Yevgeny Basovskaya, a specialist on public speech at Moscow’s State University of the Humanities, says that the disease has had a "radical" influence on the way Russians speak their language. This begins with the word coronavirus, which has an "a" in the middle. This is in "in complete violation of Russian orthographic rules".
Every day, I get several talk announcements from the various mailing lists that I subscribe to, which represent a rich array of disciplinary sources: linguistics, computer science, anthropology, sociology, communications, math, literary studies, marketing, and so on. Usually I can figure out from the title what the presentation is going to be about — but sometimes my first guess is wrong in an interesting way.
[VHM: This is a guest post by Chris Button. It will be primarily of interest to specialists in the phonological history of Sinitic. Since there are quite a few such scholars on Language Log, I expect that it will occasion the usual lively debate that follows posts on such subjects. It will also undoubtedly be of interest to historical phonologists in general, as well as to a broad spectrum of Sinologists and their colleagues focusing on other Asian cultures and languages.]
I've been thinking about the etymological associations of Hàn 漢. It's often reconstructed with an aspirated coronal nasal as *hn-, in spite of the Middle Chinese x- then being somewhat unexpected (Baxter and Sagart put it down to dialects), largely on the basis of the *n- in 難. But its etymological association with 艱 and its velar *k- make this problematic. A regular source of MC x- would be *hŋ- which then at least would be a velar onset to parallel *k-. The *n- in 難 could perhaps be put down to some sort of assimilation of *ŋ- with the *-n coda (one might compare 般 *pán < *pám where there is dissimilation of the coda unlike in its phonetic 凡 *bàm) . At the very least, 漢 most likely went back to something like *hŋáns and then *xáns with a velar onset and the -s eventually becoming qu-sheng. An alternative option is rhinoglottophilia whereby a *ʔ became *n- as attested in cases like 憂 *ʔə̀w and 獶(夒) *nə́w a I mentioned here.
I live in a city with a large immigrant population in general and a large Bosnian population in particular (Utica, NY [VHM: population around 60,000; between Syracuse and Schenectady]). As such, I see "BiH" bumper stickers once in a while on the road. Most of the Bosnian population either came during the breakup of Yugoslavia or are children of those immigrants, so they are probably following the American trend of putting round stickers on your car for things you like or identify with, rather than the European usage of using them to identify country of origin.
I've been familiar with the country name "Bosnia and Herzegovina" for quite some time, but until this morning I've never seen it referred to as BiH. I came upon this usage in news reports about the delivery of PRC medical supplies to that country, e.g., here. Although the Chinese printing on the boxes in the background of the photograph in this report is small and blurred, we can verify from other sources (e.g., here) what it says:
wànlǐ shàng wéi lín, xiāngzhù wú yuǎnjìn 万里尚为邻，相助无远近 ("ten thousand miles but still neighbors, mutual assistance has no far or near")
A little over a week ago, I described how I mistyped "stalk" for "stock". That led to a vigorous discussion of precisely how people pronounce "stalk". (As a matter of fact, in my own idiolect I do pronounce "stock" and "stalk" identically.) See:
