Come The Felicity The Door
From Charles Belov:
Sending along a photo from a videodisc cover I encountered in a little free library.
The Chinese title 幸福来敲门 is translated into English as "Come The Felicity The Door".
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From Charles Belov:
Sending along a photo from a videodisc cover I encountered in a little free library.
The Chinese title 幸福来敲门 is translated into English as "Come The Felicity The Door".
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Klaus Nuber, who four years ago sent us this amusing post, "Restaurant logo with a dingus" (5/29/19), has contributed another droll Anekdote.
The following article is in today's Süddeutsche Zeitung, "Kannste knicken?"* (11/23/23) — herewith the second anecdote of three from all over the world:
*VHM: The meaning of the article title escapes me — can you fold / bend [it]?
Weiter weg geht es kaum von der Großstadt Peking: Neun Stunden mit dem Zug, dann eine lange Autofahrt die Täler entlang, jetzt ist der Hunger groß. Im Restaurant? Keine Karte, bestellt werden kann, was im Kühlschrank liegt. Ein paar Karotten, zwei Kartoffeln, ein platt gedrückter Tintenfisch. Kommt sofort! Dafür um die Ecke, kaum zu glauben, ein Café! Draußen das ländliche China mit seinen Reisfeldern und Kohlelastern, drinnen brummt die Espresso-Maschine. Der lang ersehnte Schluck, aber was ist das? Der Kaffee – eiskalt! Vorsichtige Frage an den Barista, ob es den auch in heiß gäbe? Sein Blick zunächst: totale Entgeisterung, dann folgt schallendes Gelächter. "Diese Ausländer!", ruft er und alle gucken. "Hört mal her. Jetzt trinken die ihren Kaffee auch noch wie Tee!" So was Amüsantes haben die Menschen hier schon lange nicht mehr gehört. Lea Sahay
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One of my favorite diversions is looking at old photographs of James Murray (1837-1915), chief editor of the OED, and his cohort working away in their scriptorium, "a shed in Murray’s back garden in Oxford".
What a bunch of committed eccentrics! That includes Sarah Ogilvie, who worked at the OED for awhile and wrote this article:
When American Words Invaded the Greatest English Dictionary
Slips of paper with peculiar regional terms like ‘huckleberry’ and ‘cottondom’ crossed the Atlantic to Oxford and into the pages of a 70-year lexicographical project
WSJ (11/10/23)
I am so much in awe and admiration of these quaint, quirky, quixotic lexicographers buried amongst their millions of 4" X 6" quotation slips stuffed in more than a thousand pigeon hole grids that line the walls of their corrugated metal outbuilding that I wish I could quote this entire, wonderful piece, but that would not be acceptable according to the normal rules and practices of Language Log, so I will simply pick and choose several of the more colorful passages.
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In the first comment to this post on a Northeastern topolectal word for kohlrabi, "piě-le 丿了" (cf. MSM piělán 苤蓝), Jenny Chu astutely asked whether the second syllable is related to the Chinese word for the color blue, lán 藍 (also "indigo", for which see below).
That sent me scurrying, since — although I was vaguely aware of a secondary meaning besides "indigo, blue" of "cabbage" for lán 藍 — I could not recall ever hearing any convincing / satisfying explanation for what the relation between these two meanings is.
Some early Chinese authors and commentators do assert that the leaves of cruciferous vegetables (Brassicaceae, colloquially called cole crops in North America) are referred to as lán 藍 due to their color. However, because of my background knowledge of words for cabbage, kale, etc. in many other languages, I did not find that a satisfying explanation. So I decided to dig deeper into the mystery of the dual identity of lán 藍: indigo and cabbage.
I believe that what I came up with will illuminate the conundrum.
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As is so often true, xkcd points to an important topic so far ignored by linguists:
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This is a followup to "Japanese words that are dying out: focus on diabetes" (11/21/23). Because it's history of science / medicine for specialists and too technical for the majority of readers, I will not provide transcriptions for all but a few of the most common terms.
[The following is a guest post from Nathan Hopson]
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From Philip Taylor:
The British media were flooded yesterday with reports that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been “bamboozled” by scientific evidence presented during the Covid-19 pandemic. My understanding of "bamboozle" has always been that deception must be involved, and this is borne out by the OED, but there was clearly no deception in this case (other than, perhaps, self-deception, in that BoJo may well have convinced himself that he did understand the scientific evidence, when he clearly did not), so why did Sir Patrick Valance, then Chief Scientific Advisor to HMG, record in his diary that “the Prime Minister was at times ‘bamboozled’” ?
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From The Japan Times:
A foray into the realm of Japanese ‘dead words’
Trendy buzzwords tend to be most at risk of dying out as they often reflect ideas and trends that are fleeting.
By Tadasu Takahashi
Staff writer
Oct 31, 2023
Sometimes whole languages go extinct, more often certain words within languages cease to exist as part of the living lexicon. There are political, demographic, and other socioeconomic reasons why languages disappear. The reasons why individual words die out are related more to fashion — in culture, science, and similar emotional and intellectual reasons.
Tadasu Takahashi's interesting article provides some specific examples from contemporary Japanese language.
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From another tweet / X-effusion by the Master Muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin:
“管总”这词是古代白话文,现在基本不用,原意是指某个人或某个部门管各种事务,“一个问题”怎么“管总”?哪个秘书想出来的新用法? pic.twitter.com/jPdr3KzP6a
— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) November 19, 2023
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Karin Fisher, "It’s a Bleak Climate for Foreign Languages as Enrollments Tumble", Chronicle of Higher Education 11/15/2023"
Enrollments in foreign-language courses tumbled nearly 17 percent between the fall of 2016 and the fall of 2021, the largest decline in the six decades the Modern Language Association has been conducting its census of American colleges. […]
Since peaking in 2009, foreign-language enrollments have deteriorated by almost 30 percent, the MLA found. This is a stunning reversal: Over the previous 30 years, the number of students studying languages had been on a steady upward trajectory.
Ryan Quinn, "Foreign Language Enrollment Sees Steepest Decline on Record", Inside Higher Ed 11/16/2023:
While the COVID-19 crisis lowered enrollments generally, the new report notes that the overall number of students in U.S. colleges and universities only fell 8 percent between 2016 and 2021. While those aren’t directly comparable figures, the drop in enrollment in non-English-language classes was over twice as much — and the 2021 decline in language-taking continues a pre-pandemic trend.
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From the Twitter / X account of the famous popular science writer and muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin:
以色列领事馆公布的这封“一个陌生中国人的来信”,应该是在电脑上写好、打印出来,然后再抄写。所以有输入错误,把“公元”输入成了“公园”(书写只会把“公园”错成“公元”,不会反过来)。抄写的人写字水平太差,最常见的简单的字“且”“己”“组”都写错了,中国低年级小学生写这些字也不可能错。 pic.twitter.com/3GpUPS5k4b
— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) November 16, 2023
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[This is a guest post by Zhengyuan Wang]
Calligraphy Practicing Sheets and the Trussing Structure of Chinese Characters
One thing essential for every elementary-level Chinese learner is to learn to write the characters in the same size in one single passage. This is not a unique case that only exists in Chinese. But this can be a challenging task in reality, in regards to how different the Chinese characters can be to each other with the number of strokes ranging from as simple as characters with one stroke only (for instance, 一 yī and 丨gǔn [yes, this is a character]) to complex ones with up to twenty-eight strokes (矗 chù, the character with most strokes among the 3,500 common used Chinese characters). Not to mention, there are characters less common but with way more strokes, such as 麤 cū, with thirty-three strokes, 龘 dá/tà, with fifty-one strokes, and the most famous one biáng (as in figure 1) with forty-two or fifty-six strokes.
(figure 1: from left to right: biáng in traditional Chinese with 56 strokes, biáng in simplified Chinese with 42 strokes, and yī with only one stroke. How can you write them in the same size, which has to be not so big in the first place?)
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