Language Log

[This is a guest post by Bob Ramsey]

Fairy Tale-like Landscape in Guangxi

Millions in South China today, especially in Guangxi, are not Han Chinese at all, but “Tai.” Tai groups in China include, among others, the Dai, the Li, and the Zhuang. Culturally and linguistically related to the Thai (or Siamese) of Thailand, Tai in China don’t ordinarily stand out as different. They live among Han Chinese. Most look and act Chinese. They wear the same clothes. Most are bilingual in Cantonese or some other variety of Chinese. Nevertheless, the PRC classifies them as minorities, and some pose for the tourist trade, sporting exotic “native” clothes and putting on colorful festivals for paying visitors.

I'm in the process of composing a "cheat sheet" of DSP techniques for ling525, so today's xkcd is right on time:

In "Give Elfdalian, Haitian, Limburgish, Patois, Ukrainian and, yes, Black English their due", NYT (3/11/22), John McWhorter writes:

It was long ago common for Russians to regard Ukrainian as just a dialect of Russian. “Little Russian,” it was called. Writing for The Conversation this week, Florida International University’s Phillip Carter said, “If you ask some Russian nationalists, Ukrainian isn’t a language at all,” noting that in the 1863 Valuev Circular, Pyotr Valuev, Russia’s interior minister, decreed that a separate Ukrainian language did not exist.

Ruki Sayid & Ben Glaze, "Boris Johnson returns from Saudi Arabia empty handed after flop oil beg trip",  The Mirror 3/17/2022:

Boris Johnson is landing back in Britain empty-handed this morning after his oil begging trip to the Gulf flopped – and Vladimir Putin lashed out at the West.

Russia ’s invasion of Ukraine has fuelled price hikes with a litre of unleaded now more than £1.60, piling misery on British families already struggling with household bills.

A recent email from my colleague Jean Gallier explains why the new edition of Discrete Mathematics is available on his website:

A bit more that three years ago, Springer suggested that I revise my
“Discrete Mathematics” (published in 2010).
Unfortunately, Jocelyn and I
waited too long and now that we are done
Springer no longer wants it.

I added a chapter on probability theory and made some
significant changes (improvements!). I also changed the title.
There is even an intro to the simply-typed lambda-calculus!
In any case, temporarily I am falling back on the little known publisher
“Kurt Reillag and House of Cats and Dogs”.

Interested readers may observe a certain relationship between "Reillag" and "Gallier", and in any case web search will turn up Reillag's home page — which provides this post's main linguistic relevance.

In this age of typing on computers and other digital devices, when we daily input thousands upon thousands of words, we are often amazed at the number and types of mistakes we make.  Many of them are simple and straightforward, as when our fingers stumblingly hit the wrong keys by sheer accident.  People who type on phones warn their correspondents about the likelihood that their messages are prone to contain such errors because they include some such warning at the bottom: 

Please forgive spelling / grammatical errors; typed on glass // sent from my phone.

"Rules for teaching grammar in schools", The Economist 3/12/2022 ("It may not make children better writers. But it is valuable all the same"):

Absence of evidence is not, as the saying goes, the same thing as evidence of absence. But if you continue looking for something intently, and keep failing to find it, you can be forgiven for starting to worry. And so it is with the vexed—and in Britain, highly politicised—subject of explicit grammar teaching in schools, and its link or otherwise with improved writing ability.

Another study, in this case a large randomised controlled trial, has recently been added to the expansive literature on the subject. Like nearly all its predecessors, it found that teaching kids how to label the bits and pieces in a sentence does not make them better writers.

[…]

In retrospect it scarcely seems surprising that learning to underline a modal verb, such as “can”, “should” and “may”, does little to help students use them effectively in their own writing. These words are anyway grasped by tiny children without the need to know what they are called. This may tempt the conclusion that the teaching of grammar should be shelved altogether. But there are reasons to reform it rather than scrap it.

Understanding of language is part of a wider education in what makes human beings human.

Since these are on subjects that are of interest to many of us, I'm calling them to your attention.

From Mattia Cartolano:

The INSCRIBE project is hiring!

Two post-doc positions are now available:

1. Evolution of Graphic Codes: The Origins of the Chinese Script
2. Undeciphered Aegean Scripts: New perspectives in Computational Linguistics

Deadline for applications: Sunday 27 March 2022
If you want to find out more, write to s.ferrara@unibo.it

I traditionally start my phonetics courses with an "over-under bet", about how much randomly-selected audio we need to listen to (and look at), before we find a systematic, interesting, and essentially unstudied phenomenon. In the case of English, I generally offer 20 seconds as the threshold value — for less well-studied languages like French or Chinese, the threshold might be 10 seconds. For understudied languages, 3 seconds.

This came up a few weeks ago in my corpus phonetics course, and so we took a look at the most recent Fresh Air podcast at that point: "With a nod to 'Lolita,' 'Vladímír' makes a sly statement about sex and power", 2/22/2022.

Here's the first bit of the show (a little less than 12 seconds):

This is Fresh Air.
Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says
Julia May Jonas's new first novel,
called Vladímír,
should spark a lot of heated discussions
on today's campuses.

And the first interesting-and-unstudied phenomenon turns up after about 6.2 seconds:

We've just been through the problems of standard language versus the vernaculars in Arabic (see "Selected readings" below).  Now we're going to look at a photograph, a caption, a book review, and a letter to the editor that encompass these contentious issues in spades — but for Chinese.  Here's the photograph:

Susan Blum, Lies That Bind:  Chinese Truth, Other Truths (Rowman, 2007), p. 130:

…Though language was viewed as having pragmatic consequences in the past, during revolutionary China and especially during the Cultural Revolution the social effects of language were consciously emphasized, as an entire propaganda department took over the government. All words and communication were politically charged, and people had to become completely conscious of the effects of their utterances, knowing they would be scrutinized. At the same time, a premium was placed on the spontaneous eruption of profound feelings of revolutionary ardor. This forced many people to pursue a path of performance, of masking feelings they could scarcely acknowledge to themselves.

[This is a guest post by Jichang Lulu.]

Recent discussion of that most Taiwanese expletive, 潲 siâu ‘semen’ (“Hokkien in Sino-Japanese script”), made me think of a favourite item. Although Mandarin 㞞 sóng has the same literal meaning, in my experience that’s less familiar to some speakers than nouns that contain it, e.g. 㞞包 sóngbāo (literally ‘bag of semen’), roughly ‘weakling’.

Again, to refresh our collective memory and to provide the context for the present post and the other posts in this series, I repeat the following questions:

1. Is there such a thing as "Classical Arabic"?  If there is, how do we describe / define it?

2. What is "Standard Arabic"?

3. What is Quranic Arabic?  How different is it from Standard Arabic?

4. How many vernacular Arabic languages are there?  Egyptian? Syrian?  Lebanese?  Are they quite different from Standard Arabic?  Are they mutually intelligible?  Do they customarily have written forms and a flourishing literature?

—

You may also wish to revisit the introduction with which the first post in the series began.

Heather Sharkey offered the following eye-opening response:

You have opened a can of worms! Or many cans of worms!