Language Log

Chinese drone drops propaganda leaflets on Taiwan's Kinmen
Kinmen Defense Command says fliers 'typical cognitive warfare trick'

By Keoni Everington, Taiwan News | May. 27, 2024

If you're curious about the Chinese original of "typical cognitive warfare trick", it is "diǎnxíng rènzhī cāozuò jìliǎng 典型認知操作伎倆", which might also be rendered as "typical cognitive operation tactic".

A note on the name of the islands:

Kinmen (金門) means 'golden gate'. The name was first recorded in 1387 when the Hongwu Emperor appointed Zhou Dexing to administer the island and protect it from pirate attacks. The spelling "Kinmen" is a postal romanization. This transcription system is a variation of Nanking Syllabary, a system developed by Herbert Giles in 1892. It was adopted by the Chinese Imperial Post, part of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service led by Irishman Robert Hart. It is based on pronunciation in the Southern Mandarin, or Jianghuai, dialect. This dialect is widely spoken in Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, including the city of Nanjing. The Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs uses "Kinmen," while the United States Board on Geographic Names gives "Kinmen Island." Jinmen is the island's name both in Tongyong Pinyin and in Hanyu Pinyin. Chin-men / Chinmen is the Wade–Giles romanization of the county and island's name.

Quemoy, pronounced /kɪˈmɔɪ/, is a name for the island in English and in other European languages. It may have originated as a Spanish or Portuguese transcription of the Zhangzhou Hokkien pronunciation of the name, Kim-mûi. This is the most common form of the islands' name in English. For example, works that deal with the First and Second Taiwan Strait Crises (the Quemoy Incident) and the 1960 United States presidential election debates when the islands received prominent worldwide news coverage all use the word Quemoy. In addition, the former National Kinmen Institute of Technology was renamed National Quemoy University in 2010. Kinmen scholar Wei Jian-feng advocates the use of the word Quemoy to better connect the island to "international society or achieve more recognition in the world". Kimoi is a Hokkien-derived spelling also used in the postal romanization system.

(Wikipedia)

Philip Taylor writes:

I have read this headline over and over again, and I still have absolutely no idea of what it means.

"Sir Patrick Vallance calls for net zero to have immediacy of search for Covid vaccine"

Can you do any better before reading the full article ?

Readers may want to try their luck before they hit "Read the rest of this entry" to see my guess.

Kevin Newsom serves as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (of which there are a total of 13 across the country; since they are the next level below the Supreme Court, their practices and opinions are of great importance).

Judge Suggests Courts Should Consider Using "AI-Powered Large Language Models" in Interpreting "Ordinary Meaning", Eugene Volokh, The Volokh Conspiracy | 5.30.2024

That's from Judge Kevin Newsom's concurrence yesterday in Snell v. United Specialty Ins. Co.; the opinion is quite detailed and thoughtful, so people interested in the subject should read the whole thing. Here, though, is the introduction and the conclusion:

Both for the flow of and access to information.

More than a week ago, the Seattle Public Library system, a large and wonderful institution that thousands rely on every day, went offline after ransomware hackers attacked it.

"Why did ransomware hackers target Seattle Public Library?", GeekWire, by Taylor Soper (May 29, 2024)

This is an excellent article that explains why the criminals went after a library, how they carried out their dirty work, and what the authorities are doing to restore services.

I've been scarce here for a while, due to moving (for a year, while the Quadrangle is reconstructed) and dealing with some overdue professional obligations. Time will continue to be tight for me, and it'll be a couple weeks before I have time for a Breakfast Experiment™ but I'll try to find time for a series of interesting short posts, starting with this one.

English nouns ending in -ics come in several morphosyntactic flavors, some of which act like plurals while others act like singulars.

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]

To take a step or two back towards the Sad Cripples theme, I had the TV on the other day and the show host — echoing the guest, a dietitian — said this:

“Lán Tâi-oân lâng kóng ‘tāu-leng’; gōa-kok lâng kóng ‘tó͘⁺-nài.’”

(Can't remember if he used Tone 3 or Tone 5 on the last syllable.) This could also be written like this:

“Lán Tâi-oân lâng kóng ‘tāu-leng’; gōa-kok lâng kóng ‘豆奶’ (DÒUNǍI).”

= 咱台灣人講「豆乳」。外國人講『豆奶』（DÒUNǍI）。

Again, he wasn't making a point; he was just summarizing an offhand remark the guest had just made to the same effect. While he seems to be referring to Mandarin speakers as foreigners — and they are, in a meaningful sense — there is no way he meant that. Rather, he & the guest were ultimately both referring to the English word soy milk, but calqued into Mandarin as 豆奶 — also a word in Mandarin, but not generally used in Formosa.

Assertively spicy and conspicuously Cantonese

That's almost a contradiction in terms, because Hong Kongers are not very big on spicy food and they generally are not very good at cooking it either.

Photographs of walls in a popular chain of special Yunnan style spicy noodles in Hong Kong:

(Facebook)

Before and after the recently completed sinicization of the Grand Mosque of Shadian, Yunnan, in southwest China:

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-forty-seventh issue:

"Metric Montage in Chinese Poetry," by Conal Boyce.

https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp347_metric_montage_chinese_poetry.pdf

Keywords: Chinese poetry; metric montage; Shěn Zhōu; Lǐ Bái; Lǐ Hè; Frodsham

[Prefatory note:  The material for this post was sent to me by a usually trustworthy source.  Moreover, it comes from a blog that sounds and looks as though it should have done its homework and know its stuff, and the blog drew their material from Madeleine Pelner Cosman’s  Medieval Wordbook that has been in circulation since 1996, with enthusiastic reviews (avg. 4.5) on Amazon.   Cosman (1937-2006) had a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University (1964) and a J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (1995) at Yeshiva University.  She was a professor in the Department of English at City College of New York for nearly three decades (1964-1993), lectured on medieval daily life at the Metropolitan Museum of New York for years, and was active in medical, judicial, and other fields across the United States. I must confess that, as I prepared the post, I felt qualms over the quality of some of the entries.  I should have followed my instincts and investigated further, and apologize for having failed to do so.  Mea culpa — straight from the Middle Ages (Confiteor [1100]).]

You'd be surprised by how many of our most common, comfortable expressions come from the medieval period.  Here are twelve collected by Madeleine Pelner Cosman as part of her book on words and phrases from the medieval period that you are likely to be quite familiar with.

12 Expressions that we got from the Middle Ages, Medievalists.net, May 21, 2024

Crocodile tears

To display insincere sadness. A few ancient and medieval writers believed that crocodiles would cry while eating their victims. The story was spread in England by the 14th-century travel writer John Mandeville. He explains that “these serpents slay men, and they eat them weeping; and when they eat they move the over jaw, and not the nether jaw, and they have no tongue.”

Bring home the bacon

To earn a living or achieve success. This expression dates back to 1104 when a nobleman and his wife dressed themselves as peasants and asked the local Prior for a blessing for not arguing after a year of being married. In response, the Prior gave them a side of bacon. Afterwards, the nobleman gave land to the monastery on the condition they gave couples who accomplished the same deed with the same reward.

[This is a guest post by Charles Belov.  To show what a dedicated, eclectic listener of Asian popular media Charles is, I've left his signature block intact.]

As a frequent, essentially monolingual consumer of Asian popular media, one of the issues for me has always been how translations succeed or fail at communicating both the particular Asian culture and how it can be expressed meaningfully in English. ¿Where does the translation reflect current or past Asian culture and where does it reflect American or British culture of the audience?

A term of concern for me at the moment is "cíxióngtóngtǐ 雌雄同體" (lit. "male female same body"), which Wiktionary translates as "hermaphrodite." However, Wiktionary also notes in the English entry for "hermaphrodite" that this term is now considered offensive and that "intersex" is the preferred term.

We have expressed concern over the quality of training and source materials for Chinese AI and LLMs.  Less than a week ago, we examined "AI based on Xi Jinping Thought (5/21/24), which may be considered as an attempt to "purify" what goes into Chinese AI.  It turns out that there really is a problem, and it is affecting not just China's own AI efforts, but is infecting ours as well.

OpenAI’s latest blunder shows the challenges facing Chinese AI models:
Finding high-quality data sets is tricky because of the way China’s internet functions.
By Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review (May 22, 2024)

As we shall soon see, pursuing this topic takes us into very sensitive, disquieting territory concerning the nature of China's internet.  It will be difficult for us to avoid assessing the quality of China's knowledge basis and information resources overall.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the MIT Technology Review article by Zeyi Yang: