Language Log

From Chau Wu:

I have always wondered about the deep gulf of variations in the sounds of "néng 能 -bearing" characters, that is, the variations in the onsets and rimes (shēng 聲 and yùn 韻):

néng 能  n- / -eng (Tw l- / -eng)  [Note: 能 orig. meaning 'bear'; nai, an aquatic animal; thai, name of a constellation 三能 = 三台]

xióng 熊  x- (Wade-Giles: hs-) / -iong [熊 Tw hîm; the x- in MSM xióng is due to sibilization of h- caused by the following -i.]

pí 羆  ph- / -i  (the closely related p- onset is also seen in 罷, 擺)

nài 褦  n- / -ai  (the same onset n- is seen in 能)

tài 態  th- / -ai (the same th- onset is seen in 能)

One of the first Pekingese colloquialisms I learned (by now I know scores) was taught to me half a century ago by Iris Rulan Chao Pian (1922-2013), daughter of the distinguished linguist, Yuen Ren Chao (1892-1982).  It sounded like "der", sometimes with a trill at the end, and meant "scram; skedaddle".  Like many authentic Pekingese colloquial expressions, it was impossible to tell for sure how to write it in Sinographs.

Recently, I asked around to see if people of a younger generation (in their 20s and early 30s) knew this expression, what it meant, how to write it, and how to pronounce it.  Most of my informants, even those who had grown up in Beijing / Peking, told me that they had never heard it.

Today's xkcd:

The mouseover title: "Neither group uses iso 8601 because the big-endian enthusiasts were all at the meeting 20 years ago."

Poujol, Mathis, Régis Wunenburger, François Ollivier, Arnaud Antkowiak, and Juliette Pierre. "Sound of effervescence." Physical Review Fluids 6, no. 1 (2021): 013604:

Capillary bubbles burst at a free surface following a rapid sequence of events occurring at different length scales and timescales: hole nucleation, fast retraction of the micron-thick liquid film in a few microseconds preluding the much slower overall collapse of the millimeter-sized bubble in a matter of milliseconds. Each of these steps is associated with unsteady fluid forces and accelerations, and therefore with sound radiation. In this experimental study we focus on the airborne sound generated during bubble bursting. Investigating the physical mechanism at the root of sound emission with the help of synchronized fast imaging and sound recordings, we quantitatively link the film retraction dynamics with the frequency content of the acoustic signal. We demonstrate that, contrary to a Minnaert resonance scenario, the frequency here drifts and increases, consistent with a Helmholtz-type resonance of the cavity being more and more opened as the thin film retracts. We propose as an extension a simple model based on a collection of drifting Helmholtz resonators capturing the main features of the fizzing sound of an effervescing beverage.

Today I learned that yeet means (among other things) "To discard an item at a high velocity". I didn't learn this from the not-very-reliable Urban Dictionary, but from Umar Shakir, "Tom Brady says the next sideline Surface he yeets will cost him: Microsoft’s star tablet may finally be safe on the sideline", The Verge 12/29/2021:

On the Sunday Night Football stage, December 19th, Tom Brady and the Buccaneers were swept for the second consecutive regular season against the Saints — a frustrating shut-out loss that had Brady spiking a poor Microsoft Surface tablet on the sideline.

Now, per Brady on his Let’s Go podcast that aired Monday, the NFL is not going to let the Surface abuse continue. Should the seven-time Super Bowl champion throw the tablet again, he will be fined. “I did get warned from the NFL about that so… I won’t throw another Surface.” Brady said.

New article in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), "The rise and fall of rationality in language", Marten Scheffer, Ingrid van de Leemput, Els Weinans, and Johan Bollen (12/21/21)

118 (51) e2107848118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107848118

A striking example of the post-modifier attachment ambiguity: "Police officer jailed for attacking members of the public found dead", The Guardian 12/29/2021.

Bob Ladd, who sent in the link, spent "quite a few hundred milliseconds" puzzling about why the police officer had attacked dead people.

Even those who are not China watchers will remember the savage satire directed against the pathetic River Crab (= Harmonious Society) and the Grass-Mud Horse (= *uck your mother"). 

There's always something the censors have to block on the Chinese internet.  It wouldn't be the Chinese internet if a large part of it were not being blocked.  If I were to list all the Language Log posts that document the expressions that have been censored by the PRC authorities, it would soon swell to over a hundred items.

For the year 2021, here are some of the favorite targets of the internet police:

Clubhouse

February 8, 2021

Social audio app Clubhouse was blocked around 7 p.m. on February 8 in response to a spirited discussion about Xinjiang that had happened the previous weekend. (See Darren Byler’s column about the offending chat room). In addition, Clubhouse had hosted discussions about Tibet and Taiwan. Some Chinese users noted that their mainland China phone numbers could not receive verification messages to register for new accounts.

Wondermark for 11/25/2021 — deriving "rappers", from "wrappers" and their "candy shanties" on the Hersey Chocolate assembly line:

Mouseover title: "People will claim lots of things to impress some random moron."

Occasionally I see pinyin (spelling) interspersed with Sinographs (usually for phonetic annotation), but this one threw me for a loop:

Yěxǔ (jué duì) shì, gāi lǐngyù zuì qiángdà de jiǎngzhě zhènróng.

也许（jué duì）是,该领域最强大的讲者阵容。

"Perhaps (definitely) it's the case that this is the strongest lineup of speakers in this field.

It occurs about two thirds of the way down in this Chinese article.

[This is a guest post by Zihan Guo, who was a student in my "Language, Script, and Society in China" class this past semester.]

About ten years ago, I stood next to this gigantic granite stele which is situated in the present-day city of Ji'an (coordinates of city center:  41°07′31″N 126°11′38″E) on the bank of the Yalu River in Jilin Province of Northeast China, directly across from North Korea:

[The following is a guest post by Jim Unger (J. Marshall Unger), who wrote it in response to my invitation to him to draw up a Stammbaum to show the relationships of the world's scripts.]

The rationale for tree structures in language history is that languages never completely converge. When speakers of two languages come into contact, there are always clues in the resulting language(s) that reveal the identity of the input languages: apart from the effects of contact, languages diverge over time.

In the case of writing, one must first of all distinguish graphic methods per se from writing systems. The adaptation of existing graphic methods that originated in one time and place to a different time, place, and, usually, language, does not, in my opinion, show the spread of a writing system, just the diffusion of a technology.  It only makes sense to speak of a writing system with respect to a particular language at a particular time and place.  This is a corollary of the fact that every practical and learnable writing system co-extensive with the potential output of a natural language necessarily utilizes a certain amount of phonography with respect to that language (unless the system is contrived expressly for cryptographic purposes).  Logography arises because of sound changes that obscure the motivations for some previously phonographic inscriptions, the purposeful suppression of certain phonographic information for the sake of brevity, or, as in the case of Chinese, historical accidents that militated against the adoption of an abjad, abugida, or alphabet.