Language Log

Name on a ship that docked in Yancheng (in Jiangsu province) harbor last Thursday:

The reason there are armed public security forces patrolling near the ship is because it was full of smuggled cargo.  The story is reported here:

"Smugglers caught because they got their Chinese characters the wrong way round:  Language blunder gives sugar carriers a bitter lesson after it attracts coastguards’ suspicions" (SCMP, 9/5/17)

This is what happened in a middle school in Anhui's capital city of Hefei on the first day of the new school year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peoQ_-F2F_Y

Today's SMBC:

Political poster in Sydney, Australia:

Glenn Lammi, "Food Court Follies: Judge Grates Parmesan-Cheese Multidistrict Litigation", Forbes 8/31/2017:

A recent court case asked the Reasonable Person to put on her "reasonable consumer" hat and determine the meaning of the term "100% Grated Parmesan Cheese" as it appears on containers of shelf-stable, processed shaky cheese.

In February 2016, inspired by overblown media stories, 15 lawsuits were filed in 6 different courts against 7 defendants (Kraft Heinz Co., Albertsons Cos., Target Corp., Wal-Mart Stores, ICCO-Cheese Co., and Publix Super Markets) alleging common-law and statutory violations for those companies' false or misleading use of that statement.

The term is fraudulent, the suits alleged, because the container of grated or shredded cheese included an additive, cellulose, which is included to prevent caking.

On June 2, 2016, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation centralized all the actions in one multidistrict litigation (MDL) in the Northern District of Illinois before Judge Gary Feinerman.

Damián Blasi, Susanne Michaelis and Martin Haspelmath, "Grammars are robustly transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages", Nature Human Behaviour 2017:

[W]e analyse 48 creole languages and 111 non-creole languages from all continents and conclude that the similarities (and differences) between creoles can be explained by genealogical and contact processes, as with non-creole languages, with the difference that creoles have more than one language in their ancestry. While a creole profile can be detected statistically, this stems from an over-representation of Western European and West African languages in their context of emergence. Our findings call into question the existence of a pidgin stage in creole development and of creole-specific innovations. In general, given their extreme conditions of emergence, they lend support to the idea that language learning and transmission are remarkably resilient processes.

Email from Damián Blasi puts it more bluntly:

The basic conclusions are that 1) creoles clearly continue the linguistic structure of the languages that preceded them, 2) we don't have any evidence for a pidgin stage preceding creoles and 3) no evidence for purely creole features (like SVO) whatsoever.

Sign on a Sino-Tibetan restaurant:

(Source)

Just got off the phone with my 2nd-grader granddaughter, Samira.  She was in her dad's truck out on some errand with him.  She had a new cell phone and was excited to talk to me on it.

Her dad got out to pick up some things he had left behind at a store.  Thereupon Samira started to tell me about her grand plan to do housework for the neighbors so that she could save up enough money to buy a "marmay tay".

"What is a 'marmay tay', honey?" I asked

She tried to explain, but no matter what she said, I just couldn't grasp what a "marmay tay" was.

Finally, my son got back to the truck.

"Tom, what is this 'marmay tay' that Samira wants to buy?"

Ding Xueliang, a professor of PRC history and contemporary Chinese politics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has called attention to the difference between

Máo Zédōng sīxiǎng 毛泽东思想 ("Mao Zedong thought")

and

Máo Zédōng de sīxiǎng 毛泽东的思想 ("Mao Zedong's thought")

Similarly, there is a significant difference between

Xí Jìnpíng sīxiǎng 习近平思想 ("Xi Jinping thought")

and

Xí Jìnpíng de sīxiǎng 习近平的思想 ("Xi Jinping's thought")

More than 2,400 researchers have now signed an "Open Letter to NIH Director Francis Collins" that starts like this:

We are writing to request that NIH delay implementation of its policy that sweeps basic science into a clinical trials framework until adequate feedback about its impact is obtained from the affected scientific community. We wholeheartedly agree with NIH’s goals of increasing scientific transparency and rigor, but we ask that you consider alternative mechanisms to accomplish those goals that would have fewer adverse effects on basic research.

The background is a new definition of what counts as a "clinical trial", to be enforced starting 1/1/2018 ("NIH's Definition of a Clinical Trial"):

A research study in which one or more human subjects are prospectively assigned to one or more interventions (which may include placebo or other control) to evaluate the effects of those interventions on health-related biomedical or behavioral outcomes.

Interpreted literally, this means that a study of priming effects on speech perception in healthy undergraduate students might count as a "clinical trial", since "human subjects are prospectively assigned to one or more interventions" (the priming part), and speech perception is a "health-related biomedical or behavioral outcome". Or maybe not. NIH has given some bizarrely irregular examples of how to interpret this rather general definition — thus vision and memory in adults are apparently "health-related outcomes" but learning in children is not.

In various areas of Edinburgh there are signs that say "Peripheral Controlled Zone." What exactly would you do if you encountered one of these signs? What would it mean to you? Not much? That's the hallmark of nerdview.

What is peripheral to what? Who is controlling what? What is peripheral control? Why are you being told this? Nothing becomes clearer as you mull over what it says. They might as well have put up a sign saying "Argle bargle nurff gugga mongmong gooboo wah Mon – Fri 8:30am – 5:30pm."

But worse, if you did know what it meant you would become aware that it could not possibly be relevant to you.

David Bandurski has done the world a great service by providing a point by point translation and valuable exegesis of the essentials of President Xi Jinping's "important speech" delivered in Beijing on July 26, 2017.  See his:

"The Arithmetic of Party-Speak:  The 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is just around the corner — and that means the machine of political discourse is humming away at high speed" (8/28/17).

As presented in state media products such as “Xi Speak in Pictures” (Xí yǔ tújiě 习语图解), the essence of the Core Leader's directives may be boiled down to and designated by the following magic numbers:  2, 3, 5, 9, 8, 3, 2.

[This is a guest post by Jichang Lulu.]

Imagine that a certain phrase could be potentially offensive to the authoritarian rulers of a country you would like to do business in. To promote that business, you intend to display images of certain professionals who work for you. One of these professionals has indelibly inscribed the potentially offensive phrase on their belly. The professional activity you wish to promote typically involves barebelliedness.