Language Log

This is a followup to "Japanese words that are dying out: focus on diabetes" (11/21/23).  Because it's history of science / medicine for specialists and too technical for the majority of readers, I will not provide transcriptions for all but a few of the most common terms.

[The following is a guest post from Nathan Hopson]

From Philip Taylor:

The British media were flooded yesterday with reports that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been “bamboozled” by scientific evidence presented during the Covid-19 pandemic.  My understanding of "bamboozle" has always been that deception must be involved, and this is borne out by the OED, but there was clearly no deception in this case (other than, perhaps, self-deception, in that BoJo may well have convinced himself that he did understand the scientific evidence, when he clearly did not), so why did Sir Patrick Valance, then Chief Scientific Advisor to HMG, record in his diary that “the Prime Minister was at times ‘bamboozled’” ?

From The Japan Times:

A foray into the realm of Japanese ‘dead words’

Trendy buzzwords tend to be most at risk of dying out as they often reflect ideas and trends that are fleeting.

By Tadasu Takahashi
Staff writer
 
Oct 31, 2023

Sometimes whole languages go extinct, more often certain words within languages cease to exist as part of the living lexicon.  There are political, demographic, and other socioeconomic reasons why languages disappear.  The reasons why individual words die out are related more to fashion — in culture, science, and similar emotional and intellectual reasons.

Tadasu Takahashi's interesting article provides some specific examples from contemporary Japanese language.

From another tweet / X-effusion by the Master Muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin:

“管总”这词是古代白话文，现在基本不用，原意是指某个人或某个部门管各种事务，“一个问题”怎么“管总”？哪个秘书想出来的新用法？ pic.twitter.com/jPdr3KzP6a

— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) November 19, 2023

Karin Fisher, "It’s a Bleak Climate for Foreign Languages as Enrollments Tumble", Chronicle of Higher Education 11/15/2023"

Enrollments in foreign-language courses tumbled nearly 17 percent between the fall of 2016 and the fall of 2021, the largest decline in the six decades the Modern Language Association has been conducting its census of American colleges. […]

Since peaking in 2009, foreign-language enrollments have deteriorated by almost 30 percent, the MLA found. This is a stunning reversal: Over the previous 30 years, the number of students studying languages had been on a steady upward trajectory.

Ryan Quinn, "Foreign Language Enrollment Sees Steepest Decline on Record", Inside Higher Ed 11/16/2023:

While the COVID-19 crisis lowered enrollments generally, the new report notes that the overall number of students in U.S. colleges and universities only fell 8 percent between 2016 and 2021. While those aren’t directly comparable figures, the drop in enrollment in non-English-language classes was over twice as much — and the 2021 decline in language-taking continues a pre-pandemic trend.

From the Twitter / X account of the famous popular science writer and muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin:

以色列领事馆公布的这封“一个陌生中国人的来信”，应该是在电脑上写好、打印出来，然后再抄写。所以有输入错误，把“公元”输入成了“公园”（书写只会把“公园”错成“公元”，不会反过来）。抄写的人写字水平太差，最常见的简单的字“且”“己”“组”都写错了，中国低年级小学生写这些字也不可能错。 pic.twitter.com/3GpUPS5k4b

— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) November 16, 2023

[This is a guest post by Zhengyuan Wang]

Calligraphy Practicing Sheets and the Trussing Structure of Chinese Characters

One thing essential for every elementary-level Chinese learner is to learn to write the characters in the same size in one single passage. This is not a unique case that only exists in Chinese. But this can be a challenging task in reality, in regards to how different the Chinese characters can be to each other with the number of strokes ranging from as simple as characters with one stroke only (for instance, 一 yī and 丨gǔn [yes, this is a character]) to complex ones with up to twenty-eight strokes (矗 chù, the character with most strokes among the 3,500 common used Chinese characters). Not to mention, there are characters less common but with way more strokes, such as 麤 cū, with thirty-three strokes, 龘 dá/tà, with fifty-one strokes, and the most famous one biáng (as in figure 1) with forty-two or fifty-six strokes.

(figure 1: from left to right: biáng in traditional Chinese with 56 strokes, biáng in simplified Chinese with 42 strokes, and yī with only one stroke. How can you write them in the same size, which has to be not so big in the first place?)

Probably only Northeastern Chinese could understand.

(source)

From Charles Belov:

While scouting out restaurants on Yelp, I noticed that Harborview Restaurant Yelp page had an item on the menu listed in English as Congee with Bone-in Chicken. However, the menu image, taken in 2022, reads "Congree with stir-fried frog" in Chinese.

This appears to have been corrected on the Harborview Restaurant website. The Dim Sum menu reads Congee with Bone-in Chicken in English and 黃毛鷄粥 (jook with the Chinese version of free-range chicken) in Chinese.

I wonder how the frog got in there. Of course, I've eaten frog at Cantonese restaurants but it doesn't seem to be on Harborview's menu.

Screen print from Yelp:

We're all waiting to learn the story behind Sam Altman's firing as CEO of OpenAI. Or at least, many of us are.

Meanwhile, there's possible resonance with an on-going drama in the daily Popeye comic strip, concerning the fate of (former) King Blozo of Spinachovia, now the Superintendent of Royal Foot Surfaces:

From Nathan Hopson:

I have been reading some handwritten documents from the 1960s and 1970s, and have been reminded that even beyond abbreviations, there were still "nonstandard" kanji in use. I guess this took me off guard mostly because these are school publications.

On the abbreviated side, the most obvious example is:

第 → 㐧

The "nonstandard" kanji that interested me most were these two:
1. 管 → 官 part written as 友+、

2. 食缶 as a single character, but paired with 食 to be 食[食缶]

Recently, we've had occasion to discuss how waitpersons in restaurants tend to say "perfect" no matter what we order (see, for instance, in the comments here).  Lately, I've noticed how the craze for perfection has spread to the grocery business.

I have a habit of carrying cash (my Chinese students barely know what cash is) around in a change purse (for coins and dollar bills) and a billfold for fives, tens, and twenties.  When it comes to paying, I have two general rules of thumb:

1. If possible, I like to pay the exact amount of the bill

2. I like to get rid of an excess of heavy change and bulky dollar bills that rapidly accumulate in my purse

To meet both of those desiderata, that sometimes entails fussing around a bit to count out the right amount.  It might mean that I end up giving the cashier slightly more than the exact amount.  Sometimes I even come up a penny or two or three short, in which case the cashier might make it up from the kitty.  No matter what, they almost always say "perfect" — especially  if I give them the precise amount owed, or close to it.

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "The problems started with my resolution next year to reject temporal causality."