Language Log

Matt Taibbi has gotten some teasing for mixing metaphors in a recent Xeet about Bannon's jailing:

That’s . . . a lot of metaphors.

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— Radley Balko (@radleybalko.bsky.social) Jun 7, 2024 at 6:42 PM

When you hear the name "Nebraska", the first thing you think of is probably "corn" and "cornhuskers", at least that was what always passed through my mind.

No longer.  Now having come roughly halfway across this long (430 miles) state and finding myself in Central City, I have gained a keen (I would even say "palpable") sense that it means "flat river".  That's because, from one end to the other, I'm following Route 30 / Lincoln Highway, and it was easy for the surveyors who laid out the Lincoln Highway (our nation's first transcontinental road) to follow the Platte River.  You guessed it, which I also did long ago, that "platte" is French for "flat", and that decidedly is what this river is all about:  flat, flat, flat.

[This is a guest post by Martin Schwartz.]

"Unknown language #10" (12/1/17) left all stumped, including a broad range of superb scholars of many languages.  I have no Rosetta Stone for it, but have something that may be called a Russetta or Rusetta (as in ruse) Bone.

First, the mystery text, which was the focus of Language Log Unknown Language #10,  I reproduce it here as was transmitted there:

Ukhant karapet qulkt kirlerek
Iqat ighun chapuq sireleq,
Poghtu Paghytei Piereleq
Azlayn qoghular eliut karapet.

Now, to the above I give a set of verse found in Aleksandr Kuprin's Russian novel Jama ('The Pit'), 1909-1915:

U Karapeta est' bufet
Na bufete est' konfet,
Na konfete est' portret
Ètot samyj Karapet.

'Karapet has a buffet
On the buffet is a bonbon (vel sim.)
On the bonbon is a portrait,
It's the very same Karapet.'

Angela Giuffrida, "Pope Francis allegedly used offensive slur during discussion about gay men", The Guardian 5/27/2024:

Pope Francis allegedly used an offensive slur during a discussion with bishops over admitting homosexual men into seminaries, several Italian newspapers have reported.

The pontiff, 87, is alleged to have made the remark during a closed-door meeting with bishops in Rome last week, where they were reportedly discussing whether out gay men should be admitted to Catholic seminaries, where priests are trained, a topic that the Italian bishops conference (CEI) is said to have been pondering for some time.

During the discussion, when one of the bishops asked Francis what he should do, the pope reportedly reiterated his objection to admitting gay men, saying that while it was important to embrace everyone, it was likely that a gay person could risk leading a double life. He is then alleged to have added that there was already too much “frociaggine”, a vulgar Italian word that roughly translates at “faggotness”, in some seminaries.

Spotted on the counter for tea/coffee service at the Residence Inn in Omaha, Nebraska:

Having gotten a good earful of Latin last month, Chau Wu was prompted to write this note in response to our previous post on "From Chariot to Carriage" (5/5/24):

“chē 車 ("car; cart; vehicle") / yín 銀 ("silver")”

In my view, these two words are among those most representative of cultural and linguistic transfers from West to East. This comment will focus on 車 chē only. 車 is pronounced in Taiwanese [tʃja] (POJ chhia), quite similar to the first syllable char- of English chariot. I believe, like E. chariot and car which are derived from Latin carrus (see Etymonline on car and chariot), Tw chhia is ultimately also a derivative of L. carrus.

Today's Frazz has a nice metaphor about life cycles:

Which called to mind an odd (to me) new theory about the language of Neanderthals, presented in a 5/20/2024 review essay by Stephen Mithen, "How Neanderthal language differed from modern human – they probably didn’t use metaphors":

[T]he evidence points to key differences in the brains of our species and those of Neanderthals that allowed modern humans (H. sapiens) to come up with abstract and complex ideas through metaphor – the ability to compare two unrelated things. For this to happen, our species had to diverge from the Neanderthals in our brain architecture.

Some experts interpret the skeletal and archaeological evidence as indicating profound differences. Others believe there were none. And some take the middle ground. […]

Today's xkcd is (or should be)  the illustration for a week or two in every introductory course on the sound side of language:

Mouseover text: "Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay."

Oh wow this is an AMAZINGLY FASCINATING find! The 'Chinese characters' seem intractable, but are just phonetically written Mandarin syllables (initial, nucleus, coda):
c(e) 策+ e 額 + (e)ng 鞥 = ceng
Next to it a Manchu transcription: ᡮᡝ᠋᠊ᠩ

I wonder where it comes from? https://t.co/p2T42WANGD pic.twitter.com/z9V2DO5SaC

— Egas Moniz-Bandeira ᠡᡤᠠᠰ ᠮᠣᠨᠢᠰ ᠪᠠᠨᡩ᠋ᠠᠶᠢᠷᠠ (@egasmb) June 4, 2024

Following up on "Crap Lolly Pop" (11/21/2022), Ambarish Sridharanarayanan sent in this xeet, featuring a poster that glorifies the present Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu as the “Bride of Tamil Nadu” instead of the “Pride of Tamil Nadu”, again because of the b/p equivalence in Tamil:

Oops!
Tamil Nadu's banner blunder turns Stalin into the 'Bride' of the state… instead of 'Pride? #BannerFail #TamilNadu pic.twitter.com/3ZJSGGjNw4

— Nabila Jamal (@nabilajamal_) March 5, 2024

Wherein we embark upon an inquisition into the divine proportions of the dodecahedron and its congeners, take a peek at the history of accounting, explore the mind of Leonardo da Vinci, and examine the humanistic physics of Werner Heisenberg*.

[*Heisenberg's father was a professor of medieval and modern Greek studies at the University of Munich in Germany. Heisenberg had more a “humanistic” education, i.e. more Latin and Greek than in natural sciences.  One morning the young Werner Heisenberg discovered reading Plato's Timaeus a description of the world with regular polyhedra. Heisenberg could not understand why Plato being so rational started to use speculative ideas. But finally he was fascinated by the idea that it could be possible to describe the Universe mathematically. He could not understand why Plato used the Polyhedra as the basic units in his model, but Heisenberg considered that in order to understand the world it is necessary to understand the Physics of the atoms. (source)  He contributed to atomic theory through formulating quantum mechanics in terms of matrices and in discovering the uncertainty principle, which states that a particle's position and momentum cannot both be known exactly. (Britannica | Apr 23, 2024)

—————

We have had an exciting, joyful journey through dodecahedra land, from the archeological discovery of a new specimen in England, to deep, dense discussions about the meaning and purpose of these mysterious objects, to scampering through and clambering over a playground installation of a related form.  In this post, I would like to return to the essential twelveness of the dodecahedra.

Jonathan Weinberg sent in a link to this article — Molly Redden, "How A Luxury Trip For Trump Judges Doomed The Federal Mask Mandate", Huffington Post 6/3/2024:

Buried in the April 2022 ruling that struck down the Biden administration’s mask mandate was a section that was unusual for a court decision.

The outcome itself was far from surprising. Places all over the country were dropping local mask requirements, and the judge hearing this case — a challenge to the federal mandate to mask on planes and other public transportation — was a conservative Trump appointee, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle for the Middle District of Florida. Mizelle ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mask requirement overstepped the agency’s legal authority.

What was eye-catching was her explanation of why. In her ruling, Mizelle wrote she had consulted the Corpus of Historical American English, an academic search engine that returns examples of how words and phrases are used in select historical texts. Mizelle searched “sanitation,” a crucial word in the 1944 statute that authorizes the CDC to issue disease-prevention rules, and found it generally was used to describe the act of making something clean. “Wearing a mask,” she wrote, “cleans nothing.”

Searching large linguistic databases is a relatively new approach to judicial analysis called legal corpus linguistics. Although it has gained in popularity over the last decade, it is barely discussed outside of an enthusiastic group of right-wing conservative legal scholars. Which raises the question: How did this niche concept wind up driving such a consequential decision in the country’s health policy?

[This is a guest post by John Mock]

Query about inscription on crystal from Afghanistan.

Face 1 (actual and reverse):