Language Log

Article by Manya Koetse:

"Chinese Term ‘Wuxin Gongzuo’:

Can’t Focus on Work Due to Russia-Ukraine Crisis

Chinese netizens are so focused on the Russian attack on Ukraine that nobody can focus on work (wuxin gongzuo)."

What's on Weibo (2/24/22)                                                                         

Here's the new expression that has gone viral:

wū xīn gōngzuò

乌心工作

lit., "U[kraine] heart-mind work"

This is word-play for:

wúxīn gōngzuò

无心工作

"don't have a mind to work; not in the mood for work")

where wū 乌 is short for "Wūkèlán 乌克兰" (transcription of "Ukraine") and stands for "wú 无" ("no; not; without; do not have"), hence "wúxīn gōngzuò 无心工作" ("do not have the mind for work")

Posted on Twitter by Xi Van Fleet (click on the "X" in the black circle at the top right of the photo to see the whole sign):

Shameless propaganda street sign by CCP. It is roughly translated as “You can pay back your parents for raising you. You will never be able to pay back the Party for what it has done for you”. pic.twitter.com/9RwegwIYwk

— Xi Van Fleet (@XVanFleet) February 24, 2022

One enigmatic artifact combines so many of my favorite things:  Dunhuang, Yi jing, Buddhism, cosmic symbols (e.g., Kunlun)….

One of the earliest known stone pagodas made in China, dating 435 AD from Dunhuang, NW China. Buddhist texts & images are inscribed with 8 trigrams, Chinese cosmic symbols, including Kun-the sustaining power of the earth. Its hexagram form shows six double lines.
#20220222 pic.twitter.com/iBLHjmEumK

— Jin Xu 徐津 (@xujnx) February 22, 2022

clevelandart.org

[For an enlargement, click on the photograph to go to the thread, then click on the photograph again. It will be large enough to make the inscription legible.]

Yesterday I got an email from the Voice Foundation with this header:

The body of the email started this way:

how many ways to write #teochew 潮州話? some time ago we joked about this, but didn't really explain it. in this thread we'll give an overview of different ways people write/have written Teochew/Chaozhou/Teo-swa/Chiu-chow! https://t.co/FFZ2m4loG4

— learn-teochew (@LearnTeochew) February 20, 2022

The linguist is Krišjānis Kariņš, the current prime minister of Latvia. And among other recent news stories, there's "West must brace for years of Putin pressure on Ukraine, Latvian PM says", Politico 2/18/2022:

Whether or not Moscow launches an attack on Ukraine in the coming days, the West must gear up for years of heightened Russian pressure on the country and on Europe as a whole, Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš said Friday.

In an interview with POLITICO, Kariņš said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal was to suppress Ukraine’s independence and bring it back into “the Russian fold.” Putin could pursue his strategy of “neo-imperialism” not just through a direct military attack but also by ramping up efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian economy and society, Kariņš warned.

“In the best-case scenario — best-case meaning no war — we will be facing long-term pressure from Putin on Ukraine and on Europe as a whole,” said Kariņš, whose Baltic nation borders Russia and Belarus, where Moscow has massed tens of thousands of troops as part of a huge buildup of forces around Ukraine.

The current xkcd:

The mouseover title: "Roundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely."

But first, English. English spelling is famously a hot mess. In each of the words though, tough, trough, through, thought, thorough, bough, hough, hiccough, and lough the "ough" is pronounced differently (at least for me; some English dialects merge some of these). 2/34 pic.twitter.com/pydydxZ9bv

— Michael Cannings (@formosaphile) February 17, 2022

The ethnicity and language of the Xiongnu / Huns (the names are related, but that is not to say they are exactly the same peoples across the stretch of time during which they existed) have long been enigmas for scholars of Chinese and Inner / Central Asian history during the late first millennium BC and early first millennium AD.  Recently discovered archeological evidence may shed new light on these puzzles.

Sogdians depicted in a Tang-dynasty tomb (716 AD). They're attendants of a deceased general who claims ancestry from Chanyu rulers of the Xiongnu empire. Since their defection to the Han dynasty in the 1st c AD, Xiongnu nobility had always been active in politics of North China. pic.twitter.com/AnXYqT5WZJ

— Jin Xu 徐津 (@xujnx) February 21, 2022

The current xkcd, title "Chorded Keyboard":

From a restaurant menu:

As a published translator myself, I certainly strive to make my translations worthy of being considered as art.  But it isn't always an easy task.  Witness "The Tricky Art of Translation and Maria Dahvana Headley’s Modern Beowulf", CD Covington, Tor.com (Mon Feb 7, 2022):

It’s not very often that a thousand-year-old poem has a new translation that gets people hyped up, at least in the Anglophone world, but Maria Dahvana Headley’s recent Hugo Award-winning translation of Beowulf stirred up a lot of interest—there’s even a video series of writers and entertainers reading it out loud. (Alan Cumming’s section is excellent—he really knows his way around alliterative verse.)

…

[This is a guest post by Bob Ramsey]

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