Language Log

If you ever had a question about Jurchen (a long extinct Tungusic language, script, people, and dynasty [1115-1234; also called the Jin]) or Khitan (a long extinct Para-Mongolic language, script, people, and dynasty [916-1125; also called the Liao]), chances are that people would advise you, "Ask Danny Kane".

"World-renowned linguist an expert in ancient Chinese script", The Sydney Morning Herald (6/18/21)

At his primary school in 1950s Melbourne, Danny Kane would ask the kids from Italy, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere how to say things in their language. He became quite fluent in Italian and picked up Latin from the liturgy at church, pursuing it formally in high school along with French.

Home life was hard. His father had been a bank officer but was thrown out of work in the Great Depression and never regained a sound financial footing. Danny recalled living in houses in Richmond with holes in the floors and walls, and an army greatcoat for a winter blanket. With the help of Labor MP Jim Cairns, the family got public housing, but Danny was obliged to leave school at 16 to help with money.

A week or so ago, we looked at the phenomenon of "lying flat" (see under "Selected readings" below).

Karen Yang writes from China:

Hahahahha, tang ping ["lying flat"] was kind of a hot topic last month, for about one week. Maybe it’s because the College Entrance Exam was on-going, people tended to talk about life attitude such as tang ping or work hard. But you know how fast the Internet in China moves on,  so I wouldn’t say tang ping is a significant movement.

On the other hand, foxi (佛系) is a rather more frequently used word similar to tang ping. Basically it describes that young generations in East Asia, especially in Japan, tend to be indifferent or even negative about money, promotion, marriage, raising kids and so on, just like a Buddha. It’s an attitude in response to the heavy pressure brought by social development. 

[This is a guest post by Jichang Lulu]

In “Ornamental Manchu: the lengths to which a forger will go” (LL, April 24), Professor Mair discussed a handscroll with faux-Manchu inscriptions. Although the writing clearly imitated Manchu, the imitation was so liberal and the forger so unfamiliar with the Manchu script that hardly any word was intelligible even to eminent Manjurists consulted for the post.

As a non-Manjurist, I found the text only more puzzling, but was able to identify its model by comparing a a conjectural reading of a non-recurring word in it to a published text of a Manchu translation of the Heart Sutra (Fuchs, Die mandjurischen Druckausgaben des Hsin-ching (Hṛdayasūtra) (non legi), transcribed in Hurvitz, “Two polyglot recensions of the Heart Scripture”, J Indian Philos 3:1/2 (1975)). That guess I shared in a comment embedded in the post, elaborated under it with the likely source text. That presumably settled the question, but, with the source given in transliteration only, didn’t make it any easier to appreciate the hilarious cavalierness of the copy without an ability to mentally untransliterate it back into the Manchu script.

Professor Kicengge has now compared the text to a Manchu-script rendition of the sutra and composed an image that juxtaposes the copy to its model. The juxtaposition verifies the identification of the source text: not only does the text (very roughly) match, so does its division into columns.

The handscroll’s faux Manchu and its model, juxtaposed. Supplied by Kicengge.

Talking about a certain movie, I just wrote this on a list serve:

"I wouldn't watch a single minute of it".

Another member of the list commented, "Me either".

If I were he, I would have said, "Me neither".

Somehow, though, I feel that we're both correct.  In any event, I've heard it said both ways.

I've written several posts about unpredictable typing mistakes that are not the result of auto-correct or sloppiness, but are produced through phonological confusion in my own neuro-muscular hardware and software (see "Selected readings").  This morning I experienced another funny occurrence of such a mistake.

I had lost over 7,000 of the recent e-mails in my inbox, so I wrote to the excellent IT guys in Williams Hall:

Crisis

I'm making good progress moving things from inbox to archives, but I just had a disaster.  Everything in my inbox between these two e-mails is missing:

Margaret ********   today (6/18/21) 11:53 a.m.

MISSING

Jing ***  (11/18/20)  11:06 p.m.

There are thousands of important e-mails to me with all sorts of information, attachments, and so forth that I need to take care of, some of them very soon.

Can you somehow restore the missing items?

The following article is so revelatory, at least for me, that I wish I could copy it entirely.  Since that's not what we do at Language Log, I will just quote the opening portion (probably less than a quarter of the total essay), while pointing to a few additional highlights, and encourage others who are interested to read the whole piece (4,700 words):

"Africa writes back:  European ideas of African illiteracy are persistent, prejudiced and, as the story of Libyc script shows, entirely wrong", Aeon (6/17/21), by D. Vance Smith, edited by Sam Dresser

Four different writing systems have been used in Algeria. Three are well known – Phoenician, Latin and Arabic – while one is both indigenous to Africa and survives only as a writing system. The language it represents is called Old Libyan or Numidian, simply because it was spoken in Numidia and Libya. Since it’s possible that it’s an ancestor of modern Berber languages – although even that’s not clear – the script is usually called Libyco-Berber. Found throughout North Africa, and as far west as the Canary Islands, the script might have been used for at least as long as 1,000 years. Yet only short passages of it survive, all of them painted or engraved on rock. Everything else written in Libyco-Berber has disappeared.

Libyco-Berber has been recognised as an African script since the 17th century. But even after 400 years, it hasn’t been fully deciphered. There are no long texts surviving that would help, and the legacy of the written language has been one of acts of destruction, both massive and petty. That fate, of course, is not unique. It’s something that’s characteristic of modern European civilisation: it both destroys and treasures what it encounters in the rest of the world. Like Scipio Africanus weeping while he gazed at the Carthage he’d just obliterated, the destruction of the other is turned into life lessons for the destroyer, or artefacts in colonial cabinets of curiosities. The most important piece of Libyco-Berber writing was pillaged and sold to the British Museum for five pounds. It’s not currently on display.

Good news!

"German classic released in Hoklo" 

 FIRST IN A SERIES: The aim was to translate ‘Grimms’ Fairy Tales’ as closely as possible to the original while giving play to Hoklo’s characteristics, the translator said

    By Kayleigh Madjar / Staff writer, Taipei Times (6/21/21)

Some of our favorite things:  languages, topolects, translations, folktales.

National Cheng Kung University linguists on Wednesday released a bilingual version of Grimms’ Fairy Tales in German and Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), complete with voice recordings accessible via QR code.

Grimms’ Fairy Tales, a German collection of about 300 stories published in the 19th century, has been translated into more than 100 languages worldwide.

Hoklo is now joining the list thanks to a project spearheaded by Tan Le-kun (陳麗君), an associate professor in the university’s Department of Taiwanese Literature.

[This is a guest post by Denis Mair]

River Snow
Liu Zongyuan (773-819)

Over ranged mountains, no birds are seen in flight
On every pathway, human traces are being erased
In a solitary boat, an old man in rough-weather gear
Is out on the cold river, fishing in the snow

{Here the mountains are just a backdrop in a scene where falling snow makes things indistinct. Although precipitous mountains can "cut off" the flight of birds, I don't think this line is emphasizing the impassibility of mountains to birds. That would be a tangent. And to say that the birds are "receding in flight" would be over-particularizing the image, choosing only the birds that are flying away from the viewer. Surely, there could also be birds flying towards or lateral to the viewer. The important thing is that the snow is making it hard to see any birds flying, or they don't want to be out flying in the snow.}

Photo taken in the bathroom of Watt Mann, a thrift store in Sagamihara, Japan:

(Source: the Facebook group Engrish in Japan)

UC Santa Barbara’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies just held “The Worst Chinese Poetry: A Virtual Roundtable" on June 1 and 2. It followed on “The Worst Chinese Poetry: A Virtual Workshop,” held in April.  Both events were organized by Thomas Mazanec, Xiaorong Li, and Hangping Xu.

Mazanec expects the roundtable to produce an anthology, “The Worst Chinese Poetry: A Critical Anthology,” which will feature selected bad poems and commentary that explains the issues that the poems raise about literary, social and political history, he said.

Source:  "Lyrical Losers,'The Worst Chinese Poetry: A Virtual Roundtable' will take a critical look at failures of the genre", By Jim Logan, The Current (UCSB) (Friday, May 28, 2021)

From former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo:

Calling all unapologetic Americans to join me and become a Pipehitter. https://t.co/KO15jutDPi

— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) June 15, 2021

Martin Delson asked about a couple of Chinese expressions that appeared in this article from the San Jose Mercury News (6/17/21):

"China launches crew to its new space station", by Carlos Garcia and Shubing Wang

Complete, and more easily accessible version from Reuters (6/17/21):

"Chinese astronauts board space station module in historic mission", by Carlos Garcia

The three astronauts are Nie Haisheng, 56, Liu Boming, 54, and Tang Hongbo, 45.

"This will be the first crewed flight in the space station (construction) phase, and I'm lucky to be able to have the 'first baton,'" Nie told reporters in Jiuquan a day before the launch.

Wang Yaping, a member of the Shenzhou-12 backup team, told state media.

"In our crew, elder brother Nie is like the needle that stills the sea…".

Jeff DeMarco saw this sign in the window of a building in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan district in 2009: