Language Log

From Bob Ramsey:

Pell Street in New York’s Chinatown, 1899

The first two panels of a recent SMBC:

From S.S-L.:

I have a 2.5-year-old daughter, so I've been paying close attention to traps for the unwary in English-language learning. One thing I'm catching are instances where it feels like x is a synonym for y, and hence that you can just regex-replace every instance of x with y, and yet that fails. A couple instances:

1. 1.  She has a teddy bear named Tobias. She said both "Let's clean up Tobias" and "Let's clean up him." The former is perfectly good English; the latter is definitely not. A naïve understanding of how pronouns work might lead you to believe that you could just find-and-replace proper nouns with pronouns, but it's not true.
   2.  One might naïvely think that "to allow" and "to let" are synonyms, and hence that you could sub the one for the other, but it's "I allow him to do [something]" versus "I let him do something." The former requires "to be" as a helping verb; the latter does not.

When I hear examples like this, I try to imagine programming a computer to generate valid sentences, or at least imagine putting together the minimal set of rules for a new English learner. Is there some nice compact way of representing all these sorts of exceptions to naïve synonymy? Or is it really just a long list that native English speakers have long since internalized?

Last week, a master's student went to the board to write the Chinese character for "nose" (bí 鼻), but forgot how to do so.  There is no simplified version.  The form of this character differs slightly between China and Japan:  in China it is 鼻 and in Japan it is 鼻.  Can you spot the difference?

Believe it or not, the top part of the character depicts a nose.  Here's the small seal script form, about two millennia ago (the bottom part is the phonophore, which was added long after the top part was invented):

Glyph origin

Phono-semantic compound (形聲, OC *blids): semantic 自 (“nose”) + phonetic 畀 (OC *pids).

自 (OC *ɦljids) originally meant “nose” but came to be used to mean “self”, so the sense of “nose” has been replaced by 鼻 (OC *blids). Some scholars interpret 鼻 (OC *blids) as a combination of a nose (自 (OC *ɦljids)) and two lungs (畀 (OC *pids)).

Under the rubric, "An Odd Question", Doug Adams (the Tocharianist) asked:

Why do we always refer to Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) and Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) in Cantonese (?) phonological form rather than Mandarin?

Simple reply

Before about 1975, Cantonese was by far the most widespread and prevalent Sinitic language around the world outside of China, and Sun's Cantonese art name, Yat-sen, was so deeply ingrained and familiar in English for decades — both in speech and in writing — that it would have been very difficult to change it to Mandarin Yìxiān 逸仙 ("Liberated Transcendent").  Anyway, he had many other different names for different purposes, and some of them were as popular as Yat-sen, e.g., Chung-shan / Zhongshan, which actually derives from a Japanese pseudonym / nom de guerre (Nakayama Kikori [see below]) given to him by a Japanese friend.  Chung-shan / Zhongshan 中山 was / is so widespread in China that his hometown was renamed after it, making Zhongshan one of the few cities in China to be named after a person.  Zhongshan is also used as the name of the style of jacket that Sun Yat-sen liked to wear:  Zhongshan suit (simplified Chinese: 中山装; traditional Chinese: 中山裝; pinyin: Zhōngshān zhuāng), but in the PRC it came to be known as the Mao suit.  (I'm the proud owner of a Zhongshan suit, which I had tailor made in Taipei in 1971.)  There are dozens of other things and places called Zhongshan in China, a few of them referring to states from much earlier times that are completely unrelated to Sun Yat-sen / Zhongshan, for which see here.

New article in Japan Times (1/21/22) by Eric Margolis:  "Translator trip-ups: What do they mean for learning Japanese?"  It is so rich in insights that I will quote from it liberally (well, the whole kit and caboodle, broken up a bit):

In the recent issue of the literary magazine Monkey, which publishes new and old Japanese writing translated into English, a dozen literary translators dished out their thoughts on the hardest words to translate from Japanese into English. These choices ranged from the omnipresent いらっしゃいませ (irasshaimase), which is used as a greeting when entering a store, to sentence endings like the emphatic よ (yo) and the interrogative かしら(kashira, I wonder?).

Examining the words chosen by these translators can shed light on why communication between languages requires so much more than one-to-one translation. It also demonstrates how important it is to have a high level of cultural understanding for speaking fluent Japanese.

I want to take a look at five of these words and dive into why they’re significant and how Japanese learners can embrace and grow by using them. These words are: いらっしゃいませ、おじさん/おばさん (ojisan/obasan, mister/missus), 懐かしい (natsukashii, nostalgic), はあ(hā, an interjection) and 心 (kokoro, heart). Why did translators choose these words as being hard — even impossible — to translate? As we’ll soon see, the parenthetical definitions are woefully insufficient. We’ll need to dive deeper.

Kasha Patel, "Covid-19 may have seasons for different temperature zones, study suggests", WaPo 1/28/2022:

Aerosol researcher and co-author Chang-Yu Wu explained that local humidity and temperature play vital roles in the size of the virus’s particles, which can influence its life span in the air. Drier atmospheres in colder regions will induce water evaporation from the particles, shrinking their size and allowing them to float in the air for longer periods. People also tend to seek shelter inside in colder environments and expose themselves to recirculated air that potentially contains the virus.

The air in humid, hotter environments contains more water, which can condense onto the virus particles, make them bigger and theoretically fall to the ground faster. Wu compares the particles to a rock in this case — the more mass, the faster it falls.

Via Jeff DeMarco on Facebook comes this imagined conversation between the leaders of China and Hong Kong, Xi Jinping and Carrie Lam.

From Dotno Pount:

I received this poster in Chinese and thought you would enjoy it! It captures the Catch-22 of talents and careers very nicely, I think.

From S. Robert Ramsey:

Zhuang women posed for a photograph

Pictured here is a zhèn lóu shénqì 震楼神器 ("magical floor shaker"):

In his "The Good Word" column of The Atlantic (1/24/22), Caleb Madison has a new article, "Why We’re All Shooketh:  The term is online slang of Biblical proportions".  The first two paragraphs:

Lately modern life has felt all too biblical. Plagues, massive weather events, tribal divisions, demagogic leadership … and people using words like shooketh. The phrase I’m shooketh was first uttered by the comedian Christine Sydelko in a YouTube video uploaded to her account in 2017 (she was expressing her shock at having been recognized by a fan at Boston Market). The adjective shooketh took off as a way to lend biblical proportions to awestruck confusion. But the linguistic journey to its creation spans the evolution of the English language, connecting Early Modern English, turn-of-the-century adventure novels, and Twitter slang.

When we want to transform verbs like shake into adjectives, we typically use something called a participle, either present or past. The present participle of shake is shaking, as in “I’m shaking.” The past participle would be “I’m shaken.” But, for some reason, in the 19th century, the simple past tense, shook, took hold. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure classic Treasure Island, Long John Silver admits, “I’ll not deny neither but what some of my people was shook—maybe all was shook; maybe I was shook myself.” And 14 years later, in Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous, the form reappears within a now-common collocation with up when Dan Troop exclaims, “Well, you was shook up and silly.”

From S. Robert Ramsey:

The Naxi Story of Creation and the Great Flood