Language Log

Song by a Taiwanese band with sinographic and romanized transcriptions of the lyrics in the center and Mandarin translation at the bottom as subtitles, via Bilibili:

Florida 12-year-old Bruhat Soma wins 96th Scripps National Spelling Bee after competition’s second-ever spell-off

By Sydney Bishop and Christina Maxouris, CNN (5/31/24)

—

Bruhat Soma, 12, of Florida won the 96th Scripps National Spelling Bee Thursday night after defeating all seven other finalists and beating his final competitor in the Bee’s second-ever spell-off.

Bruhat spelled 29 words correctly during that spell-off, while 12-year-old Faizan Zaki of Texas, spelled 20 words correctly. The two shared a handshake after Bruhat was announced this year’s champion.

It's surprising (at least to me) that this seemingly oxymoronic belief is so widespread.  Check out this quote from Christopher Hitchens in “Religion Kills” from his 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything: 

…the Greek demigod Perseus was born when the god Jupiter visited the virgin Danae as a shower of gold…The god Buddha was born through an opening in his mother’s flank. Catlicus the serpent-skirted caught a little ball of feathers from the sky and hid it in her bosom, and the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli was thus conceived. The virgin Nana took a pomegranate from the tree water by the blood of the slain Agdestris, laid it in her bosom, and gave birth to the god Attis.  The virgin daughter of a Mongol king awoke one night and found herself bathed in a great light, which caused her to give birth to Genghis Khan. Krishna was born of the virgin Devaka. Horus was born of the virgin Isis. Mercury was born of the virgin Maia. Romulus was born of the virgin Rhea Sylvia.

and finds it!

Back in early February, I asked the Lexicography at Wenlin Institute discussion group if they could help me find a rare Chinese character in Unicode, and I sent along a picture of the glyph.  It won't show up in most browsers, but you can see the character here.  You can also see it in the first item of the list of "Selected Readings" below.  In the following post, when you see this symbol, , just imagine you're seeing this glyph.

On 2/27/04, Richard Warmington kindly responded as follows:

I asked Microsoft Copilot (a chatbot integrated into Microsoft's Edge browser), "Can you tell me anything about the Chinese character ?"

The answer began as follows:

Certainly! The Chinese character is an intriguing one. Let’s explore it:

1. Character Details:
Character:
Unicode Code Point: U+24B25
[…]

Dan Halpern, "Trump’s charm offensive in the Bronx", The Economist 5/29/2024:

As the former president glowered and dozed through his criminal trial a few miles south in lower Manhattan, the Trump campaign emails had been growing weirder and weirder. Their subject lines were an anthology of cryptic clickbait. “I stormed out of court!” read one (he didn’t). “I nearly escaped death,” said another (if he had, then grammatically speaking he would be dead, which he pretty clearly wasn’t).

Elon Musk (a long-time Iain Banks fan) recently told the audience at VivaTech 2024 that AI will (probably) bring us Banksian "space socialism" — which Wikipedia explains this way:

The Culture is a society formed by various humanoid species and artificial intelligences about 9,000 years before the events of novels in the series. Since the majority of its biological population can have almost anything they want without the need to work, there is little need for laws or enforcement, and the culture is described by Banks as space socialism. It features a post-scarcity economy where technology is advanced to such a degree that all production is automated. Its members live mainly in spaceships and other off-planet constructs, because its founders wished to avoid the centralised political and corporate power-structures that planet-based economies foster. Most of the planning and administration is done by Minds, very advanced AIs.

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)