Language Log

This has been a busy week for me, wherefore no posts — a full day at Penn on Monday; Tuesday and Wednesday at Baidu in Sunnyvale; Thursday at Apple in Cupertino; Friday at ETS in San Francisco; lunch with Geoff Nunberg on Saturday; and then an afternoon at Scale By The Bay 2018. There were a lot of instructive and productive exchanges, but by far the most amusing moment was the point in the final Scale-By-The-Bay panel when one of the participants observed that "Big Data is so 2012"…

[This is a guest post by an anonymous correspondent.]

We traveled last week from our home in Baltimore out to see our daughter in Ohio, and while en route in Pennsylvania, my husband and I noticed something. At various points along the turnpike, we saw signs that noted "Falling Rocks" and others that noted "Fallen Rocks." It was after dark as we drove, so we couldn't see what the hillsides looked like, but we found it unusual to see both signs, which appeared to be in free variation. We didn't see any rocks in the road, and happily for us, none came rolling down as we passed.

Earlier this week (11/12/18), under the rubric "Of knots, pimples, and Sinitic reconstructions", we discussed the origins and meaning of the fascinating Sinitic word "geda" ("pimple; knot; lump").  That, in turn, was prompted by our initial acquaintance with "geda" in "Too hard to translate soup" a couple of months before (9/2/18).  After considering a possible source in Indo-European, Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic, there seemed to be a bit of momentum in favor of the last named family.

Since "geda" first appeared in a significantly large number of citations in written Sinitic during the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) about a thousand years ago, it was thought advisable to look at an earlier stage of Mongolic rather than simply referring to modern Mongolian forms.  So I thought of asking Daniel Kane, a rare specialist in Khitan, which is generally considered to be a Para-Mongolic language, whether he had any thoughts on the matter.

Tweet by Dan Okrent:

Menu translation, Hanoi pic.twitter.com/mDG3FH2Bd8

— Dan Okrent (@okrent) November 12, 2018

Tweet  by Noelle Mateer:

pic.twitter.com/ZKeOBldM0m

— Noelle Mateer (@n_mateer) November 13, 2018

A tweet by Kelsey Munro:

https://twitter.com/KelseyMunro/status/1062464615257231360

Poster in Saigon:

(Source)

A couple of months ago, we talked about gēda 疙瘩, which is one of those very cool, two syllable Sinitic words, neither of whose syllables means anything by itself (i.e., not only is it a disyllabic lexeme, it is also a disyllabic morpheme).  Furthermore, gēda 疙瘩 is highly polysemous, with the following meanings:  "pimple; knot; swelling on the skin; lump; nodule; blotch; a knot in one's body or heart (–> hangup; problem; preoccupation)".

See "Too hard to translate soup" (9/2/18).

John Leicester, Raf Casert, and Lori Hinnant, "In remembering WWI, world warned of resurging ‘old demons’", Associated Press 11/11/2018 [emphasis added]:

As Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and dozens of other heads of state and government listened in silence, French President Emmanuel Macron used the occasion, as its host, to sound a powerful and sobering warning about the fragility of peace and the dangers of nationalism and of nations that put themselves first, above the collective good.

“The old demons are rising again, ready to complete their task of chaos and of death,” Macron said.

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,” he said. “In saying ‘Our interests first, whatever happens to the others,’ you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be great and that which is most important: Its moral values.”

Trump, ostensibly the main target of Macron’s message, sat stony-faced.

Kendra Schaefer, "China's 'barrage videos' are chaotic af — and say a lot about loneliness", The Next Web 10/11/2018:

“Hey, I know,” said someone in a design meeting once. “How about we let users post live comments as they watch their favorite shows. Then we could scroll those comments across the viewport so they cover the entire screen, like a curtain of enthusiastic verbal abuse?”

“HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” laughed alternate reality me, “Who hired this asshole?” […]

That’s a conversation between hundreds of users, laid over the top of a video player, while the video is playing. Someone implemented that. Someone institutionalized that chaos, and what’s worse, they did so with great success. The feature is called danmu(弹幕), and it’s the hottest thing going in Chinese streaming media UI.

Bill Benzon spotted this on Facebook:

From a tweet by Claire Varley:

The troubleshooting section for our new fridge has melted my heart. Imagine being the copywriter who sat there for hours trying to decipher the language of fridge… pic.twitter.com/H7AAd2sn6T

— Claire Varley (@clairepvarley) November 9, 2018

Article by Mandy Zuo in today's (11/9/18) South China Morning Post, "Chinese education officials sorry for announcing Mao-style political background check on students":

Education authorities in southwest China have apologised after they hit a raw nerve by announcing students must pass a “political background check” before they can take the national university entrance exam next year.