Language Log

From AntC:  "Following the thread on South Korea’s English exam, here’s New Taipei promoting topolect diversity. “the goal is to encourage more people to learn Hakka and use the language in daily life.”

New Taipei to reward Hakka test passes with cash
City residents can earn up to NT$4,000 for certified exam passes
Reagan Lai, Taiwan News (Dec. 25, 2025)

The Penghu (/ˈpʌŋˈhuː/ PUNG-HOO,       Hokkien POJ: Phîⁿ-ô͘  or Phêⁿ-ô͘ ) or Pescadores Islands are an archipelago of 90 islands and islets in the Taiwan Strait, about 50 kilometres (25 nautical miles) west of the main island of Taiwan across the Penghu Channel, covering an area of 141 km² (54 sq mi). The archipelago collectively forms Penghu County. The largest city is Magong, on the largest island, which is also named Magong.   …Population 101,758 (2014)    (Wikipedia)

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

“Buddhism among the Sogdians: A Re-Evaluation,” by Todd Gibson.

Random storefront in Taiwan:

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

“Correspondences between Old Chinese and Proto-Celtic Words,” by Julie Lee Wei

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

“The Japanese and Their Language: How the Japanese Made Their Language and It Made Them,” by Samuel Robert Ramsey.

PROLOGUE

Travel the length and breadth of Japan, across the more than 6,800 islands in the archipelago, and anywhere you go, from the Tokyo megalopolis to the most remote and isolated village, every person you meet will immediately understand and speak Nihongo—Japanese. The accents you hear might vary from place to place. There will be odd and unexplained words and pronunciations peculiar to each of these places. But not one person among the more than 126 million citizens of Japan will have any trouble at all understanding the standard language as it’s normally spoken.

No, this is not about Mister Ed. The OED glosses to talk horse as "to talk the language of ‘the turf’; to talk big or boastfully", with quote from T.C. Halliburton's 1855 collection Nature & Human Nature:

Doctor, I am a borin’ of you, but the fact is, when I get a goin’ ‘talkin’ hoss,’ I never know where to stop.

But Sam Slick, the speaker of that fictional quote, is actually talking about a horse-riding incident, which would fit perfectly well in the current equestrian podcast Talk Horse. And I asked the OED about the "talk horse" phrase because of a quote in a collection of 1852-53 articles about Emma Snodgrass: Cross dresser, for which the "talk big or boastfully" sense might be more appropriate.

Photograph from Neil Kubler of a sign in front of a gift shop in Penghu, Taiwan selling Pénghú wénshí 澎湖文石 ("Pescadores aragonite"); its name in Chinese, wénshí 文石 literally means "patterned stone", an apt characterization for this carbonate mineral which is favored by sculptors.

Wiktionary's etymology:

nyce, nice, nys, from Old French nice, niche, nisce (“simple, foolish, ignorant”), from Latin nescius (“ignorant, not knowing”); compare nesciō (“to know not, be ignorant of”), from ne (“not”) + sciō (“to know”).

Wiktionary's etymology:

From Middle English mery, merie, mirie, myrie, murie, murȝe, from Old English meriġe, miriġe, myriġe, myreġe, myrġe (“pleasing, agreeable; pleasant, sweet, delightful; melodious”), from Proto-West Germanic *murgī (“short, slow, leisurely”), from Proto-Germanic *murguz (“short, slow”), from Proto-Indo-European *mréǵʰus (“short”). Cognate with Scots mery, mirry (“merry”), Middle Dutch mergelijc (“pleasant, agreeable, joyful”), Norwegian dialectal myrjel (“small object, figurine”), Latin brevis (“short, small, narrow, shallow”), Ancient Greek βραχύς (brakhús, “short”). Doublet of brief.

From Xinyi Ye:

I was on my way home from HKU (Hong Kong University) and was looking for a dinner place and found this handwritten menu:
(explanations and annotations below)

Xinyi is not a native of Hong Kong, but she has been living there long enough to know the folkways and even to be sufficiently familiar with the local lingo to be sensitive to the special flavor of the menu shorthand on display in the eateries there.

This signboard offers a cornucopia of delicious Hong Kong menu shorthand, starting with the first two items (N.B.:  not all items on the board are distinctively Cantonese, but plenty of them are):

1. dòufù 豆付 (lit., "bean pay") for dòufu 豆腐 ("tofu; bean curd")

2. jiāndàn 煎旦 ("fried dawn") for jiāndàn 煎蛋 ("fried egg")

Friday's On The Media, "Deep Fakes, Data Centers, And AI Slop — Are We Cooked?" has some linguistically-interesting discussion, especially the part about the rise of AI-generated trolling — more on that later. But this post is just a quick note on a widespread symptom of current end-to-end speech-to-text technology, where the text end of the process is letter-sequence tokens of obscure origin, yielding some peculiar spelling errors.

This past semester, the lectures for ling0001 took place in a classroom located in Penn's Annenberg School for Communication, and one of the students in the course asked me something that I've wondered about myself from time to time: Why is it "The Annenberg School for Communication" rather than "The Annenberg School of Communications"?

There are two questions here:

• Why "for" rather than "of", as in most other post-secondary "School of X" institutions?
• Why singular "communication" rather than plural "communications"?

Compare the many web hits for "school of communications", where other programs made the opposite choice of preposition and plurality.

Wikipedia deepens the question by telling us that

The school was established in 1958 by Wharton School alum Walter Annenberg as the Annenberg School of Communications. The name was changed to its current title in 1990.