Language Log

From the Twitter account of the famous popular science writer and muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin:

先把外资都赶跑、吓跑了，再死皮赖脸地请回来？ pic.twitter.com/FepFOsJnpY

— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) February 20, 2023

Big news from China yesterday:

"2,200-year-old flush toilet — oldest ever found — unearthed at palace ruins in China"

Aspen Pflughoeft, Miami Herald / Yahoo
Thu, February 16, 2023 at 5:37 PM EST

What a gift to humanity!

All the terms in the title of this post mean one or another kind of toilet, but function differently and date from different times and places.  We've talked about many types of toilets on Language Log before (for a few see "Selected readings" below).  Here I want to focus on two Chinese models, one dating to two millennia ago that was recently discovered archeologically, so we don't have a proper name for it yet, and an archaic-sounding one, mǎtǒng 馬桶 ("horse bucket"), that is the current, conventional, common term for the toilet across China.

A Russian friend of mine told me that "Terrible" is a common, well nigh universal, mistranslation for the nickname of Ivan IV Vasilyevich (Russian: Иван Васильевич; 25 August 1530 – 28 March [O.S. 18 March] 1584).  He says that a closer translation would be "Enraged".

The English word terrible is usually used to translate the Russian word Грозный (grozny) in Ivan's nickname, but this is a somewhat archaic translation. The Russian word Грозный reflects the older English usage of terrible as in "inspiring fear or terror; dangerous; powerful" (i.e., similar to modern English terrifying). It does not convey the more modern connotations of English terrible such as "defective" or "evil". Vladimir Dal defines grozny specifically in archaic usage and as an epithet for tsars: "courageous, magnificent, magisterial and keeping enemies in fear, but people in obedience". Other translations have also been suggested by modern scholars, including formidable.

(source)

Klaus Nuber stumbled upon this opinion piece in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard:

"Shoot 'em down – Ooops, einige Ballons waren doch keine chinesischen Spionageballons"

10 hours ago

Klaus says "It's about the downed balloons over Alaska. At the end the author asks a question":

"Ggibt es einen Ausdruck in Mandarin für "Chuzpe"?

Is there an expression In Mandarin for chutzpah?

Tessa Koumoundouros, "Adorable Study Tests How Dogs Respond to Wild Wolf Calls – And, Yes, There's Footage", ScienceAlert 2/12/2023:

Without convenient access to phones for pens for letter-writing, wolves must rely on howls to communicate long distances. These woeful wails allow the social mammals to maintain their territories as well as keep track of and stay in synchrony with other pack members. […]

A new study exposes family dogs to wolf howls to better understand why some of our canine companions no longer seem to bother with this seemingly important form of dog communication.

For weeks, everyone was talking about how great the Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT is, or else showing that it can make serious mistakes of fact or logic. But since the alliance between OpenAI and Microsoft added (a version of) this LLM to (a version of) Bing, people have been encountering weirder issues. As Mark Frauenfelder pointed out a couple of days ago at BoingBoing, "Bing is having bizarre emotional breakdowns and there's a subreddit with examples". The cited subreddit, r/bing,  has examples going back to the start of the alliance. And today, Kevin Roose posted a long series of strikingly strange passages from his own interactions with the chatbot , "Bing's A.I. Chat: 'I Want to Be Alive", NYT 2/16/2023.

I've never heard of this "Chinese" proverb, but some American friends are asking if I can tell them the original proverb in Chinese.  I can't tell them the original proverb in Chinese, but I can tell them about its origins in Japanese.

Yesterday, Charlie Munger, the 99-year-old billionaire Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, declared that the Chinese company, BYD, was beating Tesla in the electric vehicle (EV) market.  I had never heard of BYD, so I asked my students from mainland China what "BYD" meant.

They all seemed to consider the apparent initialism as though it were an English word, pronouncing it Beeyah'di, making the second syllable long and stressed.  I pursued by asking, "But what does it mean?  What does it stand for?"

They said, "It doesn't mean anything and it doesn't stand for anything.  It's just the name of a car company:  Beeyah'di."

I have often sung the praises of Google Translate (see "Selected readings" below for a few sample posts), but now I've learned about an online translator that, for many languages, may be even better.  Since we've been discussing phenomenal developments in AI quite a bit lately (see also under "Selected readings" below), now seems as good a time as any to introduce DeepL to the collective Language Log readership.

In truth, we've barely mentioned DeepL before (see comments here, here, here, and here), so I really didn't notice it until this past week when my students and auditors from East Asia told me about it.  Seeing what DeepL could do, I was simply overwhelmed.  Let me explain how that happened.

Most of the participants in my Middle Vernacular Sinitic (MVS) seminar (all attendees are from China, Japan, and Korea), said that they've been using it regularly for years.  They also mentioned that they use OCR apps on their phones.  The scanned texts they use can then be fed into various applications for translation.  Many of them also use Grammarly to improve the quality of their writing.  Lately I myself have noticed that when I write papers, essays, and letters in word processing programs (e.g., Microsoft Word), the processor gives me mostly good suggestions for getting rid of superfluous, redundant, awkward suggestions.

Specifically, what impressed me so much about DeepL in this instance is that we were faced with a Dutch translation of a rare, medieval Chinese text with a lot of esoteric vocabulary.  The Dutch translator had done a commendable job of getting from the difficult Chinese to Dutch, but then we had to use OCR on his limited circulation Dutch publication to produce a document to feed into DeepL.  When I read the resulting English translation, I was amazed at how faithfully the English conveyed the sense and the feeling of the extremely recondite medieval Chinese text.  Of course, the English wasn't  perfect, but it made a tremendous contribution toward getting a handle on what was happening in the medieval Chinese text that had seldom been read by anyone (it was lost for more than a thousand years) and had never been translated into any other language beside Dutch.

Some funny things happen when one tries to straighten out the relationships among these three names for one of the world's most challenging board games.

First of all, if I put wéiqí 圍棋 / 围棋, the Chinese name of the game, into Google Translate (GT) and ask it to translate that into Japanese, out comes Iku 行く ("to go"), but if I ask GT to translate wéiqí 圍棋 directly into English, out comes "go", the English name of the game.

So that we don't get sucked more deeply into a quagmire of nomenclatural confusion, I will put some basic linguistic facts about these names here.  It would be good for other Language Log readers to inform us how the name of the game is handled in other languages.

From Laura Morland:

Plane plunge

A United Airlines 777 leaving Hawaii made a scary plunge toward the ocean shortly after takeoff, flight tracking data shows. The incident occurred in December when the plane dived toward the ocean for 21 seconds a little over a minute after takeoff. Neither United nor the FAA indicated anyone was injured on the flight. Still, passengers on board were startled after the plane lost more than half its altitude and came within 775 feet of sea level, according to data from FlightRadar24. "There were a number of screams on the plane," a passenger told CNN. "Everybody knew that something was out of the ordinary, or at least that this was not normal." United said it conducted an investigation with the FAA and the pilots union "that ultimately resulted in the pilots receiving additional training," adding the investigation is ongoing.

[Source: CNN's daily newsletter, "Five Things"]

"Word of the Week: Huminerals (人矿 rén kuàng)", Alexander Boyd, China Digital Times (2/13/23)

The new word “humineral” (人矿 rén kuàng) has taken the Chinese internet by storm and is now a sensitive word subject to censorship. First introduced in a now-censored Zhihu [VHM:  a forum website] post on January 2, 2023, “humineral”—a portmanteau of 人 rén (“person”) and 矿 kuàng (“ore,” “mineral deposit,” or “mine”) in the original Chinese—describes a person relentlessly exploited by society until they are eventually discarded on the refuse pile. The original Zhihu post elucidated 10 tenets of the “humineral,” three of which CDT has translated below: 

1. Huminerals: You are a resource, not a protagonist. You are a means, not an end. Your life’s work will go towards the fulfillment of others instead of the pursuit of your own desires.

2. The life of a humineral can be divided into three stages: extraction, exploitation, and slag removal. Investment in your education over your first decade or so is oriented at extracting your potential—turning you into usable ore. The middle decades are a process of exploitation and consumption. When you’re finally useless, they’ll use the least polluting method possible to dispose of you.  [emphasis added]

8. Huminerals power the motors that turn the wheels of history. Huminerals have few other choices: either fuel history’s engine, or be ground beneath its wheels. Of course the inverse is true. If huminerals were to stop propelling history, then those other huminerals who abstained would not be crushed. Yet there are always huminerals who see more value in a lifetime of being fuel than to risk being flattened.  [Chinese]