Language Log

I promised that I would tell the story of how five old, white men persuaded me to begin the study of Asian languages two years after I was out of college.  Here it is.

When I graduated from Dartmouth in 1965, I joined the Peace Corps for two years in Nepal.  Although I contracted fifteen diseases, some quite serious, lost fifty pounds, and had three nearly deadly trail accidents, the experience was transformative.

I was an English major in college and wrote an undergraduate thesis on Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde".  At the end of my Peace Corps service, I still wanted to study for a PhD on Chaucer.  So, among other applications to graduate school and for funding, I applied for a Woodrow Wilson fellowship.  In those days (1967), that was a very prestigious prize.

The most recent xkcd:

I've wondered for a long time why Biblical inerrantists have a big problem with biological evolution, which contradicts Chapter 1 of Genesis, but not so much with historical linguistics, which contradicts Chapter 11.

But in "Linguistic Confusion and the Tower of Babel", National Catholic Register 6/21/2023, Dave Armstrong argues that the usual interpretation of the Tower of Babel story is simply a mistake, due to a bad job of sense disambiguation:

[T]he Hebrew word for “earth” (eretz) can mean many things, including the entire world (e.g., Genesis 1:1, 15; 2:1, 4), but also things like the “land” or “ground” of countries, such as Egypt (eretz mitzrayim) and Canaan (eretz kana’an), the dry land (Genesis 1:10), and ground from which seeds grow (Genesis 1:12). The New American Standard Bible translates eretz: country or countries 59 times, ground 119 times, land 1638 times; compare to earth, 656 instances, and world (3).

Beautiful WSJ OpED (6/22/23) by Gerard Gayou, a seminarian of the archdiocese of Washington, who is studying theology at the Pontifical North American College in Rome:

The Guiding Light of Latin Grammar

The language reminds us of what our words mean and of whom we’re called to be.

—–

Nothing bored me more during the summer of 2008 than the prospect of studying Latin grammar. I needed a foreign language as part of my high-school curriculum, and I was loath to choose a dead one. I opted instead for Mandarin Chinese, an adolescent whim that shaped my young adult life. I continued to learn Mandarin in college before working in mainland China after graduation.

[This is a guest post by Mark Cohen]

I am wondering if members of this group have had experience with translating the Chinese serial comma or dùnhào 顿号  [、] ("the caesura sign; a slight-pause mark used to set off items in a series; punctuation mark used between parallel words or short phrases; sign of coordination; ideographic comma; the Chinese comma (、) used for separating items in a list")  In 2007, I was involved in a WTO case where I negotiated an English translation for a dunhao that ended up appearing as a footnote in the panel decision regarding a criminal law.  The statutory language was "fùzhì , fāxíng 复制  、  发行" of copyrighted works.  The question at that time was whether China required  "making" or "selling" [in the English text]  of a copyrighted work or whether both acts were required under the criminal law.  See World Trade Organization, China-Measures Affecting the Protection and Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights, Report of the Panel, WT/DS/362/5 (26 Jan. 2009) , at fn. 82 and accompanying text:  “There is neither "and" or "or" between "making" and "selling", only a Chinese repetitive comma (、) or dùnhào 顿号 (lit., "pause" + "mark; symbol"),  which has no precise English equivalent.”  The panel translated the “serial comma” with a slash “/” which basically preserved this ambiguity. 

I'm in Georgetown for a few days to meet with colleagues and do some research.  Shortly after I left my hotel and headed down Wisconsin Avenue toward the Potomac for a morning run, I stopped dead in my tracks when I crossed over the canal and saw this:

Illuminating new book from Hong Kong University Press edited by Richard VanNess Simmons:

Studies in Colloquial Chinese and Its History:  Dialect and Text

ISBN : 978-988-8754-09-0

The book also has a Chinese title:

Hànyǔ kǒuyǔ de lìshǐ yánjiū: fāngyán hé wénxiàn

漢語口語的歷史研究：方言與文獻

I would prefer to render this into English as:

Studies on the History of Spoken Sinitic:  Topolects and Texts

A few years ago, I began to notice that the scientific and technical papers relentless spammed at me, by academia.edu and similar outfits, were becoming increasingly surrealistic. And I soon learned that the source for such articles was systems for "article spinning" by "rogeting" — automatic random subsitution of (usually inappropriate) synonyms. Those techniques were originally developed many years ago for spamdexing, i.e. generating "link farms" of fake pages, in order to fool search engine ranking systems by evading simple forms of content similarity detection,

And the same techniques also fool simple systems for plagiarism detection — though the incoherent results are not useful for student papers, at least in cases where instructors actually read the submissions. But the same time period saw the parallel growth of predatory publishing (and analogous developments among generally reputable publishers), and the use of mindless quantitative publication metrics to evaluate researchers, faculty and institutions. The result: an exponential explosion of "tortured phrases" in the scientific, technical, and scholarly literature: "talk affirmation" for "speech recognition", "straight expectation" for "linear prediction", "huge information" for "big data", "gullible Bayes" for "naive Bayes",  "irregular woodland" for "random forest", "savvy home" for "smart home", and so on.

[This is a guest post by Jichang Lulu, with some minor modifications and additions by VHM]

You might have seen this — the PRC embassy in Poland has given Badiucao's forthcoming exhibition in Warsaw (coorganised by Sinopsis) some very welcome, completely unexpected publicity by trying to have it shut down. Lots of international reporting:

The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, &c., &c.

The ‘cannibalistic’ theme (picture below [with Badiucao standing next to the poster featuring his art] via the Sydney Morning Herald):

of course alludes to Cronus eating his sons, as in Hesiod:

Article by Phillip M. Carter in The Conversation (6/12/23):

"Linguists have identified a new English dialect that’s emerging in South Florida"

Beginning sentences:

“We got down from the car and went inside.”

“I made the line to pay for groceries.”

“He made a party to celebrate his son’s birthday.”

These phrases might sound off to the ears of most English-speaking Americans.

In Miami, however, they’ve become part of the local parlance.

According to my recently published research, these expressions – along with a host of others – form part of a new dialect taking shape in South Florida.

This language variety came about through sustained contact between Spanish and English speakers, particularly when speakers translated directly from Spanish.

The word eggcorn was originally proposed in a LLOG post almost 20 years ago — "Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ???", 9/23/2003.  And the word is now recognized by most current English dictionaries and other relevant sources, which gloss it variously, e.g. —

1. the  Oxford English Dictionary, ("An alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements as a similar-sounding word")
2. Merriam-Webster: ("a word or phrase that sounds like and is mistakenly used in a seemingly logical or plausible way for another word or phrase either on its own or as part of a set expression")
3. Wiktionary: ("A word or phrase that sounds like and is mistakenly used in a seemingly logical or plausible way for another word or phrase either on its own or as part of a set expression")
4. the Collins English Dictionary: ("a malapropism or misspelling arising from similarity between the sound of the misspelled or misused word and the correct one in the accent of the person making the mistake")
5. the American Heritage Dictionary, ("A series of words that result from the misunderstanding of a word or phrase as some other word or phrase having a plausible explanation")
6. Wikipedia: ("An eggcorn is the alteration of a phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements, creating a new phrase having a different meaning from the original but which still makes sense and is plausible when used in the same context")

Those sources cite the examples eggcorn, to the manor born, old-timers' disease, ex-patriot, for all intensive purposes, feeble position, free reign, wipe board, card shark, and so on. Many more can be found at Chris Waigl's Eggcorn Database.

This morning, I'm appealing for help in answering two questions: What are some examples of eggcorns in other languages? And what are the earliest documented (or reconstructed) examples?

An NFL policy prohibits players from endorsing alcoholic beverages. So Coors found a linguistic work-around:

Get ready to go a-wanderin'.  I'll take you down to the rivers and lakes, and we shall lose ourselves in them, get lost from the hurlyburly hustlebustle of the mundane world.  That's what jiānghú 江湖 ("rivers and lakes") is all about.  It's where you go to xiāoyáo yóu 逍遙遊 ("wander freely / carefreely / leisurely").

The first occurrence of jiānghú 江湖 in traditional Chinese literature is to be found in the Zhuāng Zǐ 莊子 ("Master Zhuang") (late 4th-early 3rd BC), which happens to be my favorite work of ancient Chinese literature:

Quán hé, yú xiāngyǔ chǔ yú lù, xiāng xǔ yǐ shī, xiāng rú yǐ mò, bùrú xiāngwàng yú jiānghú.

泉涸，魚相與處於陸，相呴以溼，相濡以沫，不如相忘於江湖。

"When springs dry up, fish huddle together on the land. They blow moisture on each other and keep each other wet with their slime.  But it would be better if they could forget themselves in the rivers and lakes."

VHM, tr., Wandering on the Way:  Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu (New York:  Bantam, 1994), p. 53.