Language Log

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]

To take a step or two back towards the Sad Cripples theme, I had the TV on the other day and the show host — echoing the guest, a dietitian — said this:

“Lán Tâi-oân lâng kóng ‘tāu-leng’; gōa-kok lâng kóng ‘tó͘⁺-nài.’”

(Can't remember if he used Tone 3 or Tone 5 on the last syllable.) This could also be written like this:

“Lán Tâi-oân lâng kóng ‘tāu-leng’; gōa-kok lâng kóng ‘豆奶’ (DÒUNǍI).”

= 咱台灣人講「豆乳」。外國人講『豆奶』（DÒUNǍI）。

Again, he wasn't making a point; he was just summarizing an offhand remark the guest had just made to the same effect. While he seems to be referring to Mandarin speakers as foreigners — and they are, in a meaningful sense — there is no way he meant that. Rather, he & the guest were ultimately both referring to the English word soy milk, but calqued into Mandarin as 豆奶 — also a word in Mandarin, but not generally used in Formosa.

Assertively spicy and conspicuously Cantonese

That's almost a contradiction in terms, because Hong Kongers are not very big on spicy food and they generally are not very good at cooking it either.

Photographs of walls in a popular chain of special Yunnan style spicy noodles in Hong Kong:

(Facebook)

Before and after the recently completed sinicization of the Grand Mosque of Shadian, Yunnan, in southwest China:

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-forty-seventh issue:

"Metric Montage in Chinese Poetry," by Conal Boyce.

https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp347_metric_montage_chinese_poetry.pdf

Keywords: Chinese poetry; metric montage; Shěn Zhōu; Lǐ Bái; Lǐ Hè; Frodsham

[Prefatory note:  The material for this post was sent to me by a usually trustworthy source.  Moreover, it comes from a blog that sounds and looks as though it should have done its homework and know its stuff, and the blog drew their material from Madeleine Pelner Cosman’s  Medieval Wordbook that has been in circulation since 1996, with enthusiastic reviews (avg. 4.5) on Amazon.   Cosman (1937-2006) had a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University (1964) and a J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (1995) at Yeshiva University.  She was a professor in the Department of English at City College of New York for nearly three decades (1964-1993), lectured on medieval daily life at the Metropolitan Museum of New York for years, and was active in medical, judicial, and other fields across the United States. I must confess that, as I prepared the post, I felt qualms over the quality of some of the entries.  I should have followed my instincts and investigated further, and apologize for having failed to do so.  Mea culpa — straight from the Middle Ages (Confiteor [1100]).]

You'd be surprised by how many of our most common, comfortable expressions come from the medieval period.  Here are twelve collected by Madeleine Pelner Cosman as part of her book on words and phrases from the medieval period that you are likely to be quite familiar with.

12 Expressions that we got from the Middle Ages, Medievalists.net, May 21, 2024

Crocodile tears

To display insincere sadness. A few ancient and medieval writers believed that crocodiles would cry while eating their victims. The story was spread in England by the 14th-century travel writer John Mandeville. He explains that “these serpents slay men, and they eat them weeping; and when they eat they move the over jaw, and not the nether jaw, and they have no tongue.”

Bring home the bacon

To earn a living or achieve success. This expression dates back to 1104 when a nobleman and his wife dressed themselves as peasants and asked the local Prior for a blessing for not arguing after a year of being married. In response, the Prior gave them a side of bacon. Afterwards, the nobleman gave land to the monastery on the condition they gave couples who accomplished the same deed with the same reward.

[This is a guest post by Charles Belov.  To show what a dedicated, eclectic listener of Asian popular media Charles is, I've left his signature block intact.]

As a frequent, essentially monolingual consumer of Asian popular media, one of the issues for me has always been how translations succeed or fail at communicating both the particular Asian culture and how it can be expressed meaningfully in English. ¿Where does the translation reflect current or past Asian culture and where does it reflect American or British culture of the audience?

A term of concern for me at the moment is "cíxióngtóngtǐ 雌雄同體" (lit. "male female same body"), which Wiktionary translates as "hermaphrodite." However, Wiktionary also notes in the English entry for "hermaphrodite" that this term is now considered offensive and that "intersex" is the preferred term.

We have expressed concern over the quality of training and source materials for Chinese AI and LLMs.  Less than a week ago, we examined "AI based on Xi Jinping Thought (5/21/24), which may be considered as an attempt to "purify" what goes into Chinese AI.  It turns out that there really is a problem, and it is affecting not just China's own AI efforts, but is infecting ours as well.

OpenAI’s latest blunder shows the challenges facing Chinese AI models:
Finding high-quality data sets is tricky because of the way China’s internet functions.
By Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review (May 22, 2024)

As we shall soon see, pursuing this topic takes us into very sensitive, disquieting territory concerning the nature of China's internet.  It will be difficult for us to avoid assessing the quality of China's knowledge basis and information resources overall.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the MIT Technology Review article by Zeyi Yang:

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-forty-sixth issue: "The Imagery of House Geckos and Tokay Geckos in Imperial Era Chinese Literature," by Olivia Anna Rovsing Milburn.

Keywords: House geckos; Tokay geckos; Chinese literature; virginity tests; magic; rain-making

Frequent commenter AntC sent email about a transitive use of cooperate, used by Karen Friedman Agnifilo in an interview with Michael Popok about Walt Nauta's role in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case:

And so it makes sense why
uh they would want to cooperate him
and i- it also makes sense why they would reach out before indictment
and give him that opportunity.

I stopped short when I passed by this piece of gym equipment in a kindergarten playground near my home.

[line spacing was difficult with this one]

Chinese signs collected by Zeyao Wu:

本店/有/嬰兒被/賣 or 本店/有/嬰兒/被賣
běn diàn yǒu yīng'ér bèi                                  mài
this shop has baby   passive signifier; blanket for sale
"this shop has baby blankets for sale" or "this shop has had babies for sale"

Liwei Jiao sent in this photograph from a park in Hefei, China: