Language Log

More on gendered badass

August 27, 2024 @ 7:33 am· Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and gender, Words words words

Following up on yesterday's "'Badass'" post, here's a recent and relevant article complaining that the word has been bleached into meaninglessness, especially as applied to women — Jackie Jennings, "We Need a Word Besides 'Badass' for Our Heroines", Jezebel 6/3/2024:

I am finished with the b-word. It’s been applied to every woman who has ever been publicly competent at anything. It’s been worked to death and rendered meaningless. Everyone from Courtney Love to Martha Stewart to Rosa Parks has been described as one and, at this point, it’s so overused that to call a woman this is a form of dada performance art.

In short: We simply have to stop using the word “badass” to describe any/every woman on earth who has entered the cultural dialogue for something other than a federal crime. And, I’m not a language cop but just know that if you use “badass” and think it conveys anything at all, you simply must think again.

What was once patronizing and gendered is now maddeningly vague and borderline inscrutable. It’s a collection of AI-generated slay queen, #girlboss memes gathered into a single word.

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The Welsh heritage of Philadelphia

August 26, 2024 @ 4:24 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and education, Language and sports, Names, Toponymy

Whenever I drive through the near northwest suburbs of Philadelphia, the names of the towns and streets there make me feel as though I've been transported to Wales: Bryn Mawr, Bala Cynwyd, Narberth, Uwchlan, Llanalew Road, Llewelyn Road, Cymry Drive, Llanelly Lane, Derwydd Lane…. By chance, through some sort of elective affinity, today I happened upon the following article about that very subject:

"Welcome to Wrexham, Philadelphia and the Welsh language", Chris Wood, BBC (11/12/23)

Rob McElhenney's attempts to learn Welsh provided a highlight of television show Welcome to Wrexham.

But if things had been different, the language may not have been so alien to him – and he might have spoken it in school or even at home.

It was the intention of settlers in parts of his native Philadelphia for the government and people to use Welsh.

However, the attempts in 1681 did not prove as successful as those later in Patagonia, Argentina.

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"Badass"

August 26, 2024 @ 6:41 am· Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and gender, Pragmatics

Screenshot of a post on Threads:

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"I didn’t save you because you’re not important."

August 25, 2024 @ 6:15 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Counterfactuals, Misnegation, Semantics

[This is a guest post from Brett Powley]

I ran into something recently that I thought might be log-worthy. My wife was watching Van Helsing, the TV series, and I heard one of the characters say this:

I didn’t save you because you’re not important.

Now, what he meant was:

I wouldn’t have saved you if you weren’t important.

But the more I thought about this, the more I realised that he said exactly the opposite of what he meant. I wondered why I got the ‘right’ interpretation of this the first time, rather than the plain reading which would be something like:

You’re not important, so I didn’t save you.

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Elective affinities: Japanese bonds of affection

August 24, 2024 @ 7:02 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and philosophy, Language and psychology, Language and science, Language and society, Proverbs

One of my favorite expressions of ineffability in Chinese is yǒuyuán 有緣, which is what two people feel when they are drawn together by some inexplicable, indisputable attraction. Considerations of beauty and practicality are not what matter. They simply are fated / predestined to be together. They have an undeniable affinity for each other.

I first gained a serious appreciation for the idea of affinity in college when I read Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), the third novel of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). The concept was taken up in chemistry (Robert Boyle [1627-1691] — check out his hair!), then sociology (Max Weber [1864-1920]), then in psychology to describe the magnetism between individuals, and in dozens of other fields (commerce, finance, and law; religion and belief; science and technology; business; music; literature; history; mathematics; language studies; etc.). Needless to say, "affinity" is a powerful, productive concept, just as it is an actual force in relations between entities in the microcosm and macrocosm.

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Triple review of books on characters and computers

August 23, 2024 @ 1:48 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Books, Language and computers, Writing systems

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-fourth issue: "Handling Chinese Characters on Computers: Three Recent Studies" (pdf), by J. Marshall Unger (August, 2024).

Abstract
Writing systems with large character sets pose significant technological challenges, and not all researchers focus on the same aspects of those challenges or of the various attempts that have been made to meet them. A comparative reading of three recent books—The Chinese Computer by Thomas Mullaney (2024), Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu (2022), and Codes of Modernity by Uluğ Kuzuoğlu (2023)—makes this abundantly clear. All deal with the ways in which influential users of Chinese characters have responded to the demands of modern technology, but differ from one another considerably in scope and their selection and treatment of relevant information long known to linguists and historians.

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"I" again?

August 23, 2024 @ 7:01 am· Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and politics, Psychology of language

From Bill Clinton's 2024 DNC speech:

I mean look,
what does their opponent do with his voice? He mostly
talks about himself
right?
So the next time you
hear him, don't count the lies.
Count the I's.
Count the I's.
His
vendettas, his vengeance,
his complaints,
his conspiracies.
He's like one of those tenors
opening up
before he walks out on stage like I did, trying to get his
lungs open by singing, "Me, me, me, me, me, me."

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Tones, Then and Now

August 22, 2024 @ 5:51 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language teaching and learning, Pronunciation, Standard language, Tones, Variation

[This is a guest post by Don Keyser]

I was relieved/reassured to read this in Language Log yesterday:

VHM: I myself remember very clearly being taught to say gongheguo 共和國 ("republic") and gongchandang 共產黨 (Communist Party) with the first syllable of each being in the first tone, then being surprised later when the PRC started pushing fourth tone for those first syllables. This sort of thing happened with many other words as well, with, for example, xingqi 星期 ("week"), which I had been taught as first tone followed by second tone, becoming two first tones.

My first Chinese language instructor, Beverly (Hong Yuebi) Fincher, used Chao Yuan-ren's Mandarin Primer. Later I studied a couple years, full-time, at the "Stanford Center" (Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies) hosted by National Taiwan University. Subsequent to that, a half decade later, I spent a year in Mandarin interpreter training at the government's Foreign Service Institute Branch School in Taiwan. In my "spare time" during that program, I studied daily an hour of Shanghainese and "Taiwanese" (i.e., Hoklo, or southern Min, or whatever).

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Regional claims on "yeah no / no yeah"

August 21, 2024 @ 7:38 am· Filed by Mark Liberman under Dialects

For some reason, people from different social groups in different regions all over the world believe that saying (things similar to) "yeah no" and "no yeah" is their special thing.

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A Hainanese mystery

August 21, 2024 @ 4:06 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Phonetics and phonology, Reconstructions, Tones, Topolects

[This is a guest post from Mok Ling.]

Hainanese is rather atypical of Southern Min (閩南) languages, with lots of innovations and retentions not seen in other varieties in the region: it has, for example, implosive consonants (which it shares with Vietnamese), as well as glottal-final 上聲 (a retention from Old Chinese).

The atypical feature I've found most mysterious is the tendency to pronounce the Middle Chinese 去 tone as 陰平. I haven't managed to find a consistent pattern in the words affected by this tonal shift.

Just for context: I unfortunately do not know which part of the island my grandparents are from. I was told ethnic tensions within the Chinese community in the island of Tanjung Pinang (where they eventually settled) discouraged them from transmitting any kind of information about this to their children. Looking at phonetic data compiled online (from the dialect dictionary kaom.net as well as recordings of Hainanese), it seems that our family lect most resembles Qionghainese (瓊海話).

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Personification

August 20, 2024 @ 8:54 am· Filed by Mark Liberman under Peeving, Rhetoric

Most rhetorical devices have classical Greek names, arriving in English through Latin and French: analepsis, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, … But there are some common cases, like personification, where the English word is entirely Latinate, although the Greeks certainly used knew and used the technique. The OED's etymology is "Formed within English, by derivation", and the earliest OED citation is from 1728.

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Sino-Persian chimera

August 20, 2024 @ 7:32 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and art, Language and culture, Orthography, Philology, Phonetics and phonology

We've been on the trail of the griffin for some time: "Griffins: the implications of art history for language spread" (8/9/24), "Idle thoughts upon the Ides of March: the feathered man" (3/11/23) — very important (not so idle) observations about griffins in the pre-Classical West by Adrienne Mayor, with illuminating illustrations. Following the leads in these and other posts, I think we're getting closer to the smoking gryphon (in some traditions, e.g., Egyptian sfr/srf, it is thought to be fiery).

One name from the Middle East rings a bell with a well-known fabulous monster from classical China. That is

…the Armenian term Paskuč (Armenian: պասկուչ) that had been used to translate Greek gryp 'griffin' in the Septuagint, which H. P. Schmidt characterized as the counterpart of the simurgh. However, the cognate term Baškuč (glossed as 'griffin') also occurs in Middle Persian, attested in the Zoroastrian cosmological text Bundahishn XXIV (supposedly distinguishable from Sēnmurw which also appears in the same text). Middle Persian Paškuč is also attested in Manichaean magical texts (Manichaean Middle Persian: pškwc), and this must have meant a "griffin or a monster like a griffin" according to W. B. Henning.