Language Log

The Wikipedia entry for Gritty, cited in my post "Liberté, Égalité, Gritté", used the modifier "outcoming" [emphasis added]:

When Philadelphia played an outsized role in determining the 2020 presidential election, social media users depicted Gritty, as the city personified, defeating outcoming incumbent Donald Trump.

Philip Anderson quickly objected in the comments:

But “outcoming” (as an adjective) in the Wikipedia quote? Incoming or outgoing, surely?

Some discussion ensued, with opinions on several sides of the question.

Melissa Jeltsen, "Lawyers For Mentally Ill Woman Set To Be Executed By U.S. Contract Coronavirus", Huffpost 11/12/2020.

Watching this this CNN story on YouTube I noticed some really weird closed-captioning. You can try it for yourself — open the story on YouTube, turn CC on using the controls on the bottom right of the video panel, and see what you get.

In case it gets fixed, or your environment is different for some reason, I recorded a short sample:

A chart in Wikipedia ("Indo-European vocabulary") [rearranged here] — see under "Bodily functions and states" — shows the connection between words for "sleep" and "dream" in IE languages, including Tocharian.

1. PIE: *swep- "to sleep", *swepnos "dream (n.)" 

2. English: archaic sweven "dream, vision" (< OE swefn); NoEng sweb "to swoon" (< OE swebban "to put to sleep, lull") 

3. Gothic: ON sofa "sleep (v.)" 

4. Latin:  somnus "sleep (n.)"

5. Ancient Greek: húpnos "sleep (n.)"

6. Sanskrit: svápnaḥ "sleep, dream (n.)" 

7. Iranian: Av xᵛafna- "sleep (n.)" NPers xwãb- "sleep" 

8. Slavic: OCS spěti "sleep (v.)", sŭnŭ "sleep (n.), dream (n.)" 

9. Baltic: OPrus supnas "dream", Lith sapnas "dream"

10. Celtic: OIr sūan, W hun "sleep (n.)" 

11. Armenian: kʿnem "I sleep", kʿun "sleep (n.)"

12. Albanian: gjumë "sleep (n.)"

13. Tocharian: A ṣpäṃ, B. ṣpane "sleep (n.), dream (n.)" 

14. Hittite: sup-, suppariya- "to sleep"

"Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update: FDA Authorizes Monoclonal Antibody for Treatment of COVID-19", U.S. Food and Drug Administration 11/9/2020:

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the investigational monoclonal antibody therapy bamlanivimab for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adult and pediatric patients.

“Bamlanivimab”

Try saying that 5… or 9 times fast!

Jimmy tries to pronounce the new COVID antibody treatment https://t.co/Ua2rpQ0D0j #FallonMono #FallonTonight pic.twitter.com/LuDHpFuJt2

— The Tonight Show (@FallonTonight) November 11, 2020

Charles Yang* is perhaps best known for the development of the Tolerance Principle, a way to quantify and predict (given some input) whether a rule will become productive. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he collaborates with various researchers around the world to test and extend the Tolerance Principle and gain greater insight into the mechanisms underlying language acquisition.

How did you get into Computational Linguistics?

I’ve always been a computer scientist, I never really took any linguistics classes and I was interested in compilers. I was doing AI, so it was kind of natural to think about how human languages were parsed. I remember going to the library looking for stuff like this and I stumbled onto the book “Principle Based Parsing” which was an edited volume and it was incomprehensible. It was fascinating, actually, I wrote [Noam] Chomsky a physical letter way back in the day when I was a kid in Ohio and he kindly replied and said things like there’s recent work in syntax and so on. That was one of the reasons I applied to MIT to do computer science because I was attracted to the work of Bob Berwick who was the initiator of principle based parsing at the time. While doing that, I also ran across Mitch Marcus’s book. I don’t think I quite understood everything he was saying there but his idea of deriving syntactic constraints from parsing strategies was very interesting. I started reading Lectures on Government & Binding among other things. I applied to MIT, I got in. I had some marginal interests in vision, I was very attracted to Shimon Ullman’s work on the psychophysical constraints of vision. [It was] very much out of the Marrian program as opposed to what was beginning to become common, which was this image processing based approach to vision which was just applied data analysis which didn’t quite interest me as much.

I'm a few days late with this, but better late than never — Gritty as La Liberté guidant le peuple:

Liberté, Egalité, Gritté pic.twitter.com/p1Jnaf54de

— Sov Cit Decider (@alicelfc4) November 6, 2020

It has become a meme in China to make fun of people speaking with a Henan accent.  Here are two videos of women dancing and singing Christian songs in Yùjù 豫剧 ("Henan opera") that are circulating on the Chinese internet to the accompaniment of much merriment:  first (for Easter, eulogizing the scene of the Resurrection of Jesus; folkish), second (in praise of Jesus, with an industrial, commercial, official flavor).

Comment by a Chinese friend on the first song-and-dance:

Just think of saints who resurrect from tombs riding in sedan chairs carried by angels and flying to heaven in throngs! It makes me laugh so hard. The girl in red with a piece of cloth over her head is obviously a bride. So it becomes a scene of wedding in progressing to heaven. What a combination of local customs with religion!

Further remark by the same friend:

As for the second piece, it will work perfectly well if "Zhǔ 主“ ("Lord") is replaced by "Dǎng 党“ ("Party").

To the other educational benefits of Rudy Giuliani's recent press conference in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, we can add the opportunity to learn about Hazard Communications (HazCom) signage.

On the right of the garage door forming the backdrop for Mr. Giuliani's presentation, there's a (faded and peeling, but still legible) NFPA Fire Diamond symbol.

Stefan Krasowski, who graduated from the Wharton School of Penn in 2002, and has visited every country in the world, just wrote this note to the e-Mair list:

Wattleseed milkshake

This Australian milkshake brought to mind a VHM Classical Sinitic class where I first encountered the word "wattle" in translating a Du Fu (712-770) poem.

Ha ha ha OMG! The grand debut of Four Seasons Total Landscaping was AMAZING! Thank you to everyone who showed up! pic.twitter.com/2c5KQKQwgC

— coopertom (@thecoopertom) November 9, 2020

One of my favorite places to run to from Swarthmore is a beautiful little lake about three miles away.  I've been running down there for a couple of years now after I discovered its existence when I mentioned to some folks who live in Ridley Park, where the lake is located, that I'm always looking for nice places to run, and they suggested, with some pride, that I should come down and check out their little gem of a lake.  So I tried it out and have become stuck on it.  I have to run down there at least once every week or two, otherwise I feel that something is missing in my life.

So I've been blissfully running to that pretty little lake for a couple of years, but never thought whether it had a particular name.  Yesterday, for some unknown reason (perhaps because the weather was so glorious — 70º, clear blue skies, still some autumn foliage), the thought entered my mind that I should ask some people walking around there, sitting on benches, fishing, and standing on the cute bridge at one end where there is a creek that feeds the lake, what they call that lovely, little body of water.

When is a Qaghan really a Qaghan?

It matters, so let's familiarize ourselves with the meaning of the term right off the bat.  In Chinese Studies, we call this "zhèngmíng 正名" ("rectification of names").

Confucius was asked what he would do if he was a governor. He said he would "rectify the names" to make words correspond to reality. The phrase has now become known as a doctrine of feudal Confucian designations and relationships, behaving accordingly to ensure social harmony. Without such accordance society would essentially crumble and "undertakings would not be completed." Mencius extended the doctrine to include questions of political legitimacy.

Wikipedia

So, what is a "qaghan"?