Language Log

There's an odd expression that has become virally popular in the PRC in recent weeks, viz., shuǎi guō 甩锅 (lit., "throw / toss the pot / pan", i.e., "shift the blame; pass the buck").

Expressions related to guō 锅 ("pot / pan") are not new.  For example, bèi guō 背锅 ("bear the blame"), and guō cóng tiān jiàng 锅从天降 ("accusation / blame coming from nowhere", lit., "pot falling from the sky").  Together with shuǎi guō 甩锅 (lit., "throw / toss the pot / pan") itself, they were popular long before their current application in connection with accusations of responsibility and culpability for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kim Willsher, "'La Covid': coronavirus acronym is feminine, Académie Française says", The Guardian 5/13/2020 ("Many in France have been referring to “le Covid” but guardians of French language rule otherwise"):

The Académie Française, guardian of the French language, has said a big non to le covid. Not to the actual disease, but to the use of the masculine definitive [sic] article “le”.

While many in France have been referring to “le Covid”, the so-called “Immortals” who make up the academy have ruled otherwise. Covid, they insist, is most definitely feminine.

“Covid is the acronym for coronavirus disease and acronyms have the genus of the name that forms the core of the phrase of which they are an abbreviation,” the academy ruled in a statement on its website under the heading “Say, don’t say”, aimed at stopping the French language being infected with Anglicisms.

Tim Finin writes:

President Trump said Fauci wants to "play all sides of the equation" about reopening schools. I thought that was an unusual phrase and used google to search for it without the token Trump. There were three hits.

"Prinderella and the Cince Told by Cynthia Hall Domine"

The CCP government has done its utmost to prevent Chinese citizens from viewing Matt Pottinger's remarkable May Fourth speech (see "Selected Readings" below) or even from reading about it or expressing their ideas concerning it.  Yet some of them have taken the risk of using illegal VPNs to jump the Great Firewall (GFW) and have managed to see Pottinger's presentation with their own eyes.  Among those who have watched the video of Pottinger's speech, some have dared to express their reactions to it.  Here is one:

I watched Matt Pottinger's message. His Chinese is excellent except for his stressing on more than necessary words that makes him sound a bit unnatural like machine-generated. Had he been acquainted with the subtleness of spoken Chinese, he would definitely qualify for an A+.

Not surprisingly, his message can't be watched within the GFW. What's on the news are the slams and abuses on the message from the official media. Some curious people might wonder what the original message is and climb over the walls to explore. There are quite a few comments on the official news demanding access to the original message of Pottinger so that people may "join the government to criticize".

Email from Julia Preseau: "The word 'masklessness' — going to surge?"

She sent a couple of examples:

[link] So it was that until this week, Mr. Trump’s mask aversion extended well beyond his person, echoing throughout the White House. Top aides generally eschewed them, as did those who attended meetings with the president or appeared at his daily public briefings. Certainly, Mr. Pence internalized the message, doing public appearances barefaced even after causing a minor scandal by declining to mask up during his visit to the Mayo Clinic last month, explicitly violating the hospital’s policy. Mr. Pence apologized for the infraction, before settling back into masklessness.

[link] And late in April, a woman whose previous brush with fame included an unsuccessful run for mayor of Roseville was arrested following an altercation at a Nino Salvaggio grocery store in St. Clair Shores, over, you guessed it, her masklessness.

No doubt there's a surge in all derived and inflected forms of the stem mask, including maskless and even unmasked as well as masklessness.

Today's Dinosaur Comics:

Michael Marshall, "The hidden links between mental disorders", Nature 5/5/2020:

Perhaps there are several dimensions of mental illness — so, depending on how a person scores on each dimension, they might be more prone to some disorders than to others. An alternative, more radical idea is that there is a single factor that makes people prone to mental illness in general: which disorder they develop is then determined by other factors. Both ideas are being taken seriously, although the concept of multiple dimensions is more widely accepted by researchers.

The details are still fuzzy, but most psychiatrists agree that one thing is clear: the old system of categorizing mental disorders into neat boxes does not work.

This note is about the site of Shimao in northern Shaanxi.  It is dated to around four thousand years ago.  The architectural details alone are astonishing for that age and place, but there are so many other cultural riches, including sculpture and engraving, plus agricultural advances not found in central China till later.  It is only recently, within the last decade, that the site began to be excavated, and new discoveries are ongoing, so we can expect more important findings from Shimao.

Shimao (Chinese: 石峁; pinyin: Shímǎo) is a Neolithic site in Shenmu County, Shaanxi, China. The site is located in the northern part of the Loess Plateau, on the southern edge of the Ordos Desert. It is dated to around 2000 BC, near the end of the Longshan period, and is the largest known walled site of that period in China, at 400 ha.

A commenter to this post, "Matthew Pottinger's speech in Mandarin" (5/9/20) posed the questions in the title. These are interesting questions that raise important issues.

Since I don't know Matthew Pottinger, I am unable to say for sure what he was reading, whether it was Hanzi, Hanyu Pinyin, or something else.  The reason I say "something else" is because his teacher, Perry Link, was a strong advocate of Gwoyeu Romatzyh spelling, aka GR or the National Language Romanization system, so it may have been that.

For those who are not familiar with it, GR is a kind of tonal romanization in which the tones of words are spelled with letters.  It is difficult to learn (though much less difficult than characters, of course!), but it is very effective in imprinting the tones of words in the heads of learners.  Indeed, many of the best foreign speakers of Mandarin learned the language via GR, and they include Perry Link and Tom Bartlett.

Today's xkcd:

Something extraordinary happened on May 4, 2020.  Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger delivered an extremely impressive speech in virtually flawless Mandarin.  Here it is:

This headline puzzled me:

I interpreted it as

Doctors are showing a buried CDC report to top White House officials

And I wondered, what was that report? and why did the CDC bury it? And who are the doctors digging it up?

What the headline actually meant, of course, was

Documents show that top White House officials buried a CDC report

which makes much more sense in the current environment.