Language Log

JoAnna Klein, "Did Dietary Changes Bring Us ‘F’ Words? Study Tackles Complexities of Language’s Origins", NYT 3/14/2019:

Thousands of years ago, some of our ancestors left behind the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and started to settle down. They grew vegetables and grains for stews or porridge, kept cows for milk and turned it into cheese, and shaped clay into storage pots.

Had they not done those things, would we speak the languages and make the sounds that we now hear today? Probably not, suggests a study published Thursday in Science.

This little clip, of sociolinguistic as well as non-linguistic interest, has gone viral in the Algerian online world (via Twitter):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGTxWCLIQNM

Wikipedia describes academia.edu as a for-profit "social networking site for academics", whose misleading .edu domain name "was registered in 1999, prior to the regulations requiring .edu domain names to be held solely by accredited post-secondary institutions". For my part, I'd describe academia.edu as "a source of large volumes of annoying unsolicited email".

Yes, I know that I should unsubscribe — but this is harder to do than you might think, since they have registered me under a number of different email addresses, and add new ones when I tell them to unsubscribe the old ones. Anyhow, academia.edu seems recently to have achieved a level of transcendent fakery that almost makes me glad that that they're still spamming me.

Zeyao Wu found this picture on Weibo:

Thomas Lumley called my attention to the neologism and bilingual pun "whaumau", now a Twitter hashtag:

The only reason why I'm bothered about having very limited wifi access here… can't stream Matatini 😭 #WHAUMAU pic.twitter.com/X2yYL6Uji1

— Josephine (@soseesays) February 21, 2019

Tong Wang told me that she just learned a new word.  It's "up主“, a term borrowed from Japanese into Chinese, and refers to those who upload audio, video, or other resources to share on certain websites.

In this expression, zhǔ / nushi 主 means "master; lord; host; owner", etc. (it has many other meanings in other realms of discourse, e.g., "Allah; Lord; advocate; main; primary; principal", etc.)

News from the laboratories of democracy — Anna Staver, "Computers zip through 2,000-page bill after Senate Republican forces its reading", Denver Post 3/11/2019:

All work in the Colorado Senate came to halt Monday morning thanks to a procedural maneuver invoked by a ranking Republican.

Committee hearings, floor debates and votes were all delayed as House Bill 1172 — a 2,000-page bill revising Title 12 of the Colorado Revised Statutes — was read in its entirety.

“I’m just following the rules,” Sen. John Cooke, R-Greeley, said with a smile when asked about his request to read the whole bill. “We keep saying we want things slowed down, and this is the only thing we have in our arsenal.”

What Cooke wanted to slow down was the hearings and votes on the death penalty and oil and gas bills. He said he talked with Democratic leadership last week about delaying the oil and gas hearing but that he was dismissed.

Some estimated it would take 60 hours for a human to read the bill, but Monday afternoon Democrats used a maneuver of their own to cut that time drastically: After a Senate staffer read for three hours, they brought in five computers to read the bill simultaneously at a speed far faster than humans can understand.

I have a colleague at Penn who teaches medieval Arabic cultural history; his name is Paul Cobb.  He used to teach at the University of Chicago.

I have a friend at the University of Chicago who teaches medieval Chinese cultural history; his name is Paul Copp.  He received his PhD from nearby Princeton, which starts with a "P".

Boy, do I ever get them confused!

I mentioned this to Diana Shuheng Zhang, and she replied as follows:

Every time someone (usually a Chinese person) raises the issue of writing Sinographic languages in a phonetic script, people (usually non-Chinese) will jump on him / her and say that it can't be done or that it will destroy the culture.

When it is pointed out that it already has been done repeatedly for the last millennium and more ("Writing Sinitic languages with phonetic scripts" [5/20/16]) and that the Vietnamese and Koreans have done it successfully (passim), the ultimate response of the anti-phonetists is that we need to take a survey to find out if the Chinese people really want a phonetic script (most recently in the comments here:  "Sinitic languages without the Sinographic script" [3/5/19]).

For International Women's Day, Google made one of its doodles — this one with quotations from various women from around the world. Each is given its own distinctive typography. Several languages and scripts appear.

Tong Wang ran into this picture today in Beijing:

This morning while shaving, as I was listening to the radio around 7:30 a.m., I heard a medley of songs by three artists, all with the same title:  "Hold on".  But a funny thing happened in all three of these renditions:  whenever the singer pronounced the title phrase, it always came out as "hol don", at least to my ear.  But I don't think it was just my ear, since several times they prolonged the "hol" syllable and emphasized the "d" at the beginning of the "don" syllable.

Below is a guest post by Nancy Dray, following up on Brian Joseph's obituary for Eric Hamp (3/4/2019).

Deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Professor Eric P. Hamp, I thought I would repost something—my parody lyrics for “The Very Model for Historical Comparison”—that I wrote more than 25 years ago, in large part as a tribute to him (mocking his exact opposite). These lyrics were not just written to celebrate Eric and his work: writing them was a path through which I came to know him, not just as a kind and interesting professor but as the extraordinary observer, thinker, poet, conversationalist, and human being that he was.