Language Log

Felix Sadeli sent in this list of colossal mistranslations of food names. We've already seen several of these and explained a number of them on Language Log:

• "Puke " (10/8/10)
• "Gourmet Chinese cookshop " (1/27/14) — "Soup for Sluts" (in the comments)
• "Combating the monolithic tree mushroom stem squid " (5/3/10) ("The jew's ear Juice" — also in the comments)

Here I'll just give brief explanations for four of the droller items in Chinese and Japanese on the list.  Perhaps Language Log readers will be inspired to follow suit for some of the remaining items, especially those in other languages.

Attachment ambiguity strikes again! Originally the headline was "Screenwriter Graham Moore reveals he tried to commit suicide during 2015 Oscars acceptance speech for 'The Imitation Game'". Now it's "Screenwriter Graham Moore reveals during Oscars acceptance speech for 'The Imitation Game' that he tried to commit suicide at 16", Daily News 2/23/2015.

From Kevin Knight's home page:

I think our approach to syntax in machine translation is best described in D. Barthelme's short story They called for more structure….

Peter Jensen Brown, "Paper Linen and Crib Notes – A Well-Planned History of 'Off the Cuff'", Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog, 2/20/2015, following up on "The 'off the cuff' mystery", 8/16/2012:

The idiom, “off the cuff,” meaning “without preparation . . . as if from impromptu notes made on one’s shirt cuffs,” dates to the 1930s.  Mark Liberman, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, pushed the earliest known use of “off the cuff” back from 1938 to 1936; but wondered how or why the expression came into being decades after detachable paper cuffs had long fallen out of fashion, and with no apparent immediate impetus.  Charlie Chaplin’s film, Modern Times, released in February 1936 (which features a scene in which Chaplin’s Tramp writes notes on his cuffs), notwithstanding; he could not find a satisfactory reason for the decades-long gap between paper-cuff fashion and the “off the cuff” expression; none of the seemingly plausible explanation made sense.  “So what happened?”

For the answer, see the rest of Peter's post.

[h/t Peter Reitan]

From Bob Sanders comes this sign at a burger joint in the Melbourne, Australia airport:

Michael Robinson sent in the following photograph of a restaurant which I believe is in the Inner Richmond section of San Francisco:

Tim Leonard sent in the following photograph of a curious menu item (via Reddit):

In the comments on "From Bushisms to la langue François", there was some discussion of whether French is more diglossic than English — that is, whether the differences between (formal) writing and (informal) speech are greater in French than in English. As I mentioned, it's not clear how and what to count — informal words and expressions, informal morphological and syntactic variants, sentence complexity and discourse structure? Is the issue relative frequency, or categorically different options? And there's the question of whose version of French or English,  as used in what contexts, to look at.

But however we answer these questions, I remain unconvinced that French is more diglossic than English. Here are a few of the routine features of more-or-less mainstream spoken English that are not found in formal writing:

Remember the Bushisms industry? Something similar, mutatis mutandis, seems to be springing up in France.

Stéphane Ratti, "De la langue française à la langue François", Le Figaro 2/14/2015:

Pourquoi François Hollande s'acharne-t-il à massacrer ainsi la langue française dans toutes ses interventions? Plusieurs analystes se sont à juste titre posé la question après avoir, avec précision, analysé quelques-unes des monstruosités syntaxiques présidentielles à l'occasion de sa dernière conférence de presse.

Why does François Hollande insist on butchering the French language in all of his comments? Several analysts have understandably asked the question, after having analyzed carefully several of the president's syntactic monstrosities on the occasion of his last press conference.

Following up on yesterday's post about Representative Paul Gosar's substitution of "Boca Raton" for "Boko Haram" ("Boko Haram, Boca Raton, whatever", 25/16/2015), I wanted to check the recording, since I know that journalist's direct quotes are often unreliable. I found the interview here (Paul Gosar interviewed by Carol Costello on CNN's Newsroom, Tuesday 2/10/2015; complete audio here), and transcribed the relevant Q&A:

We were recently treated to lovely example of a "Fay-Cutler malapropism", that is, a speech-production error in which the speaker intends to say word X but actually comes out with word Y, where Y is typically similar to X in number of syllables, shares some sounds and even whole syllables, is the same part of speech, and so on.

Tracy Walsh, "GOP Congressman Mixes Up Boko Haram And Boca Raton", TPM 2/13/2015:

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) confused the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram with a mid-sized Florida city during an appearance Tuesday on CNN, the Sun Sentinel newspaper in Florida reported Wednesday.  

Gosar said that if the U.S. were to pay ransom to terrorists, then "every American citizen traveling abroad becomes a subject in regard for kidnapping and then the plight of how much money has been captivated in the Boca Raton group." 

On Friday, his office issued a news release making light of the gaffe, saying that the congressman "had been awake for almost 24 hours and had given many interviews that day."

According to the Chinese zodiac, the coming New Year is referred to as yángnián 羊年, but there's a problem:  what animal are they referring to?  Is it the "year of the ram", the "year of the sheep", the "year of the goat", or something else?

I received the following message from a young Chinese scholar who is studying in America:

Improving my English and understanding Western culture, as well as dealing with racial and gender issues as an Asian female and also a first-generation immigrant in this country, is much easier than being part of the 官本位 culture in China, though I was born and grew up there. I feel that my intelligence is treated with more respect in the States.

This is not the first time that I had heard this young scholar and other young scholars inveigh against 官本位, but in this instance she put it so succinctly and clearly that I felt galvanized to come to grips with a concept that I had heretofore only grasped in a hazy manner.