Language Log

Below is a guest post by Corey Miller:

In the third volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, la duchesse de Guermantes mentions she fortunately doesn’t know any Jews. It’s the middle of the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the nineteenth century. She goes on to mention some tedious ladies who put the words “Mort aux Juifs” (death to the Jews) on their parasols. Mortified by this concept, I searched the internet, curious to see a picture of such an ombrelle.

"Memoirs of a Woman of Long Sentences" (5/21/2022) reproduced a plot from my 5/20/2022 talk at SHEL 12:

In the talk's slides, I used that plot (without the outlier-marking arrow) as a way of  illustrating the obvious point that "Older texts in English tend to have longer sentences".

And in my final slide, I suggested that "French seems different". That (imprudent) suggestion was based on my subjective impression of a few 18th-century works, where it seemed to me that sentence (and especially paragraph) lengths were much shorter in French-language works than in English-language ones from the same period.

Another new term for expressing lack of interest in the present and future in China:

The rise of ‘bai lan’: why China’s frustrated youth are ready to ‘let it rot’

Phrase bai lan gains popularity as severe competition and social expectations leave many young people despondent

Vincent Ni, The Guardian (5/25/22)

This one is borrowed from NBA usage:  "let it rot", referring to players who are on astronomical contracts but are not performing well.  As the son of an organic gardener who also raised earthworms, I can attest that the NBA metaphor was borrowed from the language of composting.

In "Spectrums", 2/24/2022, I described a struggle with magazine editors, long ago, over whether the plural of spectrum should be "spectrums" (which they wanted) or "spectra" (which was then the norm in technical discussions of acoustics, and remains so). In a comment, rpsms noted that

Newton arguably "revived" the word spectrum (at least in scientific work) in "Optiks" and I note that he uses "spectrums." "Spectra" does not seem to appear at all in the printed work.

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce.]

As they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words." Here are two pictures, copy/pasted from Google Images: First, the Japanese periodic table, then the Chinese periodic table. I apologize for the tiny font, but notice how, in the Japanese periodic table, the symbol 'S' has the word for sulfur (硫黄) under it. That pair of kanji, Romanized as iō, is simply an annotation of the international symbol, S, not meant to 'compete with' S. (Glance also at the very long katakana items that appear elsewhere, e.g., for the element Sc or Mt. The nuance that I'm driving at will become clear after you compare the Chinese periodic table further down, and see how S, Sc, and Mt are handled there. No need to know any Chinese or Japanese at all to see what's afoot here.)

(source)

[click to embiggen]

Reading the comments on Sunday's post about verb agreement with data ("Scientist spotting",5/22/2022), I was reminded of a long-ago tussle about a different aspect of Latin morphology in English borrowings. What's the plural of spectrum? Is is "spectra" or "spectrums"?

Today's SMBC:

"Baby Pikachu? Japan panel weighs accepting unconventional readings of kanji for names"

KYODO, STAFF REPORT
The Japan Times (May 19, 2022)

What’s in a name? In Japanese, that’s complicated.  [VHM:  You can say that again!  One of the hardest tasks in my graduate training as a Sinologist was learning how to pronounce Japanese proper nouns correctly.  This is one of the reasons I wrote the dictionary described in this post.]

An advisory body to the justice minister has compiled a draft proposal on whether and how to accept — and record on the family register — unconventional kanji readings of names for newborns and naturalized citizens. In one cited example of so-called kirakira (sparkly) names, it would be acceptable for the kanji characters 光宙 read as pikachū, which could be a hit for fans of the Pokemon universe.

The proposal is part of the ministry’s push for digitalization of the family register, an effort that would be better facilitated by adding hiragana and katakana readings to kanji names.

[This is a guest post by Sara de Rose, responding to requests for more information on the subject prompted by her previous post.]

This post discusses a possible connection between the Mesopotamian tonal system, documented on cuneiform tablets that span over 1000 years (from 1800 BC to 500 BC), and the musical system of ancient China. For a more detailed discussion, see the paper "A Proposed Mesopotamian Origin for the Ancient Musical and Musico-Cosmological Systems of the West and China", Sino-Platonic Papers, 320 (December, 2021) written by myself, Sara de Rose.

Since 1996, twenty-three harps (Chinese: “konghou”) that resemble the angular harp that was invented in Mesopotamia circa 2000 BC have been found in the graves of the Tarim mummies, in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, an area of modern-day, western China. These harps date from 1000 BC to 200 BC (see photo).

"John Lee: What do you call the prospective Hong Kong leader who has everything?", by Tim Hamlett, Hong Kong Free Press (5/7/22)

The current status of John Lee Ka-chiu has presented one of those linguistic problems which delight retired sub editors: how do you describe a man who is clearly going to win a predetermined election?

My regular free newspaper tried “chief executive hopeful”, realised that wasn’t really capturing the reality of the situation – “chief executive certainty” would have been more accurate – and retreated the next day to “sole chief executive candidate”

A local columnist offered “chief executive-in-waiting” which captures the “not yet but definitely soon” aspect of the situation, at the risk of making Lee sound like a minor palace official, as in “lady-in-waiting”.

Foreign publications were less inhibited about the manipulations behind the scenes: one offered “the central government’s selection”, but this will hardly do for Hong Kong purposes.

In the question period after my virtual talk yesterday at SHEL 12, an alert audience member asked about the outlier in a graph that I showed of average sentence length over the centuries. The outlier is marked with an arrow in the plot below, though no such arrow singled it out in the presentation:

I had been struck by the same point when I made the graph, and identified the work and author as John Cleland's 1748 epistolary novel, "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure", commonly known as Fanny Hill.

I'm staying for a couple of days in a hotel in NYC, in an incredibly expensive tiny room.

Last night, a few minutes past midnight, alarms went off in the hallway outside the room: very loud blats and whoops, in somewhat irregular sequences and intervals. It wasn't exactly what I expect for a fire alarm, but it was clearly meant to be alarming, so I got dressed to evacuate.

Just as I finished, a loud loudspeaker-y voice came on: "Your attention please. Your attention please."

Then more blats and whoops.

Since I didn't smell smoke, I decided to take a minute to pack up my computer and medicines, while the blats and whoops continued. But as I finished, the voice came back: "Your attention please. Your attention please. This is your safety director. We have determined that this situation is not an emergency — please resume to your normal activities."

So I got undressed again. But the (apparently recorded) voice repeated the message, interspersed with more bouts of blats and whoops, for another hour or so. It finally ended at some point between 1:30 and 2:00am, and I finally was able to go back to sleep.

But this is Language Log, not Incompetent Alarm Silencing Log, so my focus is on the unexpected (to me) preposition to in the phrase "resume to your normal activities".

You've probably seen this, but just in case not:

Speaking in Dallas this afternoon, former President George. W Bush made a significant verbal slip-up while discussing the war in Ukraine.

He tried referencing what he described as the “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion” — but said Iraq, instead of Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/tw0VNJzKmE

— Michael Williams (@michaeldamianw) May 19, 2022