Old, new, and mixed Cantonese colloquialisms
I dislike calling non-Standard Mandarin Sinitic language expressions "slang" (almost as much as I am dismayed when people call Sinitic topolects dialects — we've been through that countless times). Others may differ, but in my idiolect, "slang" is pejorative, and I distinguish "slang" from "argot; jargon; lingo; etc.", which — for me — denote particularization of occupation, not crudeness or cursing, although they may sometimes be associated with lower social levels.
slang
1756, meaning "special vocabulary of tramps or thieves", origin unknown. Possibly derived from a North Germanic source, related to Norwegian Nynorsk slengenamn (“nickname”), slengja kjeften (“to abuse verbally”, literally “to sling one's jaw”), related to Icelandic slengja (“to sling, throw, hurl”), Old Norse slyngva (“to sling”). Not believed to be connected with language or lingo.
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AIs on Rs in "strawberry"
The screenshot I show everyone who tells me they're using AI for anything
— Chris PG | PapaGlitch (@papaglitch.bsky.social) Aug 26, 2024 at 5:20 AM
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Kinds of science
Today's xkcd — "The Three Kinds of Scientific Research":
Mouseover title: "The secret fourth kind is 'we applied a standard theory to their map of every tree and got some suspicious results.'"
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Stop throwing eggs and get to work
It's a card game with a strange name. "Throwing eggs" is a shedding-type card game in which the players (2 pairs of 2 partners) try to get rid of all their cards before their opponents.
The characters in Guandan (掼蛋) literally mean "Throwing Eggs". The second character is a homophone of the character 弹, meaning bomb, which is also suggested as an origin for the game's name. An alternative name for the game is Huai'an Running Fast (淮安跑得快), referencing the city where the game originated.
I've overheard card players in the West refer to decisive card plays as "throwing a bomb", so the name makes sense after all, if you think of "dan" metaphorically.
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More on gendered badass
Following up on yesterday's "'Badass'" post, here's a recent and relevant article complaining that the word has been bleached into meaninglessness, especially as applied to women — Jackie Jennings, "We Need a Word Besides 'Badass' for Our Heroines", Jezebel 6/3/2024:
I am finished with the b-word. It’s been applied to every woman who has ever been publicly competent at anything. It’s been worked to death and rendered meaningless. Everyone from Courtney Love to Martha Stewart to Rosa Parks has been described as one and, at this point, it’s so overused that to call a woman this is a form of dada performance art.
In short: We simply have to stop using the word “badass” to describe any/every woman on earth who has entered the cultural dialogue for something other than a federal crime. And, I’m not a language cop but just know that if you use “badass” and think it conveys anything at all, you simply must think again.
What was once patronizing and gendered is now maddeningly vague and borderline inscrutable. It’s a collection of AI-generated slay queen, #girlboss memes gathered into a single word.
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The Welsh heritage of Philadelphia
Whenever I drive through the near northwest suburbs of Philadelphia, the names of the towns and streets there make me feel as though I've been transported to Wales: Bryn Mawr, Bala Cynwyd, Narberth, Uwchlan, Llanalew Road, Llewelyn Road, Cymry Drive, Llanelly Lane, Derwydd Lane…. By chance, through some sort of elective affinity, today I happened upon the following article about that very subject:
"Welcome to Wrexham, Philadelphia and the Welsh language", Chris Wood, BBC (11/12/23)
Rob McElhenney's attempts to learn Welsh provided a highlight of television show Welcome to Wrexham.
But if things had been different, the language may not have been so alien to him – and he might have spoken it in school or even at home.
It was the intention of settlers in parts of his native Philadelphia for the government and people to use Welsh.
However, the attempts in 1681 did not prove as successful as those later in Patagonia, Argentina.
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"I didn’t save you because you’re not important."
[This is a guest post from Brett Powley]
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Elective affinities: Japanese bonds of affection
One of my favorite expressions of ineffability in Chinese is yǒuyuán 有緣, which is what two people feel when they are drawn together by some inexplicable, indisputable attraction. Considerations of beauty and practicality are not what matter. They simply are fated / predestined to be together. They have an undeniable affinity for each other.
I first gained a serious appreciation for the idea of affinity in college when I read Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), the third novel of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). The concept was taken up in chemistry (Robert Boyle [1627-1691] — check out his hair!), then sociology (Max Weber [1864-1920]), then in psychology to describe the magnetism between individuals, and in dozens of other fields (commerce, finance, and law; religion and belief; science and technology; business; music; literature; history; mathematics; language studies; etc.). Needless to say, "affinity" is a powerful, productive concept, just as it is an actual force in relations between entities in the microcosm and macrocosm.
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Triple review of books on characters and computers
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-fourth issue: "Handling Chinese Characters on Computers: Three Recent Studies" (pdf), by J. Marshall Unger (August, 2024).
Abstract
Writing systems with large character sets pose significant technological challenges, and not all researchers focus on the same aspects of those challenges or of the various attempts that have been made to meet them. A comparative reading of three recent books—The Chinese Computer by Thomas Mullaney (2024), Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu (2022), and Codes of Modernity by Uluğ Kuzuoğlu (2023)—makes this abundantly clear. All deal with the ways in which influential users of Chinese characters have responded to the demands of modern technology, but differ from one another considerably in scope and their selection and treatment of relevant information long known to linguists and historians.
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"I" again?
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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Tones, Then and Now
[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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