Language Log

A Facebook post sent to me by shaing tai:

This post is following up on "Probably", 8/11/2024, which sketched the spectrum of probably pronunciations, from the full version with three clear phonetic syllables and two full /b/ stops between the first and second and second and third syllables, to a fully-lenited version with just one phonetic syllable and no residue of the intervocalic consonants:

But as that post noted, there are many variants in between, and this post will exhibit a few of them.

As a starting point for pierogi, here's a basic definition:

Pierogi, one or more dumplings of Polish origin, made of unleavened dough filled with meat, vegetables, or fruit and boiled or fried or both. In Polish pierogi is the plural form of pieróg (“dumpling”), but in English the word pierogi is usually treated as either singular or plural.

(Britannica)

Now, turning to Asia, we are familiar with the Tang period scholar, poet, and official, Duàn Chéngshì 段成式 (d. 863), as the compiler of Yǒuyáng zázǔ 酉陽雜俎 (Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang), a bountiful miscellany of tales and legends from China and abroad.  Yǒuyáng zázǔ is especially famous for including the first published version of the Cinderella story in the world, but it also contains many other stories and themes derived from foreign sources.

A random cat video that showed up on Facebook:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_iSxFL6_Wg

From Bored Panda (8/5/24).  For people who love food and the culinary arts, this issue of Bored Panda, which has fifty parts, is almost like a bible.

[This is a guest post by Liam Kelley.]

Looking up "triệu" in this Nom dictionary brings up an example from a line in a work that appears to date from the early twentieth century that states: "The soul of the 4,000-year-old country has yet to awaken. The 25 million [triệu兆 ] people are still deep in slumber."

There was definitely modern Mandarin terminology that entered classical Chinese in Vietnam at that time (I haven't looked at many Nom texts from that period so I can't say about Mandarin terms in the spoken language, but it would make sense that some would be there too), and the topic here (soul of a country/nation, awakening from sleep) is the type of new nationalist concepts that spread from Japan/China to Vietnam at that time.

In a comment to this post, "Yuezhi archeology without concern for Tocharian language" (8/4/24), Gokul Madhavan raised an interesting question:

I’m very curious to know if there are any reliable and up-to-date sources for Tocharian loanwords into Sanskrit or other Indo-Aryan languages.

Given both the use of Gāndhārī Prakrit across the region and the presence of the Kuṣāṇa empire in India, I would expect to find at least some Tocharian-origin names or words that got absorbed into Indo-Aryan languages.

From Technology Connections on Bluesky:

My favorite weird language thing is the near universal shortening of "probably" to "pry" in speech.

And people don't notice they're doing it! If I write "yeah that's pry not gonna work" that doesn't parse right, but if you say it out loud it absolutely does.

— Technology Connections (@techconnectify.bsky.social) Aug 10, 2024 at 2:52 PM

[This is a guest post by Mok Ling about the Sinitic word for "million" in Southeast Asian Mandarin in general, and Indonesian Mandarin in particular.]

I recently had a conversation with a Mandarin-speaking Chinese-Indonesian friend who used the word 條 tiáo to mean "million" (as in 1 000 000) in the place of the more universal 百萬 bǎiwàn. After asking our other Southeast Asian Mandarin-speaking (mostly Singaporean and Malaysian) friends, we found that none of them have ever said 條 tiáo for "million" — all of them say 百萬 bǎiwàn.

Now I know for a fact that Indonesian Hokkien has a similar-sounding word for "million" — 兆 tiāu/tiǎu (Wiktionary says the first reading is more common in Xiamen/Amoy and Zhangzhou/Changchiu while the second is more common in Quanzhou/Chinchiu). This use of 兆 for "million" is also recorded in 華夷通語 Huâ–Î Thong-gú, an 1883 (Kangxi 9) dictionary by a Chinese-Malay translator named 林衡南 Lim Heng-nam (image available upon request), glossed as 寔撈突轆沙 sit-la-tut lak-sa (Malay: seratus laksa — "laksa" is obviously from Sanskrit; modern Malay no longer uses myriads, but millions "juta". Note also that the circle under 轆 on the image signifies a vernacular reading, that is lak, rather than the literary reading lok).

Like some others, I have an (empirically unsupported) impression that features of Donald Trump's speaking style have changed recently. I first noticed this in listening to his 8/8/2024 press conference in Mar-a-lago — which seems rather different from e.g. his 7/21/2015 rally speech in Sun City., or the many other samples in "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", 1/5/2024.

At some point before long, I'll provide some numbers to support or undermine this impression. Meanwhile, the comments section is open for your reactions.

Today's SMBC:

A Language Log reader asked:

I’m curious, do griffin motifs (creatures with four legs but beak) appear in China at a known date? do you think the imagery dispersed from the East, i.e., from Scythia and Asia westward to the Mediterranean or vice versa, from the West to the East?

Since we have often discussed language spreads of the Scythians and other nomadic groups of Central, Inner, and Southwest Asia, I believe it is a worthy topic to pursue the transmission of art motifs associated with these groups across the Eurasian expanse. Consequently, I asked Petya Andreeva, who is a specialist on this type of nomadic art, what her response to this question would be.  She replied (note especially the last two sentences):

Marilyn Singer is reponsible for the local (re-)invention of "Reverso Poetry: Writing Verse in Reverse":

A reverso is a poem with two halves. In a reverso, the second half reverses the lines from the first half, with changes only in punctuation and capitalization — and it has to say something completely different from the first half (otherwise it becomes what one blogger’s kid called a “same-o.”)

Wikipedia uses the term "Reversible poem", and tells us that

A reversible poem, also called a palindrome poem or a reverso poem, is a poem that can be read both forwards and backwards, with a different meaning in each direction, like this:

Reversible poems, called hui-wen shih poems, were a Classical Chinese artform. The most famous poet using this style was the 4th-century poet Su Hui, who wrote an untitled poem now called "Star Gauge" (Chinese: 璇璣圖; pinyin: xuán jī tú).This poem contains 841 characters in a square grid that can be read backwards, forwards, and diagonally, with new and sometimes contradictory meanings in each direction.[2] Reversible poems in Chinese may depend not only on the words themselves, but also on the tone to produce a sense of poetry. Beginning in the 1920s, punctuation (which is uncommon in Chinese) was sometimes added to clarify Chinese palindromic poems.

The focus of this post is Brian Bilston's Reverso Poem "Refugees".