Language Log

If, like me, you're behind in streaming the latest crop of mini-series, you may need some help in decoding this SNL skit:

With this post, I will begin a series on the nature of the Arabic group of languages.  My reason for doing so is that many people are badly confused about just what "Arabic" (a Semitic group) signifies when it comes to language, almost as badly confused as most people are about "Chinese" (linguistically more properly referred to as Sinitic).

For a basic, foundational statement, here are the opening two paragraphs of the Wikipedia article on "Arabic":

Arabic (اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ, al-ʿarabiyyah [al ʕaraˈbijːa] (listen) or عَرَبِيّ, ʿarabīy [ˈʕarabiː] (listen) or [ʕaraˈbij]) is a Semitic language that first emerged in the 1st to 4th centuries CE. It is the lingua franca of the Arab world and the liturgical language of Islam. It is named after the Arabs, a term initially used to describe peoples living in the Arabian Peninsula bounded by eastern Egypt in the west, Mesopotamia in the east, and the Anti-Lebanon mountains and northern Syria in the north, as perceived by ancient Greek geographers. The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic, also referred to as Literary Arabic, which is modernized Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā (اَلعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ "the eloquent Arabic") or simply al-fuṣḥā (اَلْفُصْحَىٰ).

Amazingly, it appears that Henry Lee Smith Jr. has no Wikipedia page, despite a notable career in science, public service, and the media. According to his 1972 NYT obituary:

In 1940, when Dr. Smith was 27 and a member of the Department of English at Brown University, he came to public attention on the radio program, “Where Are You From?” over WOR. He selected people from a studio audience, listened to them talk and told them where they came from. He was right in four out of five tries.

For more about that radio program, see "Dr. Smith", The New Yorker 11/22/1940 (page image here), or "Radio: Where Are You From?", Time Magazine 5/6/1940.

According to a "Flashback" by the UB Reporter ("55 Years Ago: Henry Lee Smith, Linguist", 10/27/2011):

After receiving his PhD from Princeton and lecturing at Barnard, Columbia, and Brown, Smith headed the Language Section, Information and Education Division of the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1946.

Prior to the war, there were no foreign language materials for the bulk of the military and civilian personnel, and Smith, along with linguists he recruited, produced language guides, phrase books and military and general-purpose dictionaries in many different languages. Under Smith’s direction, the linguists also developed what came to be known as the Army method of language instruction—later adopted by colleges and universities—emphasizing the use of phonograph records on which a native speaker recited the foreign words and allowed a pause for repetition by the student.

Smith founded the State Department’s School of Language and Linguistics in 1946, and served as the school’s director prior to coming to UB.

For more about the role of linguists in (what became) the Defense Language Institute, see "A tale of two societies" (3/1/2007) and "Linguistics in 1940" (3/11/2007).

My personal exposure to Smith's work was through the influential 1951 monograph that we used to call "Trager Smith"  — I remember being struck by how many of the examples in Chomsky & Halle's 1968 The Sound Pattern of English were reproduced exactly from that source. (A link to a .pdf, courtesy of the Internet Archive, is here.)

The story begins here — "Polished pan cake" (2/20/22) — which shows two dessert items on a menu.  In Chinese, one is described as a guō bing 锅饼 (lit., "pot / pan cake / pie") and the other is called a jiānbing 煎饼 (lit., "fried cake / pie"), two different kinds of bǐng 饼.

In the English translations on the menu, those two different varieties of bǐng 饼 are respectively rendered as simply "cake" and "pan cake".  I won't go into their fillings, since they have more or less been adequately covered in the earlier post.

We have the testimony of Charles Belov who ate one of the latter at the very same restaurant where the menu came from and declared that "pan cake" turned out to be a fried glutinous rice ball partially covered in granulated sugar.  A commenter to the post stated, "My understanding of 饼 was always just 'it means round food'".

I wonder where / how he got that "understanding".

A 15-year-old recruiting video for the Russian Airborne Forces (VDV), updated with amusing fake English subtitles:

The traditional Slavic impulse to meet tragedy with humor is still strong. Among the Russian reactions to the war in Ukraine, this one is my favorite so far:

A snapshot of the Russian economy: an investment expert goes live on air and says his current career trajectory is to work as "Santa Claus" and then drinks to the death of the stock market. With subtitles. pic.twitter.com/XiPVTSUuks

— Peter Liakhov (@peterliakhov) March 3, 2022

(Though of course the putative demise of the Russian stock market is not much of a tragedy compared to the destruction and loss of life in the war…)

No doubt commenters will have other candidates to suggest, including some from the Ukrainian side.

From Miffy Zhang Linfei:

I went to Chicago over the weekend, and look what I found in a small European vintage shop named P.O.S.H.

From John Dankowski via Dave Thomas:

From an album "The Sound of Thinking" that dropped yesterday:

[h/t Chris Cieri]

In studying the history of the Chinese Imperial examination system, I came upon an individual named Stafford Northcote (1818-1887), 1st Earl of Iddesleigh, who was instrumental in devising the British civil service.  Naturally, I tried to pronounce the name of the village he was from, but couldn't quite wrap my head and tongue around it.  So I decided I'd better do a bit of research on the history of Iddesleigh to see what topolectal gems lay hidden in that perplexing concatenation of six consonants and four vowels.

[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson]

Like many around the world, I have been deeply saddened by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I have been watching news from around the world, including Japan. In addition to the actual war itself, and to the sometimes inane (studio talking-head) coverage of the war as some kind of horse race, I have been disturbed by the Japanese media’s failure to update the orthography of Ukrainian cities such as the capital, Kyiv.

Not a single domestic news outlet I am aware of―including the public broadcaster, NHK―has dropped the Soviet-era Russian name “Kiev” (キエフ) to replace it with Kyiv. CNN’s Japanese site, for instance, has similarly failed to revise its choice of katakana.

Questions from Nancy Friedman:

I'm writing something about the Best Picture nominee "Drive My Car," whose Japanese title is "Doraibu mai kā." Is there a name for this sort of transliteration from English into Japanese? Why would a Japanese writer–the source story was written by Haruki Murakami–choose a transliteration instead of a translation? (Beatles reference, maybe?)

From David Spafford:

It’s definitely a Beatles reference. I don’t know this particular Murakami work, but he’s well known for his Beatles references: think "Noruuei no mori", which is an obvious reference / mistranslation of the Beatles song, "Norwegian wood".

From Tom Ace:  "It looks like hexagram 43 is at the top of Taipei 101 in the attached photo.  I remember you saying in 2017 that you and your brother hoped to complete a translation of the I Ching. I hope that's still possible."

Stand for Ukraine pic.twitter.com/hVjpQuzdyP

— Joseph.com (@Joseph82452310) February 26, 2022