Language Log

I was in a Salt Lake City shop called Caputo's that bills itself as a Market and Deli, Purveyors of Regional Italian and Southern European Foods.  It reminds me somewhat of the great Di Bruno Bros. in Philly, but more on the "paisan"* side (sort of like the South Asian word "desi" as used in America to describe a small down-home food shop that caters to folks from the subcontinent).

[*I absolutely love that Italian word!  So much depends on the intonation with which you say it.  A scholarly disquisition on a more formal set of Italian words for the same idea is the following:

You are probably thinking of the variations of the Italian “compare” often used in various dialects in the south, particularly cumpà/compà or ‘mpare/‘mbare. From Latin “compater”, formed by “cum” (with) and “pater” (father), which originally referred to the person present with the father at a child’s baptism, the child’s godfather. Over centuries these forms became a common greeting among friends in southern dialects. Since many immigrants from Italy to the US in the early 20th century were from the south and spoke their dialects, cumpà/compà /‘mpare/‘mbare became known as Italian-American colloquialisms. 

In Italian, naturally I would say fra as in fratello (brother). It is very common to shorten the word by cutting off the end and emphasizing the vowel that remains at the end.  To say "hey bro" in Italian, I would use one of these: “Ehi fra…” “Oi fra…” “Ciao fra…” “Ei fra…”

Another slang term for “bro” or “dude” is “zio” (uncle, like Spanish “tío,” and has the same slang meaning in Spanish too)

It comes from one of my two favorite New Jersey undergraduate paisans who took my classes a few years ago.]

The oral cavity is one section of the vocal tract.  Along with the tongue, lips, and hard and soft palates, the teeth help to form different types of speech sounds.  If any one of these components is missing or deformed, it will have a pronounced (!) effect on speech production.

Two days ago, I met an older man, probably about sixty, whose teeth were highly irregular, and he was missing about half of his teeth, with gaps here and there.

It was clear to me that the man was in no way deficient in intelligence, and that he was actually knowledgeable and articulate.  Problem was, he had difficulty making all the sounds he needed to express himself.  It was also evident that he was trying to compensate for the missing vocal components of his mouth.

We missed it this year, but the New York Times didn't , and posted a link to Laurel MacKenzie's "Pirate Lingo 101":

From Lane Greene on Bluesky (link):

I've been trying for a while to figure out a theory of Trump's capitalisation. It's mostly nouns like Country, but not always positive ones. I never did nail down the pattern.

But I've got a new theory – bear with me here.

ALL CAPS IS FOR UNGRATEFUL WOMEN.

[image or embed]

— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 12:10 PM

Not only is it hard to spell, few people know what it means.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, on my trip to SLC three or four days ago, I fulfilled three of my childhood dreams:  1. float in the Great Salt Lake; 2. hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in person; 3. visit the Family Research Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest genealogical library in the world (I remember that when I was a graduate student more than half a century ago, Mormon archivists spent two years filming every Chinese genealogical record in the Harvard-Yenching Library; at that time I did not understand why they would do that, now I do).

I was chatting with some people in the lobby of the motel where I was staying, and  a young man in his early twenties asked me why I wanted to do #3, visit the genealogy research center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (he himself was a Mormon).

Back in the early 2000s, George W. Bush got a lot of flac for calling Greeks "Grecians" and making similar mistakes in the mapping from place names to ethnonyms.

J.D. Vance recently went the other way, mapping the ethnonym Haitians to a possible place name pronounced /ˈhej.ʃə/, as if it were spelled "Haitia":

Apparently not. Given this recent tweet, in which Google AI Overview explains that "October 21 is not a Libra, as the Libra zodiac sign is from September 23 to October 22", I thought I'd try for myself. The result had a different format but the same problem:

I departed a total of about 260 miles from my Route 30 / Lincoln Highway running route to come down to Salt Lake City for a few perduring reasons.

1. From the time I was a little boy, I have always wanted to float in the Great Salt Lake.

2. From the time I was in junior high school, I've always wanted to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in person.

3. From the time I was in high school, I have always wanted to visit the world's greatest collection of genealogical records, created at great expense and effort by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,

Sarah Posner on Bluesky, linking to a kamalahq tweet and a kamalahq Instagram post:

In the thread below: a completely rambling, unhinged, incomprehensible quote from Trump at his Flint town hall with Sarah Huckabee Sanders that the Harris campaign distributed, then news headlines about same event.

Where is all the coverage that Trump is old and can't speak a coherent sentence?

I've been defending Donald Trump against similar accusations since my exchange with Geoff Pullum in 2015 — "Trump's aphasia" vs. "Trump's eloquence". Has anything changed?

There has been an enormous turbulence over the simultaneous explosion of Hezbollah pagers (some call them walkie-talkies) at 3:30 PM on September 17, 2024, involving as it does actors in regions as far flung as the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia.  No one could be closer to the center of the turmoil than the gentleman in the middle of the doorway in this photograph:

"Jingyuan Digital Platform: Font Making and Database Development for Shang Oracle Bones (Part 1)", Peichao Qin, The Digital Orientalist (9/17/24)

If you're wondering what "Jingyuan" means, it's a fancy, allusive way to say "Mirrored contexts [for thorough investigations]" ([gézhì] jìngyuán [格致]鏡原) (source), just a means for the creator of the platform to give it a proprietary designation.

A goodly proportion of Language Log readers probably have some idea of what oracle bone inscriptions are, but just to refresh our memories and for the benefit of new and recent readers who are not familiar with the history of Sinographic scripts, I'm going to jump right into the third paragraph of Qin's article, which is like a basic primer of oracle bone inscription studies.

From Josh E.:

I am a big fan of your posts on the Language Log and was wondering whether you often see semicolons used the way we might normally use commas to set off a dependent clause. Here is an example I just saw:

A Massachusetts family is demanding a full investigation after a state police recruit died after being injured during a training exercise late last week at the Massachusetts State Police Academy.

Police said Enrique Delgado-Garcia, 25, of Worcester was injured and became unresponsive during a training exercise Thursday on defensive tactics. He died the next day. […]

McGhee said he put about 400 to 500 recruits through the program without issue, and noted the academy has since trained thousands.

“While this is a tragedy, and it never should have happened; injuries to this level are very rare,” he said.

When I started teaching a decade ago, I rarely saw this issue. Now, I see it all the time in both undergraduate and professionally published writing. Is there a term for this kind of flattening of punctuation distinctions? Or would Geoff Pullum put me up there with Strunk and White as being wrong in my basic understanding?

So says DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski.

"DeepL translation targets Taiwan as next key Asian market:  CEO says AI-based model is aiming to refine nuances, politeness", Steven Borowiec, Nikkei staff writer (September 16, 2024)

DeepL Write is one thing, DeepL Translator is another.  We've examined both on Language Log and are aware that the former is already deeply entrenched as a tool for composition assistance, but are less familiar with the special features of the latter.

The article by Borowiec, based on his interview with CEO Jarek Kutylowski, begins with some not very enlightening remarks about the difference between simplified characters on the mainland and traditional characters on Taiwan, attesting to the truism that CEOs and CFOs often don't know as much about the nitty-gritty technicalities of the products they sell as do the scientists and specialists they hire to make them.