Language Log

For a natural demonstration of what diglossia is in the Chinese-speaking context, watch this 0:53 video.  The speaker begins in local Xi'anese (also called Guānzhōng huà 关中话 / 關中話), but at 0:20, when he suddenly realizes that he is talking to a television reporter, after hilariously sprucing himself up a bit, he abruptly switches to Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKwjpGVaf4Q

During the 2015 presidential campaign, Geoff Pullum wrote about "Trump's aphasia", and I responded ("Trump's eloquence") that

[I]n my opinion, he's been misled by a notorious problem: the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form.

This apparent incoherence has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals. Both are effectively signaled in speaking — by prosody along with gesture, posture, and gaze — and therefore largely factored out by listeners. But in textual form, the cues are gone, and we lose the thread.

Last Friday, an Australian journalist complained about the same sort of thing (Lenore Taylor, "As a foreign reporter visiting the US I was stunned by Trump's press conference", The Guardian 9/20/2019). The sub-head: "Despite being subjected to a daily diet of Trump headlines, I was unprepared for the president’s alarming incoherence."

She's talking about a recent tour of border-wall construction at Otay Mesa in California, and she summarizes her reactions this way:

In writing about this not-especially-important or unusual press conference I’ve run into what US reporters must encounter every day. I’ve edited skittering, half-finished sentences to present them in some kind of consequential order and repeated remarks that made little sense.

In most circumstances, presenting information in as intelligible a form as possible is what we are trained for. But the shock I felt hearing half an hour of unfiltered meanderings from the president of the United States made me wonder whether the editing does our readers a disservice.

From Fuchsia Dunlop’s Facebook page (taken in Xi'an):

"Singular 'they': Though singular 'they' is old, 'they' as a nonbinary proonoun is new — and useful", Merriam-Webster Words We're Watching:

Much has been written on they, and we aren’t going to attempt to cover it here. We will note that they has been in consistent use as a singular pronoun since the late 1300s; that the development of singular they mirrors the development of the singular you from the plural you, yet we don’t complain that singular you is ungrammatical; and that regardless of what detractors say, nearly everyone uses the singular they in casual conversation and often in formal writing.

They is taking on a new use, however: as a pronoun of choice for someone who doesn’t identify as either male or female. This is a different use than the traditional singular they, which is used to refer to a person whose gender isn’t known or isn’t important in the context, as in the example above. The new use of they is direct, and it is for a person whose gender is known, but who does not identify as male or female. If I were introducing a friend who preferred to use the pronoun they, I would say, “This is my friend, Jay. I met them at work.”

A month ago, it was being called "Women's Romanization for Hong Kong" (8/17/19).  Now it has been catapulted into an all-purpose, across-the-board status for the Hong Kong anti-extradition protesters:

"Insurgent tongues: how loose Cantonese romanisation became Hong Kong’s patois of protest", by Rachel Leung Ka-yin, Hong Kong Free Press (9/21/19).

Leung's article begins:

“Gwong Fuk Heung Gong! Si Doi Gark Ming!”*

If you understand the above slogan, chances are you’re probably a Hong Konger born in the post-80s or 90s. If that did not make any sense to you, the “language” in use is a form of loose Cantonese romanisation, which recently saw a surge from the niche to widespread use in political activism via the online platform LIHKG**.

*["Liberate Hong Kong! the revolution of our times!"]

**[VHM:  like Reddit]

A nice example of "um" as a discourse particle — from Jennifer Rubin, "What might finally ensnare Trump", WaPo 9/20/2019 [emphasis added]:

This would be the perfect example of conduct that might not technically be a crime but is obviously and blatantly a violation of the president’s oath of office and a threat to our democratic system. Former prosecutor Renato Mariotti tweeted, “If Trump promised foreign aid to Ukraine in exchange for investigating Biden’s son, that is obviously corrupt and should meet any definition of a ‘high crime’ for impeachment.”

Meanwhile, Giuliani made a wild appearance on CNN. Amid the accusations and insults, he acknowledged that “of course” he asked Ukraine to look into Biden. Umm. That’s a problem.

In Berlin for the kick-off meeting of DoReCo, I've noticed a lot of multi-lingual wordplay.

The punning radio-station advertisement in the picture is a good example. It combines the 1993 R.E.M. song "Everybody hurts" with an appropriate if non-existent form of the German word hören to imply that "everybody listens" to their station, because, as the song says,

Sometimes everything is wrong
Now it's time to sing along
When your day is night alone (Hold on, hold on)
If you feel like letting go (Hold on)
If you think you've had too much
Of this life, well, hang on

Fascinating article from BLARB (Blog // Los Angeles Review of Books:

"Our Language Battle: Korea’s Surprisingly Addictive Game Show of Vocabulary, Expressions, and Proper Spacing", by Colin Marshall (9/1/19)

This is the second paragraph of the article:

Having found myself living in the genuinely foreign country of Korea, I’ve lately also found myself watching Our Language Battle (우리말 겨루기), a game show that has aired every Monday evening on KBS since 2003. Though it occasionally invites celebrities, and this past July even brought on members of the National Assembly, it usually pits four everyday Koreans (or four teams of two, usually family) against each other in a test of their knowledge of the Korean language. It begins simply enough, with the contestants buzzing in to guess the words or phrases that fill in a crossword-style board, but soon the challenges get dramatically harder: separating folk spellings and regional variations from the officially standard, filling in words missing from old television and newspaper clips, and — most difficult of all, even for contestants who otherwise dominate the game — properly re-spacing a text whose words all run together.

Many's the Language Log post in which we've looked at the pluses and negatives of writing Chinese characters (see "Selected readings" below).  These include discipline, character building, aesthetic aspects, myopia, even punishment.  Now, in "Bring Back Handwriting: It’s Good for Your Brain:  People are losing the brain benefits of writing by hand as the practice becomes less common", Elemental (9/12/19), Markham Heid examines the psychological and physical effects of writing by hand as opposed to typing fully formed letters with the stroke of a key.

Psychologists have long understood that personal, emotion-focused writing can help people recognize and come to terms with their feelings. Since the 1980s, studies have found that “the writing cure,” which normally involves writing about one’s feelings every day for 15 to 30 minutes, can lead to measurable physical and mental health benefits. These benefits include everything from lower stress and fewer depression symptoms to improved immune function. And there’s evidence that handwriting may better facilitate this form of therapy than typing.

The University of New South Wales wants you to know that it's driving waste, and also recycling innovation for the world.

It's not clear what either of those activities really are, and it's not easy to construe either of them as something to boast about.

UNSW seems to be taking a contrarian stance here — "driving waste" sounds like "working to create more garbage", or maybe "carting it away by the truckload" — and "recycling innovation" seems to mean "copying others' inventions". Not your typical 21st century academic slogans.

[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson]

I wanted to share two photos with examples of Japlish. One appears to be the result of a quirky machine translation.

That's the "Training room area guidelines" from the municipal sports center near my home (the only gym I can afford on my salary). The offending passage is at the bottom:

"Please use a barbell and a dumbell with a chisel in this free weight area."

This novel use of a carving and gouging implement struck me as perhaps not so much a curious aspect of inscrutable Oriental culture as instead the hallmark of machine translation gone facepalmingly awry.

The following mind-boggling demonstration of machine-like writing of Chinese characters was posted on imgur a few days ago:

Flawless writing of Chinese characters

From Donald Clarke:

https://twitter.com/ps_ford/status/1172362422465613830