Language Log

They were already talking about this when I was in Kazakhstan twenty years ago.

The ABC of alphabet reform in Kazakhstan

Moving from Cyrillic-based to modified Latin script will distance the central Asian state symbolically from Russia

By Tony Barber, Financial Times (7/3/23)

——

It took only a few hours after my arrival in Astana, Kazakhstan’s futuristic capital, to appreciate the immense changes since my first visit to the country 36 years ago. Most obviously, Kazakhstan was no longer the drab central Asian outpost of a drab communist empire ruled from Moscow. But what caught my eye most was the young man with one word on his T-shirt: “Qazaqstan.”

How to spell the country’s name, and which alphabet to use for the Kazakh language, are questions of the highest political sensitivity. Cautiously, the government is preparing to replace the Cyrillic-based alphabet used for Kazakh since Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship with a modified Latin alphabet. Some Kazakhs already spell their country’s name as they would like it in Latin script — Qazaqstan.

Dunhuang (see here and here) is turning out to be a Chinglish goldmine.  Maybe that's because it's so far out in the remote, desolate, desert northwest.

I am prone / prey to earworms.  Sometimes when I'm seriously affected / infected by one, it takes me weeks to get rid of the scourge, and I have to resort to all sorts of devices and deceptions to disinfect them from the space between my ears and the auditory cortex inside the lateral sulcus of the temporal lobe).  (N.B.:  I realize that there is at least one person on this list who detests slashes, but I find them useful for conveying a range of related meanings, among many other applications). 

Unfortunately, in certain cases all it takes is to hear the name of or a line from an infectious song to trigger the ear worm, e.g., "Karma Chameleon" by Culture Club (for about the first hundred times I heard this song, I thought Boy George was saying "cama-cama-cama chameleon" and I had no idea what it meant [I thought it was just ladi-ladi-ladi-da sounds like Janis Joplin in "Me and Bobby McGee"] (uh-oh, just entered a danger zone by saying that).  And now practically every time I turn on the radio, I hear Taylor Swift's "Karma", so I quickly get into double earworm territory.

"Lying flat", "Buddha whatever", "Kong Yijiism", "involution" — China today has so many memes for opting out.  Helen Gao explains the reasons for their profusion:

How China’s Education System Trapped a Generation

Young people have been trained into competition and hopelessness.

Foreign Policy (6/22/23)

—–

From 2003 to 2005, I was a student at rendafuzhong (the High School Affiliated to People’s University) a notoriously cutthroat institution in the Chinese capital. It was well before the term “lying flat” was coined to describe opting out of the unwinnable race of Chinese academic and career competition. But some of my classmates seemed to have already cottoned on to the reality of what lay ahead. At the time, they made little sense to me. Looking back, I see they were the first victims of what the school was doing to us—and what the state is doing to us now.

Headline from NL Times (9 July 2023): "Sheep farmer injured after wolf attack in Wapse, ordered to be shot."

More savory Chinglish from Dunhuang:

We've had extensive discussions about the Old Sinitic reconstruction of the Sinitic word for "wheat".  Although we've been circling around it for quite some time now, we haven't yet nailed it down securely, but we're close.  While we're still occupied with "wheat", Martin Schwartz sends in this terse, seemingly cryptic, but extremely interesting information about words for rice:

Sorry I can't help by citing the reconstruction I saw in Boodberg

Before digging into the implications of PIIr. *wrinźh for our ongoing quest to find archeolinguistic links between eastern and western Eurasia, I'd like to say a few words about Peter Alexis Boodberg (1903-1972), whose hallowed name has come up several times on Language Log (see here and here [vigorous discussion in the comments]).

Sign at Dunhuang, at the western end of the Gansu Corridor in northwestern China, where I did my doctoral research more than half a century ago (there were no signs like this in those days):

From the Wall Street Journal:

‘The Oldest Book in the World’ Review: Also Sprach Ptahhatp

A set of maxims attributed to an adviser of an Egyptian pharaoh may be the world’s earliest surviving work of philosophy.

By Dominic Green

July 6, 2023 6:20 pm ET

What have we?  Philosophy in the Age of the Pyramids?  Philosophy before there were Greek philosophers?

Green launches his review:

In 1847 the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris acquired a 16-page scroll from the antiquarian Émile Prisse d’Avennes (1807-1879). He had bought it from one of the local men then excavating a cemetery near a pharaonic temple complex at Thebes in Egypt. The Papyrus Prisse, as it is known, contains the only complete version of a set of philosophical epigrams called “The Teaching of Ptahhatp.” Recognized upon its publication in 1858 as “the oldest book in the world,” the “Teaching” is attributed to a vizier to Izezi, the eighth and penultimate pharaoh of the Old Kingdom’s Fifth Dynasty, who ruled Egypt in the late 25th and early 24th centuries B.C.

Joe Marshall, "As AI cheating booms, so does the industry detecting it: ‘We couldn’t keep up with demand’", The Guardian 7/5/2023:

Since its release last November, ChatGPT has shaken the education world. The chatbot and other sophisticated AI tools are reportedly being used everywhere from college essays to high school art projects. A recent survey of 1,000 students at four-year universities by Intelligent.com found that 30% of college students have reported using ChatGPT on written assignments.

This is a problem for schools, educators and students – but a boon for a small but growing cohort of companies in the AI-detection business. Players like Winston AI, Content at Scale and Turnitin are billing for their ability to detect AI-involvement in student work, offering subscription services where teachers can run their students’ work through a web dashboard and receive a probability score that grades how “human” or “AI” the text is.

This picture troubled me:

(source)

From the movie "Jak rozpętałem drugą wojnę światową" (How I Unleashed World War II):

The initial Q&A:

Q: Name und Vorname?
A: Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz.

Over the last three years, I have seen first-hand Taiwan’s rich diversity and resilience and experienced the warmth, friendship, support and hospitality of the Taiwanese people. As I prepare to return to my hometown #Melbourne in the coming weeks, see my message in Taiwanese: pic.twitter.com/oSZ1hKp6Jx

— Australian Office (@AusOfficeTPE) July 4, 2023