Language Log

The multilingual part of this message from the President of Taiwan comes near the end of this 2:26 Twitter video:

Here’s my Lunar New Year message to the people of #Taiwan, my fellow Taiwanese living overseas, & everyone around the world celebrating this holiday, including our friends in Hong Kong. Take care & let’s turn the tide together in the #YearOfTheOx! pic.twitter.com/u4ZzNJ4Fba

— 蔡英文 Tsai Ing-wen (@iingwen) February 10, 2021

"Archaeologists Uncover 2,000-Year-Old Buddhist Site In Pakistan", by Neil Bowdler, Radio Mashaal (2/3/21).

When I watched the embedded video in that article, it sounded to me as though the archeologists were speaking Urdu or something close to it (e.g., I heard them repeatedly use the word matlab  مَطْلَب  ["meaning; purpose; motive"; Hindi spelling मतलब]) and caught many other words that I recognized from my knowledge of Hindi-Urdu and Nepali, but I was astonished at how much English vocabulary was mixed into the language the archeologists were speaking.  Not only did they use a lot of English vocabulary, it was mostly not heavily accented with their local language.

Here are some of the English words and phrases that I heard in the interviews:  "important site development", "800 century year ago", "complex", "rainy season", "dwelling monks", "meetings", "religious", "philosophy", "schooling areas", "institute", "architecture", "Buddhism", "Buddhist site", "religious tourism… peace… harmony".  I cannot guarantee that this is a complete list of all the English words and phrases in the interviews (total length 3:38), nor that I have transcribed each and every item exactly the way they said it.  Still, this list should give a fairly good idea of the nature of the mixed language they are speaking.

Where is this picture from?

I tried Google Image Search without useful results.

In the unlikely event that you've missed it — "The latest thing on Zoom meetings: A live goat":

At this point in the pandemic, Zoom fatigue is universal. But one woman has a solution you never knew you needed: a live goat on the call.

Cronkshaw Fold Farm in Lancashire, England, has been offering up their goats to make spontaneous, up-close appearances in virtual meetings anywhere in the world.

“It started as a joke. It wasn’t actually supposed to be a thing,” said Dot McCarthy, 32, who runs the family farm, which spans two generations.

The goats drop in on otherwise mundane virtual gatherings, including seemingly serious business meetings, birthday parties, baby showers and high school math lessons. Out of nowhere, a goat will appear in the meeting with its name displayed on the screen.

[This is a guest post by Ross King, replying to "On the origin of the term 'hanzi'" (2/3/21)]

This is very interesting. I am particularly pleased to see the caution against the term “Sinosphere.” In a related vein, and as a sort of teaser for the edited volume I am just now finishing (Ross King, ed., Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen: Reading Sheldon Pollock from the Sinographic cosmopolis. To appear in Brill’s new series, “Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis.” Approx. 600 pages.), here is an excerpt from my editor’s introduction (“Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the Sinographic Cosmopolis and Beyond: Traditional East Asian Literary Cultures in Global Perspective”)

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Against Spherespeak and Sino-speak

Bruce Cumings (1998) called out a tendency in 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s academic and journalistic writing to engage in a discourse of “Rimspeak” which he faulted for constricting the public discourse around questions of space, the state, race, and political economy in the “Pacific Rim.” When it comes to how we study and imagine premodern East Asia, the stakes are admittedly lower, but with the terms “Sinographic Sphere” and “Sinosphere” I wonder if we are coming dangerously close to a sort of Spherespeak as well, where the “sphere” in these terms carries little indexical, explanatory or theoretical weight.[1]

Marjorie Taylor Greene: "I was allowed to believe things that weren't true."

This sentence deserves a place in the Museum of the Passive Voice. I'm honestly in awe of how MTG thought she could avoid any personal responsibility whatsoever *even for the thoughts in her head.*

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) February 6, 2021

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

The following was drafted as an Appendix to a project whose working title is "The Emperor's New Information" (after Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind). It's still a work-in-progress, so feedback would be welcome. For example: Are the two examples persuasive? Do they need technical clarification or correction? Have others at LL noticed how certain authors "who should know better" use the term information where data is dictated by the context, or employ the two terms at random, as if they were synonyms?

From Tali Aronsky, a spokesperson at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem:

While scientists and historians have long surmised that etchings on stones and bones have been used as a form of symbolism dating back as early as the Middle Paleolithic period (250,000-45,000 BCE), findings to support that theory are extremely rare.

A recent discovery by archeologists from the Hebrew University and the University of Haifa alongside a team from the Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France have uncovered evidence of what may be the earliest-known use of symbols.  The symbols were found on a bone fragment in the Ramle region in central Israel and are believed to be approximately 120,000 years old.

Remarkably the fragment remained largely intact and the researchers were able to detect six similar etchings on one side of the bone, leading them to believe that they were in the possession of something which held symbolic or spiritual significance.  The find which was recently published in the scientific journal ‘Quaternary International’ was discovered in a trove of flint tools and animal bones exposed at a site during archaeological excavations.

Today's xkcd:

In Australia, anyhow — "The Macquarie Dictionary Word of the Decade winner is…", 2/4/2021:

[This is a guest post by Nicholas Morrow Williams]

I recently learned by email that an acquaintance is planning to return from London to Philadelphia, and started to close my response with "Bon voyage!" Then I thought about using English instead, but realized that "Good trip!" doesn't work at all. So I chose "Safe travels!", which does work.

This made me wonder about the usage patterns involved — why does French "Bonne chance!" translates to "Good luck" but "Bon voyage" doesn't work as "Good trip"?

From John Brewer:

I was recently listening to the Neil Young song "Barstool Blues" (first released 1975), which I have known and enjoyed since at least the late '80's, when I was struck by a particular line in the lyrics I didn't recall having focused on before. First I was noting the meteorological imagery, but then I noticed that it consisted entirely of monosyllables, thirteen of them in a row.

"Burn off all the fog and let the sun through to the snow."

This made me wonder how statistically improbable or unusual it was to have this long a sequence of consecutive monosyllables, with related wondering as to how that affected the chances that it had been done self-consciously by the writer or just happened without the writer noticing. I would think that LL headquarters might have access to appropriately-coded corpora resources that could address this question, with maybe even some indication as to whether unusually long strings of monosyllables are more common in some contexts or genres or registers than others.

Just to avoid apples-to-oranges comparison problems, I note that if you look at the end of the prior line and the beginning of the following line, these thirteen monosyllables are situated within a longer string of twenty. I personally find a complete semantic/syntactic unit of thirteen more striking than a string of twenty that crosses the boundaries between such units, but maybe the corpus data wouldn't bear me out on that.