Archive for February, 2025

Kape: the language rope that binds the people of a remote Indonesian island

Francesco Perono Cacciafoco, an associate professor of linguistics at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, called my attention to this article he wrote for The Conversation (1/26/25), "Finding ‘Kape’: How Language Documentation helps us preserve an endangered language". He and his research team are currently doing intensive fieldwork on the languages of the remote Indonesian island of Alor, which lies northeast of Timor-Leste.  Their purpose is to document and preserve endangered languages.  Among the endangered languages they have discovered and first documented is Kape, which I will discuss in more detail below.

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The Power of Naming

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

Overview: Here we look at some technical terms and how they’ve fared since their release to, or adoption by, the public: information theory; (TW) the colored quarks of Nambu and Han; cosmic‑ray decay according to Millikan; the Sinitic languages (Mair) vs. ‘the Chinese language’ (misnomer); Wu’s cosmic chirality as the violation of a nonNoetherian principle.

① information theory is the mother of all factoids. Why would one call it that? Because there is no such thing, only the following phantom utterance that is ubiquitous: “Shannon’s information theory.” In 1948, Shannon wrote a paper on the mathematics of data‑communication technology, and named it accordingly. Put off by its name, science journalists introduced it to the world as “information theory.” The name stuck, suggesting in the minds of innocents something so deep and epochal that it might even shed light on Mozart. Shannon 1948 is the big example of how of data and information have been confounded for 3/4 of a century, but it is accompanied by innumerable smaller cases, as when Susskind argues that “in physics we treat them as pretty much the same thing” (paraphrase; details in Appendix A). Here is a rough‑and‑ready demonstration of how different they actually are: “Go.” ←That’s just data, but place it in a context, and a layer of information now “rides on it” (or floats above it, on a different plane) such that this is conveyed: “Go to the store now before it closes”; or this: “Fly now to Hiroshima and drop the bomb.” True, in shop‑talk and hallway conversations, a database developer or data‑comm engineer might toss the terms data and information around as if one believed them to be interchangeable. Then, overheard by someone in the world at large, such casual usage is easily misconstrued, leading astrophysicists to fret in public over the “information” that might be “lost” in a black hole. (As for an actual Theory of Information, we must wait for a superintelligent computer to produce it since that task is far beyond human ability. And once coughed up, it will be so lengthy as to require several lifetimes to read it, and in any case, largely incomprehensible to us.)

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Sincerity

Two colleagues noticed that the PRC government often rebukes other countries for lacking sincerity, and they asked me if Chinese had a different understanding of sincerity that permitted / encouraged them to do so.  "Sincerity" is so front and center in Chinese negotiations with other nations that one soon comes to realize, if you want smooth relations with the PRC, you must needs demonstrate to the Chinese representatives that you are utterly sincere, i.e., that you are willing to do exactly what they want you to do.  Anything less opens you to the charge of being insincere.

My colleagues asked me if there is something special about the Chinese conception of sincerity, i.e., does it have special Chinese characteristics" (jùyǒu Zhòngguó tèsè 具有中国特色)?  Just as it is an article of faith for the CCP that socialism in China comes with special characteristics (Zhōngguó tèsè shèhuì zhǔyì 中国特色社会主义).

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Japanese, Chinese, and English mixed language and script

In several recent posts, we've been exposed to a few Japanese speakers who tried to write their language without recourse to kana (the two Japanese syllabaries), i.e., kanji only.  I myself thought it was ridiculous / laughable and didn't work well at all.

Now we come across an even more quixotic quest, one where some folks combine Japanese, Chinese, and English languages (lexicons and grammars) and scripts to create a hybrid linguistic amalgam.

Below, I will show several examples of what the resultant combinations look like.  I will not translate or transcribe the sample texts, because — even if you don't know all three languages and scripts, you will be able to get an idea of how this experiment works .  I will only give a paraphrase of what portions of the texts mean, especially the fourth one, because it is the most overt in declaring its modus operandi.

In actuality, that was my original intention, but I ended up paraphrasing all of the passages, although I'm not entirely certain that I caught the nyuansu ニュアンス ("nuance") of each and every word.

For all the samples, I have endeavored to smooth out the three languages and three scripts into a single English rendering.

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No, no, no; yes, yes, yes

I have a close friend who is in the habit of saying, "no, no, no; yes, yes, yes", "yes,yes,yes; no, no, no", "yes, no", "no, yes", etc., etc., usually accompanied by various, animated hand and head gestures.  There are many fine gradations of the degree to which he agrees or disagrees with you, though normally his pronouncements reflect a combination of agreement and disagreement.

What he means by these locutions depends upon the degree to which he is in agreement with you.

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"WHO is who it is"

Recent events invite a reprise of the famous Abbot and Costello skit — and Josh Johnson has obliged:

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Stand in / on line

When you queue up, do you "stand in line" or "stand on line"?

This question was prompted by Nick Tursi who remarked:

Two of my colleagues are both from Brooklyn. They frequently say standing / waiting “on line” rather than “in line” when referring to queueing

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