Language Log

From a memoir by Uyghur poet Tamir Hamut Izgil, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, Bruce Humes posted on his Ethnic ChinaLit blog (12/30/23) this brief excerpt about how content, once commissioned and approved by the Chinese state, became grounds for incarceration of researchers, writers and editors:

Huítóu kàn gōngchéng 回头看工程 — Xinjiang’s Ominous “Looking Back Project”

Uyghur poet’s memoir recalls the Xinjiang administration’s retroactive hunt for unPC content in textbooks once commissioned, edited and published by the state:

I'm led to this topic by a consideration of one of the six books that made the short list for the Wolfson History Prize, which is the UK's most prestigious history book prize, as introduced by Sudhir Hazareesingh, who is interviewed by Sophie Roell, in "The Best History Books of 2023", Five Books (11/12/23).

Because this is Language Log, we skip directly to Henrietta Harrison’s The Perils of Interpreting, which is about a key episode in Chinese history when, in 1793, the British envoy Lord Macartney (1737-1806) was rebuffed by the Qianlong emperor (1711-1799). Roell prompts Hazareesingh to tell her about this book, what it’s about, and why the judges liked it.

Hazareesingh responds (with slight amplifications and modifications):

In a narrow sense, this is a twin biography. It’s about two translators who are actors in this big drama of the encounter between the British and Chinese empires in the late 18th and early 19th century—from the 1790s through to the Opium Wars in the late 1830s.

From Emma Knightley:

Sent by my boomer parents – according to the caption how a Taiwanese village is teaching seniors how to sing "You Are My Sunshine" in English, which requires them to know a combination of Mandarin, Taiwanese ("阿粿"), English ("B"), and Japanese ("の")! (I think the calligraphy is wonderful, to boot.)

As discussed in "this post" from 9/5/2017, the label "100% grated Parmesan cheese" means only that the product's Parmesan cheese is 100% grated, or maybe that the cheese in it is 100% Parmesan — never mind the cellulose powder that's also in the mix.

So I wondered about the grocery bags that are labeled

BAG MADE FROM
100% RECYCLED
PLASTIC BOTTLES

There are many things about Papua New Guinea (PNG) that make it unique (the abundance of its flora and fauna, its ritualistic cannibalism, its political complexity, etc.), but above all for me is the huge number of its languages, especially considering its relatively small population on such a large amount of land (see below for some details).

Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; /ˈpæp(j)uə … ˈɡɪni, ˈpɑː-/ ^ⓘ, also US: /ˈpɑːpwə-, ˈpɑːp(j)ə-/^[12]) is a country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and its offshore islands in Melanesia (a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean north of Australia). Officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea (Tok Pisin: Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; Hiri Motu: Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), it shares its only land border with Indonesia to the west and it is directly adjacent to Australia to the south and the Solomon Islands to the east. Its capital, located along its southeastern coast, is Port Moresby. The country is the world's third largest island country, with an area of 462,840 km² (178,700 sq mi).

The following buzzwords from social media show that, when they get out from under the thumb / heel of the CCP, the Chinese people have a lot of lively spunk and clever wit.  Contrast "Chinese buzzwords for 2023" (12/6/23), the official ones — mostly deadly dull.

The Language of Now: China’s Best Internet Slang in 2023
Sixth Tone lists the buzzwords that shaped conversations on Chinese social media.

By Sixth Tone
Dec 28, 2023

The netizens have to keep one step ahead of the internet police to get these fun words out there.

From the Engrish in Japan Facebook page, posted by Yukie Masumoto:

Intercultural connections imply crosscultural communications.

In my estimation, Shimao is the most important archeological site in the EEAH (Extended East Asian Heartland) from B.C. times, with enormous implications for the origins of Sinitic civilization.  Shimao is a recently discovered archeological site, brought to light roughly a dozen years ago, but still very much under excavation.  Its coordinates are 38.5657°N 110.3252°E, which put it on the mid-eastern edge of the Ordos Desert that lies within the great, rectangular bend of the Yellow River called the Ordos Loop in English or Hétào 河套 ("Yellow River Sheath") in Chinese.  I often think of the Ordos as the omphalos of the EEAH, ecologically a part of the Eastern Gobi desert steppe that has been lassoed ("lasso" is another meaning of tào 套) into the cultural orbit of the Yellow River Valley, which is the center of the East Asian Heartland (EAH) proper.

For the concept of East Asian Heartland (EAH) and Extended East Asian Heartland (EEAH), see Victor H. Mair, "The North(west)ern Peoples and the Recurrent Origins of the 'Chinese' State", in Joshua A. Fogel, The Teleology of the Modern Nation-State:  Japan and China (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. 46-84.

My reaction to the current controversy over Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarisms is to observe again that the relevant policies are a tangled and incoherent mess. I first wrote about this back in 2006 — and  as it happens, that post compared the work of a different university president with the treatment of a Harvard undergraduate accused of plagiarism:

We tell kids that plagiarism is wrong, but we tell them that a lot of things are wrong that they see successful and respected people doing every day. […] In fact, anyone who pays attention knows that in some cases, like political speeches and celebrity memoirs, it's normal and expected to pass the work of others off as your own.

Here's an example that cuts close to the academic bone. A couple of decades ago, X was a graduate student at Y University, a school that regularly appears in U.S. News and World Report's listing of the top 50 American universities, and not at the bottom of the list either. The school's president, Dr. Z, had a nationally syndicated column. It ran under his byline, but X helped pay her way through school by writing it. I don't mean that she edited it, or did research for it, or drafted it. She came up with the ideas, did whatever research was required, and wrote it exactly as it ran. Dr. Z approved it for publication, or at least was given the opportunity to do so, but he never changed anything. (Or so X told me, and I believe her.)

I'm sure that Y University had a policy against plagiarism, like all similar institutions. It no doubt defined plagiarism in the usual way, as "the act of using the ideas or work of another person or persons as if they were one's own, without giving proper credit to the source" or something of the sort. This definition obviously applies to hiring someone to research and write your papers for you, just as much as it applies to copying passages from a book or cutting and pasting from an online source. (And writing-for-hire is hard to detect unless the hireling squeals. I've heard of one case that was uncovered because the hireling plagiarized a term paper from online sources, and when the copying was detected by the usual means, the accused student tried to absolve herself on the grounds that the guilty party was really the person that she had hired. "I hope you throw the book at the lousy cheater", she is apocryphally supposed to have exclaimed.) In any event, if Ms. X had been caught hiring someone to write her graduate-school term papers for her, she would surely have been unceremoniously dropped from the program.

Shocking (to me) news:

"Japan’s English Proficiency Continues to Drop Among Non-English-Speaking Countries"

nippon.com (Dec 4, 2023)

A survey found that Japan currently ranks eighty-seventh out of 113 non-English-speaking countries and regions for English language abilities. This is a fall of seven places from last year and relatively low among Asian countries.

I'm dubious that English proficiency would be so low in Japan, which overall has such a high level of education and which has such a large number of loanwords from English.  Is this a case of lies, damned lies and [polling-generated] statistics"?

From the Facebook account of Wai-hung Wong:

Those whale vowels are on my to-blog list. But for now, please remember that talking animals can be dangerous — at least, this evening:

"Talking animals: Miracle or curse?", 12/24/2004
"Watch out for those talking animals tonight", 12/24/2013
"Trigger warning: Talking animals", 12/24/2015

Subtitle:  "Thank you, Egg Fried Rice"

You may think that nothing could be more innocuous than mundane egg-fried rice.  Not so in post-Mao China.  As background for the story I'm about to tell, you need to know that eggs were a rarity in the PRC during the days of Mao, and especially during the Korean War (1950-53), in which China was pitted against the USA and the UN.

So you know the vocabulary, it is "dàn chǎo fàn 蛋炒饭" ("egg fried rice"). 

Egg Fried Rice

What is said to have killed Mao Zedong’s oldest son, Mao Anying. The younger Mao, who had studied abroad in Russia, volunteered to fight in the Korean War and was assigned to be Peng Dehuai*’s Russian translator. According to legend, Mao Anying cooked fried rice with eggs in the daytime, against military regulation. The eggs were a rare delicacy at the time and had been just been sent to Peng Dehuai from Kim Il-sung. Spotting the smoke from the fire, an American plane dropped napalm on the site. Unable to escape, Mao perished in the flames.

Regardless of the truth of the story, Mao Anying did in fact die in 1950 when his camp in a Korean cave was napalmed.