Language Log

New article by Johnson in The Economist (4/23/22):

On the origin of languages
It is tempting to think that they have clear beginnings. They don’t

First two paragraphs:

IN A CHURCH hewn out of a mountainside, just over a thousand years or so ago, a monk was struggling with a passage in Latin. He did what others like him have done, writing the tricky bits in his own language between the lines of text and at the edges. What makes these marginalia more than marginal is that they are considered the first words ever written in Spanish.

The “Emilian glosses” were written at the monastery of Suso, which was founded by St Aemilianus (Millán, in Spanish) in the La Rioja region of Spain. Known as la cuna del castellano, “the cradle of Castilian”, it is a UNESCO world heritage site and a great tourist draw. In 1977 Spain celebrated 1,000 years of the Spanish language there.

Referring to the first post in this series, "Hokkien at UCLA" (4/20/22), Chau Wu writes:

I totally agree with you about the Chinese prerequisite.

When I was younger (no, a lot younger) back in Taiwan, I had known a few grandmotherly Christian ladies who were illiterate in Sinitic script but perfectly at home in reading the Taiwanese Bible in Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ), i.e., Church Romanization (see below at * for further discussion). The following pictures appeared in the Taiwanese newspaper 自由時報 (Liberty Times) (Hokkien POJ Chū-iû-sî-pò; Hanyu Pinyin Zìyóu Shíbào) a few years ago about a Mrs. Lin (unrelated to any of the ladies I knew of) reading the Bible (Note the Bible shows signs of having been heavily used):

The Shalu district of Taichung (Taizhong) is opening a new night market:

[This is a guest post by S. Robert Ramsey]

The Statue of King Sejong in Downtown Seoul.

The brilliance of good king Sejong (1397-1450) overshadows another great mind of Joseon Korea, a middle-class man named Choe Sejin (1465-1542).

Riding the trolley from West Philadelphia going to University City,

https://twitter.com/slurve/status/563688361316339713

Article in Taiwan News:

"UCLA students learn about Taiwanese Hokkien in MOE*-supported course:

Course examines Taiwan’s widely-spoken dialect ‘in different forms of cultural production’", By Stephanie Chiang (4/19/22)

*Ministry of Education

UCLA began offering its first Taiwanese Hokkien course in January 2020:

The description of the course entitled “Taiwanese Language and Culture” reads, “Taiyu, or Taiwanese (also known as Minnan, Hoklo, or Hokkien, depending on context or region), is the language that most Taiwanese people use in daily lives, including everyday interaction and communication, entertainment, social and cultural events, etc.” The four-unit course offered to upper-division students requires students to have taken at least a year of Chinese courses or a Chinese placement test showing equivalent knowledge.

I wish they didn't have the prerequisite mentioned in the last sentence and don't understand the reason for such a requirement.

For reasons not at all connected with this post, I was looking for scans of the 1558 (first) printing of John Knox's infamous screed THE FIRST BLAST OF THE TRUMPET against the monstruous regiment of Women. And one of the places that Google sent me to was a link on the website of the Somerset County (New Jersey) Library System , where the work is apparently classified as a Romance novel:

Or the decade?

Yesterday's SMBC:

Yesterday, in "Malign Woodpeckers and Other Hegemonic Behavior" (4/18/22), we became briefly acquainted with "The Great Translation Movement" (TGTM).  Today we will probe more deeply into what it is all about.  Suffice it for the moment to say that TGTM deeply unnerves the CCP.  In addition to "Twisted in translation: Western media, social groups set up language barriers by intentionally misreading, misinterpreting Chinese materials", by Huang Lanlan and Lin Xiaoyi, Global Times (4/14/22), which was the main basis for yesterday's Language Log post and in which TGTM played a key role, TGTM was also featured in these recent Global Times (GT) articles:

"How China can counter translation bias", by Tang Jingtai, GT (4/12/22)

"GT Investigates: Behind the online translation campaign are a few Chinese-speaking badfaith actors fed by antagonistic Western media", by GT staff reporters, GT (3/24/22)

Here's a Global Times article in Chinese against TGTM where we learn that the Chinese name for it is "Dà fānyì yùndòng 大翻译运动" ("The Great Translation Movement").

With this stunning journalistic masterpiece, Global Times, China's official, nationalistic, daily tabloid newspaper under the CCP, has outdone itself in exposure of truly insidious "Western" (U.S., British) linguistic behavior:

"Twisted in translation: Western media, social groups set up language barriers by intentionally misreading, misinterpreting Chinese materials", by Huang Lanlan and Lin Xiaoyi, GT (4/14/22)

Here's one gem from the article:

Professor Tang from Fudan University noted that anti-Chinese forces are now mature enough to use the internet to self-organize – actively plan anti-Chinese issues to infiltrate and mobilize some netizens, driving them to act like woodpeckers to find a few rare, extreme statements and then embellish them.

Gosh!  Who knew that woodpeckers could be trained to do that?  Every day is an education. 

Mark Swofford took this photo yesterday in a Taipei supermarket:

The latest Dinosaur Comics:

The mouseover title: "whistle morse code with dot as a D note and dash as a G flat and you're already there, laying down the sickest of beats. a truly unwell beat"

As promised yesterday in "Pronunciation evolution", today I'll present some examples to suggest that Wally Funk's pronunciation of "astronaut" was not a mistake or an idiosyncrasy:

Taking a look at a sample of 100 instances of "astronaut" in the previously-described NPR podcast corpus, I found several similar cases where the word has only two phonetic syllables, with the first ending with a fricative and the second starting with [n]. And in more than half of the cases, the unstressed medial syllable is not elided, but the /t/ vanishes completely, and the /r/ is retained only as spectral lowering at the end of the /s/. I don't have time this morning to lay those examples out and discuss them, but I'll put it on my to-blog list for tomorrow.

We might transcribe Wally Funk's rendition in IPA-ish as [æʃnɔt], though the [ʃ] would be covering a complex tangle of coronal gestures: