Language Log

From Ben Zimmer, a nomination for the Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding.

The nominee: Jamie Salter,  CEO of Authentic Brands Group.

The source: Jacob Bogage and Ben Strauss, "Sports Illustrated shaken by major layoffs and massive reorganization", WaPo 10/3/2019 —

Reached by phone Thursday and asked about the turmoil at SI, ABG chief executive Jamie Salter described the situation at the magazine as “awesome.”

“I can only tell you that we buy troubled companies that we think there’s enormous amount of value in the intellectual property in,” he said.

When I started to learn Mandarin more than half a century ago, it was easy for me to master lán 蓝/ 藍 ("blue") and lǜ 绿 / 綠 ("green").  But as I became better acquainted with Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese, I was troubled by the word qīng 青, which seemed to straddle and include both blue and green.

The character depicts the budding of a young plant and it could be understood as "verdant", but the word is used to describe colors ranging from light and yellowish green through deep blue all the way to black, as in xuánqīng (Chinese: 玄青). For example, the Flag of the Republic of China is today still referred to as qīng tiān, bái rì, mǎn dì hóng ("'Blue' Sky, White Sun, Whole Ground Red"—Chinese: 青天，白日，滿地紅); whereas qīngcài (青菜) is the Chinese word for "green bok choy". A cucumber is known as either huángguā (Chinese: 黃瓜) "yellow melon" or qīngguā* (Chinese: 青瓜) "green melon", which is more commonly used in Cantonese. Qīng 青, was the traditional designation of both blue and green for much of the history of the Chinese language, while 藍 lán ('blue') originally referred to the indigo plant. However, the character 綠 lǜ ('green'), as a particular 'shade' of qīng applied to cloth and clothing, has been attested since the Book of Odes (1000 to 600 B.C.) (e.g., the title of Ode 27 《邶風·綠衣》 'Green Upper Garment' in the Airs of Bei). As a part of the adoption of modern Vernacular Chinese as the social norm, replacing Classical Chinese, the modern terms for blue and green are now more commonly used than qīng as standalone color terms, although qīng is still part of many common noun phrases. The two forms can also be encountered combined as 青藍 and 青綠, with 青 being used as an intensifier.

Source

[VHM:  Cant. *ceng1gwaa1]

Michael Birnbaum, "E.U. rejects Boris Johnson’s Brexit proposal, raising prospect of chaotic break within weeks", WaPo 10/3/2019:

“There are problematic points in the U.K.’s proposal, and further work is needed,” said European Commission spokeswoman Natasha Bertaud.

Although British Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay had admonished that the ball was in the European Union’s court, Bertaud emphasized, “This work is for the U.K. to do, not the other way around.”

“We are not going to be the ones left holding the bag, the ball or any other kind of object,” she added — reflecting a fear on the European side that Johnson is setting them up to take the blame for a Brexit failure.

Eileen Sullivan, "Trump Publicly Urges China to Investigate the Bidens", NYT 10/3/2019:

Mr. Trump has defended his conversation with Mr. Zelensky as “perfect” even after a reconstructed transcript of the call was released that showed him seeking help from Ukraine in investigating the Bidens. And he doubled down on his request on Thursday.

“I would say that President Zelensky, if it were me, I would recommend that they start an investigation into the Bidens,” Mr. Trump said. “Because nobody has any doubt that they weren’t crooked.”

Lisa Feldman Barrett, "Zombie ideas", Observer 10/2019:

It’s October, a month auspicious for All Hallow’s Eve and everything spooky. Accordingly, our topic for this month is … zombies. Not the charmingly decayed corpses you encounter in movies and books, but zombie ideas. According to the economist Paul Krugman (2013), a zombie idea is a view that’s been thoroughly refuted by a mountain of empirical evidence but nonetheless refuses to die, being continually reanimated by our deeply held beliefs. […]

If you think that formal science training will zombie-proof your mind, you’re out of luck, my friend. Hordes of zombie ideas flourish in science (Brockman, 2015). They also fester in our own field, quietly biding their time in peer-reviewed papers and textbooks, waiting to infect another generation of unsuspecting psychological scientists.

"Beijing reveals mascots for 2022 Winter Games", YouTube (9/19/19):

Yiming Wang et al., "Espresso: A fast end-to-end neural speech recognition toolkit", ASRU 2019:

We present ESPRESSO, an open-source, modular, extensible end-to-end neural automatic speech recognition (ASR) toolkit based on the deep learning library PyTorch and the popular neural machine translation toolkit FAIRSEQ. ESPRESSO supports distributed training across GPUs and computing nodes, and features various decoding approaches commonly employed in ASR, including look-ahead word-based language model fusion, for which a fast, parallelized decoder is implemented. ESPRESSO achieves state-of-the-art ASR performance on the WSJ, LibriSpeech, and Switchboard data sets among other end-to-end systems without data augmentation, and is 4–11× faster for decoding than similar systems (e.g. ESPNET)

Article in SCMP Magazine:

"How Hong Kong slang terms for ‘police’ have evolved over time", by Lisa Lim (9/28/19):

Back in the day, Hong Kong policemen were referred to in Cantonese as luhky ī  [sic; VHM: luk6ji1 綠衣]  (“green clothing”), for the green uniforms they had worn since the 19th century. Khaki drill became the summer uniform around 1920 while the current get-up of light-blue shirt and black trousers, worn year-round, was adopted in December 2004.

Ben Zimmer, "How Maguire Accidentally Made the Case for Singular ‘They'", The Atlantic 9/27/2019 (subhead: "The national intelligence director’s recent testimony inadvertently supported the argument against grammar purists"):

When the committee chairman, Adam Schiff, asked Maguire if he thought that the whistle-blower was “a political hack” as Trump had suggested, Maguire responded, “I don’t know who the whistle-blower is, Mr. Chairman, to be honest with you. I’ve done my utmost to protect his anonymity.” But if Maguire was seeking to protect the whistle-blower’s anonymity, why use the pronoun he to identify the person’s gender?

Schiff, in his questioning, was more circumspect, avoiding gendered references by relying on a time-honored strategy: deploying they as a singular pronoun. When Maguire said he thought the whistle-blower was “operating in good faith,” Schiff said, “Then they couldn’t be in good faith if they were acting as a political hack, could they? … You don’t have any reason to accuse them of disloyalty to our country or suggest they’re beholden to some other country, do you?”

Here's a simply titled article from China Daily:

"Opening up of financial market continues" (9/26/19).

The article may have a plain title, but it is full of gibberish.  The concluding sentence takes the cake:

Therefore, the securities market as the focus of the internationalization of the entire financial market must be targeted in order to truly realize the internationalization of the market and the internationalization of finance.

Yesterday, Merriam-Webster tweet-teased Donald Trump over a couple of glosses:

'Transcript': 🎙 a typed copy of dictated or recorded material

'Memorandum': 📝 an informal report or message

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) September 25, 2019

[This is a guest post by Douglas Q. Adams]

Readers of this blog may remember the excitement generated a few months ago by the announcement that “Tocharian C,” the native language of Kroraina (Chinese Loulan) had been discovered, hiding, as it were, in certain documents written in the Kharoṣṭhī script ("Tocharian C: its discovery and implications" [4/2/19]). Those documents, with transcription, grammatical sketch, and glossary, were published earlier this year as a part of Klaus T. Schmidt’s Nachlass (Stefan Zimmer, editor, Hampen in Bremen, publisher).  However, on the weekend of September 15^th and 16^th a group of distinguished Tocharianists (led by Georges Pinault and Michaël Peyrot), accompanied by at least one specialist in Central Asian Iranian languages, languages normally written in Kharoṣṭhī, met in Leiden to examine the texts and Schmidt’s transcriptions.  The result is disappointing, saddening even.  In Peyrot’s words, “not one word is transcribed correctly.”  We await a full report of the “Leiden Group” with a more accurate transcription and linguistic commentary (for instance, is this an already known Iranian or Indic language, or do the texts represent more than one language, one of which might be a Tocharian language?). Producing such a report is a tall order and we may not have it for some little time.  But, at the very least, Schmidt’s “Tocharian C,” as it stands, has been removed from the plane of real languages and moved to some linguistic parallel universe.