Language Log

Article in Nature

"African languages to get more bespoke scientific terms:  Many words common to science have never been written in African languages. Now, researchers from across Africa are changing that", Sarah Wild, Nature 596, 469-470 (August 18, 2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02218-x

Here are some selected passages:

There’s no original isiZulu word for dinosaur. Germs are called amagciwane, but there are no separate words for viruses or bacteria. A quark is ikhwakhi (pronounced kwa-ki); there is no term for red shift. And researchers and science communicators using the language, which is spoken by more than 14 million people in southern Africa, struggle to agree on words for evolution.

[This is a guest post by Penglin Wang]

The Chinese transcription of foreign words has made a unique and valuable contribution to our understanding of linguistic situations in early Inner Asia, but it was sometimes inevitably fraught with logographic confusion and scribal errors. Even given quite advanced word-processing and printing in modern times, one can hardly prevent miswriting or misspelling from happening. In ancient China, presumably, it was historians and other authors who heard foreign words spoken and jotted them down, and then further changes developed through the involvement of scribes, typographers, and printers, with each possibly committing their own miswritings and infelicities. It is therefore necessary to reinterpret certain transcriptions on the basis of the known philological and linguistic relevance of what came to be written down.

A question from V.R.:

I was just having a conversation with a friend, and mentioned that it had "rained out last night." Do you happen to know if that use of "rained out" (as opposed to a baseball game being rained out) a Midwesternism?

I don't know — but maybe LLOG commenters will.

Geoff Wade picked this up from Twitter, but you can find similar signs on Reddit, engrish.com, and any number of other sites.  Who knows where it began, but it seems to have become a standard meme translation of the Chinese slogan.

Following up on yesterday's "Pregnant People" post, I thought I'd look at terminological developments for a condition associated with male as opposed to female birth sex and anatomy.

The first thing to note is that current discussions of erectile dysfunction use both "men" and "people", sometimes in the same article — thus Richard Fogoros, "Is Viagra (Sildenafil) Safe for Men With Heart Disease?", verywell health 12/10/2020:

Viagra (sildenafil) has been life-changing for many people with erectile dysfunction (ED), making it possible to have a robust and satisfying sex life. However, this drug and others belonging to a class of medications called phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors (PDE5 inhibitors), may not be safe for people with certain types of heart disease.

This Chinese article is about a man who has made a living by painting slogans and ads on village walls for thirty years. Some of the slogans are rather bizarre, as may be seen by looking at the many photographs in the article.

The article says it is such a well-paying job that the man was able to buy 6 apartments in his hometown with his earnings. Painting on walls is one of the major ways to advertise or propagate goods and ideas in the countryside.

There are many examples of such signs in the article, but I couldn't understand all of them upon first glance, so I wondered if the country folk would be able to read the signs. I asked a number of my graduate students from China, and they all said, yes, the country folk not only would be able to read them, but would enjoy them and would be motivated to buy the products and services promoted by the signs.

"New CDC Data: COVID-19 Vaccination Safe for Pregnant People", CDC Media Statement 8/11/2021:

CDC has released new data on the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines in pregnant people and is recommending all people 12 years of age and older get vaccinated against COVID-19.

“CDC encourages all pregnant people or people who are thinking about becoming pregnant and those breastfeeding to get vaccinated to protect themselves from COVID-19,” said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. “The vaccines are safe and effective, and it has never been more urgent to increase vaccinations as we face the highly transmissible Delta variant and see severe outcomes from COVID-19 among unvaccinated pregnant people.”

Michael Foust, "CDC Director Criticized for Replacing 'Women' with 'Pregnant People': It's 'Dehumanizing' to Women", Christian Headlines 8/13/2021:

The CDC director is receiving pushback from conservatives for repeatedly referring to pregnant women as "pregnant people" in a brief speech Thursday about COVID-19 vaccines. […]

The phrase "pregnant people" is used by some in the LGBT community to include biological women who identify as men. It also can include women who identify as non-binary.

"People don't get pregnant – women do," R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said on his podcast The Briefing.

Something seemed amiss from the very first words of this video:

In Massachusetts, booster shot is spelled borcester shot

— Adam Blickstein (@AdamBlickstein) August 17, 2021

A recent xkcd:

I have lived a long time.  When I was in high school (1957-1961), geography was an important subject of the curriculum.  When I went to college (1961-1965), there were still departments of geography in many, if not most, self-respecting colleges and universities, but they were slowly starting to disappear.  Now, I suspect that there are very few, if any, schools, colleges, and universities that teach geography and train professors of that discipline.  Still, there are vestiges of the days in the first half of the twentieth century when geography was upheld as a princely pursuit.

At Penn, there is a building that once housed the geography department and still has markings that bear witness to its pedigree, but has now been swallowed up by the School of Engineering and Applied Science.  At Harvard, the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC) occupies what used to be the Department of Geography, in a building filled with geographical motifs that has a special history linked to the Widener family (who gave their wealth and their name to Harvard's main library in memory of Philadelphian Harry Elkins Widener (January 3, 1885-April 15, 1912) who went down with the Titanic at the age of 27.  The Widener family also gifted Harvard with the building that presently belongs to EALC, as part of an endowment meant to create a geography professorship for a member of the Widener family.  While I was teaching at Harvard, my office was in the penthouse of that building.  It was an eerie feeling to be situated all alone in that aerie above all my peers and superiors.

Despite the support of the Wideners and its illustrious past, geography did not thrive at Harvard, Penn, and elsewhere.  To me, this is cause for lament, and I have often pondered what forces have been at work that led to this unfortunate result.

"Can the Angels keep Shohei Ohtani? A payroll crisis looms in Los Angeles", 8/12/2021:

Everything Shohei Ohtani has accomplished this summer is unprecedented: the high-end pitching and high-impact hitting, the takeover of the two days of All-Star events, the marketability. With a season résumé that looks like none other, he'll win the American League's Most Valuable Player Award, having fully stretched the imagination of the Los Angeles Angels' staff — and managers' and executives' with other teams, for that matter — about his future capabilities. […]

He could eventually make the same transition that Babe Ruth made, from a two-way player to a full-time outfielder. "That would be tempting," said one AL manager, grinning at the notion of Ohtani devoting all of his acumen and athleticism to run production. "Can you imagine what he could do?" If Ohtani had 700 plate appearances at his 2021 home run rate, he'd hit 60 homers — and it seems very possible he would have more efficiency as a hitter if that were his only responsibility. He's proved to everyone this year: You cannot underestimate Shohei Ohtani. [emphasis added]

Sol Jung, a former Penn undergrad, took this photograph more than a decade ago, but I'm only now getting around to posting on it.

There's quite a story behind the photograph and why it took me so long to write this blog post about it.  I will explain below.