Language Log

(TCM = Traditional Chinese Medicine) 

Photograph of a small portion of specimen jars at the Won Institute of Graduate Studies northeast of Philadelphia in Warminster, Pennsylvania:

…and ending a sentence is like dying.

What do I mean by this weird and even creepy statement?

Short answer: Your probability of continuing to live is not constant, but decreases exponentially as you get older. (Actuaries know this as the Gompertz-Makeham Law of Mortality,  usually expressed in terms of your probability of dying.)

A generative model of this type, on a shorter time scale, is a surprisingly good fit to the distributions of speech- and silence-segment durations in speech, and also to the distribution of sentence lengths in text. A shockingly good fit, in most cases.

Long answer: See below, if you have the patience…

Makes your head spin.

Takes so many different shapes and serves so many different purposes:

Historically, a kiosk (from Persian kūshk) was a small garden pavilion open on some or all sides common in Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and in the Ottoman Empire from the 13th century onward. Today, several examples of this type of kiosk still exist in and around the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, and they can be seen in Balkan countries.

The word is used in English-speaking countries for small booths offering goods and services. In Australia they usually offer food service. Freestanding computer terminals dispensing information are called interactive kiosks.

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When I was writing "Mutilating Hangeul: visual puns as a parallel orthography" (10/8/22), I thought of including a reference to Pig Latin, but it is so mild in comparison to Yaminjeongeum that I decided to leave it out.  French Verlan lies somewhere between the two in the degree with which it deforms the original language on which it is based.

Verlan (French pronunciation: ​[vɛʁlɑ̃]) is a type of argot in the French language, featuring inversion of syllables in a word, and is common in slang and youth language. It rests on a long French tradition of transposing syllables of individual words to create slang words. The word verlan itself is an example of verlan (making it an autological word). It is derived from inverting the sounds of the syllables in l'envers ([lɑ̃vɛʁ], "the inverse", frequently used in the sense of "back-to-front").

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Today's SMBC:

Philip Taylor wrote:

An Economist article (not pay-walled but may require registration) today spoke of something which "grew like gangbusters". Until now, I had never encountered that particular simile, but I see from the OED that it is older than I. Is it (a) a simile with which you are familiar, and (b) possibly worth discussing on Language Log ?

"Lacks’s tumour cells, it turned out, grew like gangbusters …"

This is a follow-up post to "How to say 'We don't have any pickled pigs' feet'" (9/23/22).

If you had been driving along Route 30 in Valparaiso, Indiana on July 4, Independence Day this past summer, you might have caught sight of this itinerant jogger outside the Walmart there:

Hit the Engrish mother lode.  What an incredibly bountiful harvest!

We've ignored this (ig)noble variety of English for too long.  There are scores and scores (nay, hundreds) of wonderful examples on the Facebook group Engrish in Japan, which you may explore to your heart's content.  Since some of the posts cycle through multiple items (e.g., in the comments sections), they seem almost endless (I read them for hours).  For this post, I will focus primarily on a recent item, which is about onsen 温泉 ("hot springs" [and bathing facilities]) etiquette, but will also mention many others.

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From Mark Swofford in Taiwan:

Bizarre scriptplay in Korea:

[Newsmaker] "What is ‘daengdaengi?’ Government’s use of Hangeul slang stirs controversy"
By Lim Jae-seong, The Korea Herald (Oct 7, 2022)

The article is rather long.  Here I quote only the first portion, but will summarize some of the more important points at the bottom.

The National Institute of Korean Language’s use of slang words on its recent social media post has stirred controversy, questioning whether it is right for the state-run language regulator to use a distorted version of the language.

To mark the upcoming Hangeul Day on Sunday, the institute had posted an image to announce its special event on its Twitter account last month. In the posted image, it asked the followers what their views are on using the so-called “Yaminjeongeum.”

Today's SMBC starts with this Q&A about (a version of) the Liar Paradox:

Rick Rubenstein commented on yesterday's post ("What happened to all the, like, prescriptivists?"):

Are there any proven therapies available for folks like me who, despite seeing the light decades ago, can't keep from wincing at "violations" of prescriptivist rules ingrained (mostly self-ingrained) during childhood? I want to be totally unfazed by "The team with the bigger amount of people has an advantage," but man, it's hard. (Not actually serious, but it's certainly true. Unlearning is tough.)

A tweet by Julia Ioffe from 10/4/2022 (image below because twitter embedding seems to be broken…):