Language Log

There's been a lot of political reaction to what Donald Trump said in  Chris Wallace's 7/19/2020 interview. But I haven't seen any reactions to a curious linguistic innovation — or maybe it was a mistake? — that happens at about 10:52 of the interview:

hey Dr. Fauci said don't wear a mask
our surgeon general terrific guy said don't wear a mask
everybody was saying don't wear a mask all of a sudden everybody's got to wear a mask
and as you know masks cause problems too
with that being said
I'm a believer in masks I think masks are good
but
uh I leave it up to the governors
many of the governors are changing they're more
mask
into
they like
the concept of masks
but some of them don't agree

Michael Silverstein, a titan in the field of linguistic anthropology, passed away on Friday. UChicago News has an obituary today.

Prof. Michael Silverstein, a leading University of Chicago anthropologist who made groundbreaking contributions to linguistic anthropology and helped define the field of sociolinguistics, died July 17 in Chicago following a battle with brain cancer. He was 74.

The Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics and Psychology, Silverstein was known for his highly influential research on language-in-use as a social and cultural practice and for his long-term fieldwork on Native language speakers of the Pacific Northwest and of Aboriginal Australia. Most recently, Silverstein examined the effects of globalization, nationalism and other social forces on local speech communities.

“Over a half-century at the University of Chicago, he produced a body of work that fundamentally changed the place of linguistics in the field, with foundational contributions to the understanding of language structure, sociolinguistics and semiotics, as well as the history of linguistics and anthropology,” said Prof. Joe Masco, chair of the Department of Anthropology. “His erudition, sense of humor, love of scholarship, of teaching, of conversation and substantive debate is legendary and helped establish the intellectual strength of UChicago in all the many different fields of which he was part.”

There is a phenomenon in Japanese publishing called "san-gō zasshi  三号雑誌", which refers to a short-lived magazine that puts out three issues and then folds.  Sino-Platonic Papers, a scholarly journal I started in 1986, just put out its 300th issue, and we're still going strong, with about ten more issues in the pipeline, and others lined up to come after that.

The latest issue is "Between the Eyes and the Ears: Ethnic Perspective on the Development of Philological Traditions, First Millennium AD", by Shuheng Zhang and Victor H. Mair, which appeared yesterday (July 19, 2020).

Abstract

The present inquiry stands as a foray into what may be thought of as a “Summa Philologica Sinica.” To be more precise, this paper is about the study and developmental trajectory of philology rather than philology per se. The approach here, drawing on the prefaces and comments of primary historical resources, conceives of philology as subject to the transitions of philosophy, an amalgam within which variegated traditions and schools contend and consent with each other, rather than as a static, ahistorical antithesis between the study of script and that of sound. The bifocal panoply behind philological texts and the shì 勢 (“immanent configuration”) that oscillates between indigenous systems of thought and foreign philosophy, defense of nationality and openness to foreign voices, reflected in the realm of language studies, presents itself as focused on characters (eyes) versus sounds (ears).

Some things that "everybody knows" are refuted repeatedly by the experience of everyday life. A notably example is the function of "filled pauses", whose American English versions are conventionally written "um" and "uh".

Dictionaries all say that these are are expressions of hesitation, doubt, uncertainty; ways to fill time or hold the floor. The OED glosses uh as "Expressing hesitation", and um as "Used to indicate hesitation or doubt in replying to another". Wiktionary glosses uh as "Expression of thought, confusion, or uncertainty", or "Space filler or pause during conversation", and um as "Expression of hesitation, uncertainty or space filler in conversation". Merriam-Webster glosses uh as "used to express hesitation", and um as "used to indicate hesitation". Collins glosses uh as "used when hesitating in speaking, as while searching for a word or collecting one's thoughts", and um as "used in writing to represent a sound that people make when they are hesitating, usually while deciding what they want to say next".

So what are we to make of this, the opening phrase of an hour-long video interview?

Following up on our discussion of faxes and pdfs ("Obsolete communications technology", 7/13/2020), an even older textual transmission method is featured in the punch line of today's Doonesbury:

I recently learned a new word:  nurdles. These are plastic resin pellets, typically 1-5 mm in size, created as an intermediate stage in plastics production. Losses in production and transportation apparently  make them a major contribution to marine pollution.

I learned this word from reading about two environmental activists in Louisiana who have been charged with terrorism for leaving a box of nurdles on the porch of an oil and gas lobbyist.

From Aman ur Rahman:

(Face)

The actress Qin Lan, who is best known for her role in the wildly popular TV drama "Story of Yanxi Palace", said this in an interview:

“People have been asking me why I’m not getting married, and some have even suggested it’s ‘irresponsible’ if I don’t have a baby. I think it’s strange.

“What’s it to you if I use my uterus or not?”

That line went viral, garnering its own hashtag on Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter).

Tongliao 通辽市; Mongolian: Tüŋliyou qota, Mongolian Cyrillic.Түнляо хот) is a prefecture-level city in eastern Inner Mongolia, PRC.  The news is not good. 

It follows a familiar pattern:  there's a similar story about suspending Tibetan-language education in a part of Sichuan following the covid-19 closure of schools.

It sounds plausible since notification was given verbally, typical of the way Chinese government does things it doesn't want to be caught out on.

The first of eight in a partial survey:

Typefaces of Protest: A Short Survey
1/ Paranoid Light pic.twitter.com/MSuBYvDvp1

— Tom Sutcliffe (@tds153) July 13, 2020

See the whole thread.

From Alex Baumans:

Recently a supermarket of this ecofriendly chain opened in my neighborhood. As the initiative seems to be francophone, I suppose the name is a superposition of the French 'ferme' and English 'farm' by way of German spelling. What struck me most was their unbounded enthusiasm for putting little dots on vowels. I can't imagine how most of them are supposed to pronounced, so the dots clearly only serve a decorative purpose. Is the eco-umlaut the successor of the hard rock-umlaut, I wonder. 

The (French) header of their web site:

[This is a guest post by Doug Hitch]

I have had a theory for a number of years about the success of the IE (now Yamnaya) people in populating the world. Here I would like to survey some of the basic reasons for their demographic spread.

Populations in all species prosper when there is adequate food. If there is a surplus of food, the population will grow to meet it. When there is a shortage, populations shrink. There are well known population cycles for lemmings and rabbits. A peak in hare population is followed by a peak in fox population. Then, with more predation, the hares diminish, followed by a decline in fox numbers. In northwestern North America the Athabaskan populations were always small, often facing starvation. One group went south and adopted corn and beans, and later sheep. There are now more Navajo than all the other Athabaskans combined.

Dmitry Ostrovsky reacted to a litotic sentence in Bari Weiss's resignation letter:

"None of this means that some of the most talented journalists in the world don’t still labor for this newspaper."

Dmitry's email:

This strikes me as very odd. It is not a simple "arithmetic" misnegation, if "none of this means that" and "don't" are dropped the sentence obviously would have a meaning intended by Ms. Weiss "[…] some of the most talented journalists in the world […] still labor for this newspaper", but as written it doesn't work. The trouble, it seems to me, is the word "some". If "None of this means that" (a straightforward negation) is removed, the sentence would have the structure "S don’t still labor for this newspaper", but almost anything is true about S when S = "some of the most talented journalists in the world" — S like beer and S hate soccer, S work late and S rise early, S read LL and S don't read even their own publication. And thus, no matter what is your statement about S, its negation is wrong.