-Aryan *HaHmás, from Proto-Indo-Iranian *HaHmás, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂eh₃mós (“raw, uncooked”), from *h₂eh₃- (“to burn”). Cognate with Ancient Greek ὠμός (ōmós, “raw, crude, uncooked, undressed”), Old Armenian հում (hum, “raw, uncooked”), Old Irish om (“raw, uncooked”) (whence Irish amh), Persian خام‎ (xâm, “crude, raw”).

(source)

VHM:  In some Indic languages it means, among other things, "undigested", as Heidi noted for Ayurveda in general.

Dan Piraro, "Changing Channels", Bizarro Blog 12/12/2021: