Language Log

As we have seen over and over again, banning, blocking, and censorship of the internet make it almost impossible for Chinese citizens to openly discuss anything that is slightly sensitive on the political scale (see "Selected readings" below).  But netizens are highly resourceful, and they have continuously been able to think of creative ways to comment on current affairs through punning and other linguistic maneuvers.

"Chinese netizens declare 'Vegetable English' defeats 'Korea Fish' in Taiwan election:  Chinese netizens mock censors by describing Taiwanese presidential candidates as 'Vegetable English,' 'Korea Fish'"

By Keoni Everington, Taiwan News, Staff Writer (1/12/20)

Here's the official video of their viral hit, "Wolf Totem":

Julie Satow, "She Was a Star of New York Real Estate, but Her Life Story Was a Lie", NYT 1/10/2019:

Wrapped in furs, dripping with diamonds and with her blond hair perfectly coifed, Faith Hope Consolo cut a glamorous figure in the flashy, late 20th-century world of New York City real estate.

Ms. Consolo was born into the business, benefiting from her father’s legacy as a real estate executive. Emboldened professionally by her mother, a child psychiatrist, Ms. Consolo parlayed her privileged Connecticut upbringing, which included a stint at Miss Porter’s School for Girls and a degree from Parsons Paris, into a bold career, socializing and cutting deals with the moneyed classes she knew so well.

In late 2018, Ms. Consolo died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 73. As someone who had covered her for years, I wrote her obituary, which included some of the details above, confirming her place in this rarefied world.

But those details, I soon discovered, were lies.

As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal (1965-67), I have a particular interest in all things Nepalese, especially language.  Now comes report of a spectacular linguistic phenomenon related to Nepal, and it is situated less than a hundred miles from where I'm sitting in Philadelphia.

"Just 700 Speak This Language (50 in the Same Brooklyn Building):  Seke, one of the world’s rarest languages, is spoken by about 100 people in New York", by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, NYT (1/7/20):

The apartment building, in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, is a hive of nationalities. A Pakistani woman entered the elevator on a recent afternoon with a big bag of groceries, flicking a dupatta over her shoulder as a Nepalese nurse and the janitor, a man from Jamaica there to mop up a spill, followed her in.

Jialing Xie surveys the field in "Top 10 Buzzwords in Chinese Online Media: An overview of China’s media top buzzwords over the past year", What's on Weibo (1/5/20).  As in the previous year, the expressions were chosen by the chief editor of the magazine Yǎowén Jiáozì 咬文嚼字, which Xie says "literally means 'to pay excessive attention to wording'”.

No, that's not the literal meaning of "yǎowén Jiáozì 咬文嚼字", it's the lexical, figurative meaning.  The literal meaning of "yǎowén Jiáozì 咬文嚼字" is "to bite on phrases and chew on characters".  Other lexical, figurative interpretations of "yǎowén Jiáozì 咬文嚼字" ("to bite on phrases and chew on characters") are "be punctilious about minutiae of wording: chop logic; pay excessive attention to wording and choice of characters; to nitpick like a grammar Nazi; to talk pedantically").

The current xkcd:

So asks the Chinese colleague who sent me this photograph:

Language Log readers will be aware that "Chinese", i.e., "Mandarin" (Guóyǔ 國語), is not the only language on the island.  Indeed, it is a Johnny-come-lately, having become the official language of the Republic of China on Taiwan in 1945, and was strongly enforced as such after 1949 when the retreating mainland KMT armies of Chiang Kai-shek occupied the island.

The earliest indigenous languages of Taiwan (Formosa) were Austronesian.  And we should not forget that there was a period of partial Dutch rule (1624-1662), especially in the south, and Spanish Formosa (Formosa Española) was a small colony of the Spanish Empire established in the northern part of the island from 1626 to 1642.  Consequently, both Dutch and Spanish had an impact on the linguistic development of Taiwan during the 17th century.  The first Europeans to take notice of Taiwan, however, were the Portuguese who, passing Taiwan in 1544, recorded in a ship's log the name of the island as Ilha Formosa ("Beautiful Island").

Taiwan was a dependency of Japan from 1895 to 1945, during which period Japanese was the official language.  As such, it was important for the development of language on the island, and its significance lasts till today.

The influence of English in Taiwan has been enormous during the last two centuries.

See "Languages of Taiwan".

There's a Chinese character 罽 (Mandarin jì, Old Sinitic *kràts), which means "rug, carpet; woolen textile; fish net").  On the basis of its sound, meaning, place, and date of occurrence, it would seem to be related to Toch. A kratsu "rug".

This raises two questions:

1. Does this Tocharian word have cognates in other IE languages?

2. Who borrowed it from whom?   Sinitic from Tocharian or Tocharian from Sinitic?

Val Ross writes:

I am less scandalized by the fact Obama and Trump tied than I am by the hyphenation of most-admired. Have you ever written on this vexed issue of hyphens?

The opening of the most recent Scenes From a Multiverse:

Two articles in Chinese (here and here) recently brought news of an indigenous type of tea and referred to it as a rare type of salmon.  Trying to figure that out led to two linguistic puzzles:

1. Making sense of the unusual name for the salmon:  yīnghuā gōu wěn guī 櫻花鉤吻鮭 (lit., "cherry-hook-kiss / mouth-salmon"; i.e., the Formosan landlocked salmon).

2. Understanding how, even metaphorically, a kind of tea would be referred to as a type of salmon.

"Dave Barry's Year in Review 2019"

… which begins with the federal government once again in the throes (whatever a “throe” is) of a partial shutdown, which threatens to seriously disrupt the lives of all Americans who receive paychecks from the federal government. 

Consulting the OED on throe (entry updated 2017), we learn that its orthographic history is interesting:

Of uncertain origin. Perhaps a variant or alteration of another lexical item. […]
The range of forms attested for this word is difficult to account for. […]
The current standard spelling throe […] is a 16th-cent. alteration of throw, throwe […] (compare with similar alteration the current forms of roe (earlier row , rowe ), hoe (earlier how , howe ), etc.), perhaps motivated by a desire to differentiate this word from throw.