Language Log

[An essay I wrote a year and a half ago, but whose posting was interrupted by a long run.]

Enlightening article by Peter Backhaus in The Japan Times (6/9/23):

"Za grammar notes: How to properly handle the 'the' in Japanese"

Japanese seems to be able to assimilate any English word, including the ubiquitous definite article "the", which is unlike anything in Japanese itself.

Seldom does a matter of correct / precise translation go viral the way these words of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to American Secretary of State Marco Rubio did:  "hǎo zì wéi zhī 好自为之".  The set phrase ("chéngyǔ 成語") has been rendered scores of different ways, most of them dismissive or pejorative.

Why Wang Yi’s message to Marco Rubio may have been lost in translation:

There has been much discussion about how to interpret an idiom used by China’s foreign minister in talks with the US secretary of state

Meredith Chen, South China Morning Post (1/28/25)

I've lost a considerable amount of sleep over these two words, not just because they both have nine letters and look almost the same, differing only by a single consonant, but even more so because, while they both signify something bad or undesirable about the way situations unfold or how people behave toward others, they imply the opposite in the manner these odious actions are carried out, but have no obvious clues about their usage.

There are a number of videos in this series, some of them several years old, but I don't think we've been exposed to them yet on Language Log.  They are quite hilarious and linguistically sophisticated, so it's worth listening to at least one.

"Mewing, Beta Maxing, Gigachad, Baddie: Parents Are Drowning in New Lingo", Katherine Bindley, WSJ (2/5/25)

Slang is sprouting at a dizzying speed, leaving adults constantly unsure if they’re being insulted; ‘Omega is like the lowest rate you can get’

The article includes many examples of parents from diverse backgrounds and various locations confronting this flood of juvenile jargon.  Here I give only one instance:

Cecilia Hermawan has text chains going with other parents to stay up to speed on the words and phrases catching on among their children. Still, the Boston-area resident was taken aback after hearing the word “mewing” come out of her 9-year-old’s mouth.

“I didn’t know what it meant so I had to Google it, and I had to ask my friend Emily to reference check,” said Hermawan, 41.

The startup founder was relieved her daughter and her friend were referring to a type of facial exercise and not something inappropriate. “You look at yourself in the mirror and you mew,” she said. “It’s supposed to enhance your jawline.”

Incidentally, out of the half a dozen or so cases of confused guardians cited by Bindley, two are identified as a "startup founder", a designation I had heard of before and had an idea of what it meant, but recognized it as representing a certain type of person who is full of aspiration and audacity.  Maybe the environment and mentality fostered by such individuals would be conducive to speedily mutating hip parlance on the part of their offspring.

敦煌学大辞典第二版全新发布了！
New second edition of Dictionary of Dunhuang Studies!
敦煌学不可或缺的工具
Indispensable tool for #DunhuangStudies
郝春文 主编
70%词条已修订了
词汇量：241万 ➡️ 400万
词条数：5,000 ➡️ 12,000 pic.twitter.com/vYLaYQAHgL

— Neil Schmid 史瀚文 (@DNeilSchmid) January 15, 2025

Carl Zimmer, "Ancient DNA Points to Origins of Indo-European Language", NYT 2/5/2025:

In 1786, a British judge named William Jones noticed striking similarities between certain words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Latin, whose speakers were separated by thousands of miles. The languages must have “sprung from some common source,” he wrote.

Later generations of linguists determined that Sanskrit and Latin belong to a huge family of so-called Indo-European languages. So do English, Hindi and Spanish, along with hundreds of less common languages. Today, about half the world speaks an Indo-European language.

Linguists and archaeologists have long argued about which group of ancient people spoke the original Indo-European language. A new study in the journal Nature throws a new theory into the fray. Analyzing a wealth of DNA collected from fossilized human bones, the researchers found that the first Indo-European speakers were a loose confederation of hunter-gatherers who lived in southern Russia about 6,000 years ago.

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.

[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.)

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).

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.

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.

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