From Bill Clinton's 2024 DNC speech:
I mean look,
what does their opponent do with his voice? He mostly
talks about himself
right?
So the next time you
hear him, don't count the lies.
Count the I's.
Count the I's.
His
vendettas, his vengeance,
his complaints,
his conspiracies.
He's like one of those tenors
opening up
before he walks out on stage like I did, trying to get his
lungs open by singing, "Me, me, me, me, me, me."
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[This is a guest post by Don Keyser]
I was relieved/reassured to read this in Language Log yesterday:
VHM: I myself remember very clearly being taught to say gongheguo 共和國 ("republic") and gongchandang 共產黨 (Communist Party) with the first syllable of each being in the first tone, then being surprised later when the PRC started pushing fourth tone for those first syllables. This sort of thing happened with many other words as well, with, for example, xingqi 星期 ("week"), which I had been taught as first tone followed by second tone, becoming two first tones.
My first Chinese language instructor, Beverly (Hong Yuebi) Fincher, used Chao Yuan-ren's Mandarin Primer. Later I studied a couple years, full-time, at the "Stanford Center" (Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies) hosted by National Taiwan University. Subsequent to that, a half decade later, I spent a year in Mandarin interpreter training at the government's Foreign Service Institute Branch School in Taiwan. In my "spare time" during that program, I studied daily an hour of Shanghainese and "Taiwanese" (i.e., Hoklo, or southern Min, or whatever).
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For some reason, people from different social groups in different regions all over the world believe that saying (things similar to) "yeah no" and "no yeah" is their special thing.
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[This is a guest post from Mok Ling.]
Hainanese is rather atypical of Southern Min (閩南) languages, with lots of innovations and retentions not seen in other varieties in the region: it has, for example, implosive consonants (which it shares with Vietnamese), as well as glottal-final 上聲 (a retention from Old Chinese).
The atypical feature I've found most mysterious is the tendency to pronounce the Middle Chinese 去 tone as 陰平. I haven't managed to find a consistent pattern in the words affected by this tonal shift.
Just for context: I unfortunately do not know which part of the island my grandparents are from. I was told ethnic tensions within the Chinese community in the island of Tanjung Pinang (where they eventually settled) discouraged them from transmitting any kind of information about this to their children. Looking at phonetic data compiled online (from the dialect dictionary kaom.net as well as recordings of Hainanese), it seems that our family lect most resembles Qionghainese (瓊海話).
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Most rhetorical devices have classical Greek names, arriving in English through Latin and French: analepsis, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, … But there are some common cases, like personification, where the English word is entirely Latinate, although the Greeks certainly used knew and used the technique. The OED's etymology is "Formed within English, by derivation", and the earliest OED citation is from 1728.
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We've been on the trail of the griffin for some time: "Griffins: the implications of art history for language spread" (8/9/24), "Idle thoughts upon the Ides of March: the feathered man" (3/11/23) — very important (not so idle) observations about griffins in the pre-Classical West by Adrienne Mayor, with illuminating illustrations. Following the leads in these and other posts, I think we're getting closer to the smoking gryphon (in some traditions, e.g., Egyptian sfr/srf, it is thought to be fiery).
One name from the Middle East rings a bell with a well-known fabulous monster from classical China. That is
…the Armenian term Paskuč (Armenian: պասկուչ) that had been used to translate Greek gryp 'griffin' in the Septuagint, which H. P. Schmidt characterized as the counterpart of the simurgh. However, the cognate term Baškuč (glossed as 'griffin') also occurs in Middle Persian, attested in the Zoroastrian cosmological text Bundahishn XXIV (supposedly distinguishable from Sēnmurw which also appears in the same text). Middle Persian Paškuč is also attested in Manichaean magical texts (Manichaean Middle Persian: pškwc), and this must have meant a "griffin or a monster like a griffin" according to W. B. Henning.
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Singapore’s primary Chinese language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao recently reported that the Chinese government plans to issue unified internet ID numbers and certificates to members of the Chinese public in order to verify the true identity of users. This raised concerns over control of speech.
China’s Ministry of Public Security and the Chinese Cyberspace Administration just released a document titled “National Internet Identity Authentication Public Service Management Measures (Draft for Comments).” According to the document, the purpose of the internet ID is “to strengthen the protection of people’s personal information.”
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Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-third issue: "Speaking and Writing: Studies in Vernacular Aspects of Middle Period Chinese Culture" (pdf), edited by Victor H. Mair (August, 2024).
Foreword
The three papers in this collection were written for my seminar on Middle Vernacular Sinitic (MVS). They cover a wide variety of topics, from epistolary style to social mores, to philosophy and religion. They reveal how a vernacular ethos informs the thought and life of men and women from different social classes and distinguishes them from those who adhere to a more strictly classical outlook. Although they are on quite dissimilar subjects, this trio of papers harmonize in their delineation of the implications of vernacularity for belief and perception. Taken together, they compel one to consider seriously what causes some people to tilt more to the vernacular side and others to cling to classicism. While the authors of these papers do not aim to arrive at a common conclusion on the meaning of the vernacular-classical divide, the readers who probe beneath the surface of all three papers will undoubtedly find facets that refract and reflect themes that bind them into a unified body of inquiry.
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Following up on J.D. Vance's reduced pronunciation of "problems", I looked through a 100-instance random sample of that word in real-life contexts, taken from the 23,147 phrases containing it in the previously-described NPR podcast corpus. About half of those examples exhibit lenition of the medial /bl/ consonant cluster, to the point where its IPA transcription would need to change, often all the way to deletion. This pattern follows the general treatment in American English of intervocalic consonant sequences that are not followed by a stressed vowel within the same word.
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"The mysterious slowdown of VPNs in China", Drum Tower, The Economist (newsletter), Gabriel Crossley (China correspondent) (8/15/24)
Every summer Communist Party bigwigs leave Beijing and go to recharge in the resort town of Beidaihe on the coast. This coincides with the silly season for China watchers. There is little hard news, so rumours fly. Some are baseless speculations about the health of Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader. Others are more well-founded, such as a report that Hu Xijin, a prominent nationalist commentator, has been muzzled on social media (probably for accidentally overstepping the party line). And some are true but harder to explain: like the fact that virtual private networks (VPNs) are getting slower.
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Matthew Smith, "The scone pronunciation map of Britain", YouGov 8/16/2024:
The debate on whether you should pronounce ‘scone’ to rhyme with ‘gone’ or with ‘bone’ has been going on forever. There is evidence of people making light of the distinction as far back as 1913, with a poem in Punch Magazine:
I asked the maid in dulcet tone,
To order me a buttered scone,
The silly girl has been and gone,
And ordered me a buttered scone.
Neither side looks likely to win the argument any time soon however, with a recent YouGov study of more than 54,000 Britons finding that 51% say they pronounce the word to rhyme with ‘gone’ but 45% saying they pronounce it to rhyme with ‘bone’.
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The question of what to call the languages of Taiwan and how to classify them with regard to their sister languages on the mainland has become one of the most exciting areas of discussion on Language Log, and it shows no signs of quieting down yet, especially not when we keep getting stimulating infusions from the press like this article:
"Language naming is complicated", by Lee Hsiao-feng 李筱峰, Taipei Times (8/17/24)
Recently, the Ministry of Education announced that it would adopt the term “Taiwan Taiwanese” (台灣台語), to replace the term “Minnanese” (閩南語, “Southern Min”), as a unifying name for the language spoken in Taiwan.
I discussed this issue with some friends.
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(…and also more /bl/ lenition…)
For the latest problematic clip from J.D. Vance's past, see Hafiz Rashid, "J.D. Vance Bashed Immigration With Podcast Host Who Advocated for Rape", TNR 8/15/2024:
J.D. Vance’s 2021 appearance on a podcast episode is drawing some negative attention thanks to the extremist views of its host, as well as Vance’s own comments.
The podcast, Jack Murphy Live, interviewed Vance before his run for the Senate in Ohio. The host Jack Murphy, whose real name is John Goldman, has a history of expressing abhorrent views on rape and immigration.
In one since-deleted blog post, Murphy wrote that “behind even the most ardent feminist facade is a deep desire to be dominated and even degraded,” adding that “rape is the best therapy for the problem. Feminists need rape.” […]
Vance’s comments on Murphy’s podcast also decried what he believed were the negative aspects of immigration.
“You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish, and German immigration right? And that had its problems, its consequences,” Vance told Murphy. “You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn’t had that before.”
The story has also been picked up by at least one overseas outlet so far — Alana Loftus, "JD Vance blames higher crime rates on 'wave of Irish immigration' in resurfaced clip", Irish Star 8/15/2024. But this is Language Log, not Political-Self-Foot-Shooting Log, so my focus will be on the some characteristics of how Vance talks in that podcast, not on the political content.
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