Language Log

Kase Wickman, "Kylie Kelce Knocked Joe Rogan Off the Top Podcast Slot, In Just One Episode", Vanity Fair 12/10/2024:

Kylie Kelce, wife of Jason Kelce, sister-in-law of Travis Kelce, mother of three (with a fourth on the way), and Dunkin Donuts enthusiast, can add another descriptor to that incomplete list: No. 1 podcast host.

The debut of Kylie’s new podcast, Not Gonna Lie, has unseated Joe Rogan’s The Joe Rogan Experience from its long-held perch atop the most-listened charts on both Apple and Spotify. The inaugural episode, featuring It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia star Kaitlin Olson as a guest, was published on December 5, with new episodes planned to drop each Thursday.

What accounts for Japan's smoothly functioning society and exquisite esthetics?  Is there a word for it?

Bunkum Alert: The Ancient Wisdom of Japan", by Howard Chua-Eoan, Opinion Today, Bloomberg; appears to be an earlier version of "The land of the rising sun isn’t a life-hack wonderland despite the busy market in its ancient wisdom", by Howard Chua-Eoan, Opinion Today, Bloomberg (12/13/24)

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I just spent two weeks in Japan. But if you think I’ve brought back exotic pearls of wisdom, you’ll be disappointed. That’s because I’ve been talking to my Tokyo-based colleague Gearoid Reidy — a great admirer of Japan but a cold critic of Western fetishization of almost everything out of the country. As he describes it in a recent column: “Talking to first-time tourists or perusing online forums, I often find astonishment: Why does everything work so well? How else could public safety and famed attention to detail be sustained, if not from some secret knowledge the West has lost?” The search for alleged life hacks out of Japan has resulted in a plethora of books on “the Japanese secret to everything: Eat less, save money, be more productive. Ikigai, wabi-sabi or shinrin yoku will fix what’s wrong with your life.”

L.C. Hall, “Telegraph Talk and Talkers”, McClure’s Magazine, December 1901:

In its written form telegraphese , or "Morse," as it is called in the vernacular, is rarely seen. Yet as a vehicle of expression it is, to the initiated, as harmonious, subtle, and fascinating as the language of music itself.

Nothing could be simpler than its alphabet of dots and dashes. Yet it has come to pass that out of the manner of rendering this simple code has been evolved a means of communicating thought and feeling rivaling in flexibility and scope the human voice.

A recent Elle Cordova short:

The comments on "Hypertonal conlang" (12/8/2024) include a lengthy back-and-forth about where the syllable break should be located in English words like "Cheryl". I was surprised to see that no one brought up the concept of ambisyllabicity, which has been a standard and well-accepted idea in phonology and phonetics for more than 50 years. It continues to be widely referenced in the scholarly literature — Google Scholar lists about 2,170 papers citing the term, and 260  since 2020.

The most influential source is Dan Kahn's 1976 MIT thesis, “Syllable-based Generalizations in English Phonology”.  There's more to say about the 1970s' introduction into formal phonology of structures beyond phoneme strings (or distinctive feature matrices), but that's a topic for another time.

I recall Malaysia-based New Zealander Nigel Richards' multiple Scrabble championships in English and French from earlier years and thought that I had written about them, but apparently not on Language Log.  Now he has won again, this time in Spanish, so it's about time that he became known to our readership, if they don't already know him..

"Scrabble star wins Spanish world title – despite not speaking Spanish:  Nigel Richards has also been champion in English and – after memorising dictionary in nine weeks – French", Ashifa Kassam in Madrid, The Guardian (12/10/24)

The gap between spoken and written Sinitic is enormous.  In my estimation, it is greater than for any other language I know.  The following are some notes by Ľuboš Gajdoš about why this is so.

"The Discrepancy Between Spoken and Written Chinese — Methodological Notes on Linguistics", Comenius University in Bratislava, Department of East Asian Studies

The issue of choosing language data on which synchronous linguistic research is being done appears in many ways not only to be relevant to the goal of the research, but also to the validity of the research results. The problem which particularly concerns us here is the discrepancy between speech on the one hand and written language on the other. In this context, we have often encountered in the past a situation where the result of the research conducted on a variety of the Chinese language has been generalized to the entire synchronous state of the language, i.e. to all other varieties of the language, while ignoring the mentioned discrepancy between the spoken and written forms. The discrepancy between the spoken and written forms is likely to be present in any natural language with a written tradition, but the degree of difference between languages is uneven:  e.g. compared to the Slovak language, it may be stated that the situation in Chinese is in this respect extraordinary. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the quantitative (qualitative) research on discrepancies between different varieties of the language has not yet aroused the attention of Chinese linguistics to such an extent as would have been adequate for the unique situation of this natural language.

Todays' xkcd:

Mouseover title: "It works because a nautical mile is based on a degree of latitude, and the Earth (e) is a circle."

"Mysterious tablet with unknown language unearthed in Georgia", by Dario Radley, Archeology News (12/4/24)

Tablet with inscription in an unknown language, discovered in Georgia.
Credit: R. Shengelia et al., Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology

When I write in Chinese, I generally use pinyin input.  Yesterday, having finished a message to someone, I entered the following:  meiweiheng.  I was both surprised and pleased that up popped my full name in Chinese characters:  Méi Wéihéng 梅维恒.  In the past, I would usually have to call up the characters one or two at a time and choose the right ones from a list.  The fact that they came up in one fell swoop from "meiweiheng" was exhilarating.  It meant that I must be becoming better known on the Chinese internet.

Curious, I wondered what would turn up if I did a web search in Chinese, and was overwhelmed by the huge number of ghits.  But what briefly puzzled me was why this photograph was included at the top of the very first page:

When I went to the restroom at Heathrow Terminal 5 in London, I was stopped in my tracks by the sign "Cleaner's Sluice" on a door just outside.  I knew what a "sluice" was, in fact I knew several related meanings for sluice:

• • An artificial passage for water, fitted with a valve or gate, for example in a canal lock or a mill stream, for stopping or regulating the flow.
  • A water gate or floodgate.
  • Hence, an opening or channel through which anything flows; a source of supply.
  • The stream flowing through a floodgate.
  • (mining) A long box or trough through which water flows, used for washing auriferous earth.
  • (linguistics) An instance of wh-stranding ellipsis, or sluicing.

(Wiktionary)

That seems to be reader RBM's reaction to the headline "K-Pop Light Sticks Fire up Impeachment Protests in South Korea", Reuters 12/10/2024.

For whatever reason — maybe the picture at the top of the story — I understood the headline immediately. But the Berkeley Neural Parser makes the same mistake as RBM:

Today's SMBC: