Language Log

The first part of this virtuoso study of the Afro-Eurasian archeolinguistics of the donkey and its concomitant terms in diverse languages across vast expanses of land from East and North Africa to the heartland of East Asia was described in "A Sino-Iranian tale of the donkey's Eurasian trail" (5/10/24).  This post summarizes the second part of the study, which appears here:

Samira Müller, Milad Abedi, Wolfgang Behr, and Patrick Wertmann, "Following the Donkey’s Trail (Part II): a Linguistic and Archaeological Study on the Introduction of Domestic Donkeys to China", International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics, 6 (2) (October 16, 2024), 294-358.

The first two paragraphs of the Abstract were reproduced in the Language Log post cited in the first paragraph above, so there is no need to repeat them here.  Here is the third paragraph of the Abstract, which appears at the head of the just published Part II of the article:

"Australian man claiming language mix-up jailed over Tokyo break-in", By Himari Semans, The Japan Times (10/18/24)

The behavior of the defendant was so peculiar that, even if he was not intending to rob or injure the old man into whose house he broke, he deserves the 240 days detention plus 490 days for a total of two years jail time to which he was sentenced today.

The report repeatedly mentioned that the defendant smelled "gasoline".  I wonder if what he was really trying to say was that he smelled "gas".

"gasu ガス" ("gas")

"gasorin ガソリン" ("gasoline")

For the past week or so, Jef Mallett's Frazz has been exploring etymology and semantic drift.

The current sequence starts on 10/10 (or maybe earlier):

When I passed through this area, it was all very confusing to me, but the local residents have no problem distinguishing the three towns.  The Dalles OR and Dallesport WA face each other across the mighty Columbia River, whereas Dallas OR is about 150 miles to the southwest.  I met one young man who was born in Dallas OR, migrated up to Dallesport WA, and crosses the bridge every day to work in The Dalles OR because he doesn't have to pay taxes in OR.  He has absolutely no difficulty differentiating the three towns and seemed surprised when I told him it was hard for me to keep their names straight.

After talking with him (and others) for several minutes, i figured out the secret for keeping the names separate, apart from the spellings.

The middle two panels of a recent SMBC:

This might be an (unfair) attack on Blinkist, but it isn't.

Judging from these alarming top level official government proclamations, one might think that the Chinese language is going to hell in a handbasket, and it's all because of the deleterious effects of the internet, strict policing of which is absolutely necessary.

Rénmín wǎng: Rénmín rè píng: Jǐnfáng hēi huà làn gěng de yǐnxìng qīnshí 

Lín Fēng 2024 nián 10 yuè 13 rì 10:31 | Láiyuán: Rénmín wǎng-guāndiǎn píndào xiǎo zìhao jìnrì, zhōngyāng wǎng xìn bàn, jiàoyù bù yìnfā tōngzhī, bùshǔ kāizhǎn “qīnglǎng·guīfàn wǎngluò yǔyán wénzì shǐyòng” zhuānxiàng xíngdòng. Zhuānxiàng xíngdòng jùjiāo bùfèn wǎngzhàn píngtái zài rè sōu bǎng dān, shǒuyè shǒu píng, fāxiàn jīngxuǎn děng zhòngdiǎn huánjié chéngxiàn de yǔyán wénzì bù guīfàn, bù wénmíng xiànxiàng, zhòngdiǎn zhěngzhì wāi qǔ yīn, xíng, yì, biānzào wǎngluò hēi huà làn gěng, lànyòng yǐnhuì biǎodá děng túchū wèntí.

人民網 ：人民熱評：謹防黑話爛梗的隱性侵蝕
林 風
2024年10月13日10:31 | 來源：人民網-觀點頻道
小字號

近日，中央網信辦、教育部印發通知，部署開展“清朗·規范網絡語言文字使用”專項行動。專項行動聚焦部分網站平台在熱搜榜單、首頁首屏、發現精選等重點環節呈現的語言文字不規范、不文明現象，重點整治歪曲音、形、義，編造網絡黑話爛梗，濫用隱晦表達等突出問題。

What do you hear?

…or here?

I'm at a motel in Nampa, Idaho.

A sign posted on a side entrance reads:

DO NOT LEAVE DOOR

OPEN YOU WILL BE

TRESPASSED.

If you open this file in your browser, you'll see only an an left square bracket followed by a right square bracket, with nothing in between:

But if I run the file through a perl script that I wrote long ago to print out character codes and their names, I get

|[| 0x005B "LEFT SQUARE BRACKET"
|| 0xE004C "TAG LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L"
|| 0xE0061 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER A"
|| 0xE006E "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER N"
|| 0xE0067 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER G"
|| 0xE0075 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER U"
|| 0xE0061 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER A"
|| 0xE0067 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER G"
|| 0xE0065 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER E"
|| 0xE0020 "TAG SPACE"
|| 0xE004C "TAG LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L"
|| 0xE006F "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER O"
|| 0xE0067 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER G"
|]| 0x005D "RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET"

Sean Swanick, "Shaikh Zubayr", Duke University Libraries Blog, 4/13/2016:

A man lost at sea, having drifted far away from his native Iraqi lands, comes a shore in England. In due time he will be nicknamed the Bard of Avon but upon landing on the Saxon coast, his passport reportedly read: Shaikh Zubayr. A knowledgeable man with great writing prowess from a small town called Zubayr in Iraq. He came to be known in the West as Shakespeare and was given the first name of William. William Shakespeare of Zubayr.

There are many euphemisms for saying that someone died, two of the most common being "passed away" and "passed on".  Lately, I've been hearing more and more people announce that so-and-so simply "passed".  The first few times that I heard it spoken that way, I thought it sounded strange.  Now, however, I'm so accustomed to this usage that it almost sounds normal, though I'm still barely to the point of being comfortable in saying it myself.

Anh Yeo is a Chinese from Vietnam.  Currently she is studying in a graduate program of Chinese language and literature at Tsinghua University.  To earn pocket money, she has taken up a job teaching Southeast Asia office workers Mandarin online.  In response to this post "Aborted character simplification in the mid-1930s" (10/5/24), which had much to do with character simplification (or not) in Singapore, she wrote to me as follows:

I had two lessons tonight teaching Pinyin. Southeast Asians learn Pinyin fast (similar alphabet + existence of tones in Thai and Vietnamese), but because of that students are reliant on Pinyin and cannot remember characters! I have students learning for 3-4 months and still have to read off Pinyin (recognizing fewer than 50 characters). I always thought the coexistence of characters and Latin alphabet in Mandarin interesting!

Andreas Stolcke responds to "English is innocent" (10/10/2024):

The historical facts cited are correct, but they don't explain why the frequency of 's rose in the post-WW2 period, and again after about 2005 (= the internet), as indicated by the Google Ngrams plot below.

The bump in the post-war era (after 1957) could be an effect of the Allied occupation (delayed by the book publishing process), which was reversed by the mid-1990s, and then encouraged again by the internet half a century later.

So my bet is still on an English (language) influence.