Language Log

From Michael Pratt, a former professor of Spanish, who relocated to Shenzhen to learn more about Chinese poetry, which was his chief motivation for moving to China:

At times, when I discuss Tang shi ("Tang poetry") with Chinese acquaintances, I am struck by their seeming dogmatism about the range of possible interpretations. For example, in a recent conversation about the poem “Jīnlǚ yī 金缕衣” ("The Robe of Golden Thread"), traditionally attributed to Dù Qiūniáng 杜秋娘 ("Autumn Maid Du")*, my Chinese interlocutor was adamant that the speaker’s insistence on the importance of plucking blossoms during one’s qīngshàonián 少年时 ("youth") was entirely high-minded — i.e., that it was a vulgar mistake for me even to suggest that sex or love might number among the pleasures symbolized by those enticing but ephemeral blossoms.

[*VHM: article in Mandarin; in Literary Sinitic; in Norsk bokmål]

Jayme, his gangling arms covered with colorful tattoos, sallies forth onto Nanjing Road, the busiest shopping street in Shanghai, and tests the local denizens and tourists on their language skills (reading, writing, and pronunciation):

Here's Bǐ'ěr·Gàicí 比尔·盖茨 welcoming visitors to his new blog on the Chinese social network WeChat:

Tony Lin, "End of the Line for Subway Ad Against Sexual Harassment:  One year later, Guangzhou feminist group still hasn’t succeeded in putting up anti-harassment billboards" (Sixth Tone, 4/28/17) is about a group of Chinese women who have — unsuccessfully so far — tried to place a series of public service notices in the Guangzhou subway, alerting passengers to the need to oppose groping. It contains pictures of the would-be ads, including this one:

Michael Carasik, on behalf of NAPH (National Association of Professors of Hebrew), has forwarded to me a letter that was written to Oscar P. Schaub in the 1920s. Can anyone identify the script and/or translate it for him?

Spotted by Howard Goldblatt in Shatin:

Chen Cheng-wei and staff writer Elizabeth Hsu, "Taiwan's last lead-character mold maker works to preserve the past" (Focus Taiwan, 5/1/17):

Rixing Type Foundry is home to the last remaining collection of traditional Chinese movable type character molds in the world. It possesses 120,000 molds of different characters in a wide range of sizes and three different typefaces — kaiti (楷體) or regular script, songti (宋體) and heiti (黒體) or sans-serif black — and has more than 10 million lead character pieces for printing or sale.

[This is a guest post by David Moser]

I took a group of my students, who are studying the Chinese medical system, to a yǎngshēngguǎn 养生馆 [VHM: "health center / club" — centered on TCM = Traditional Chinese Medicine], which are very common in Beijing.  I wanted them to see and experience firsthand the kinds of informal "well being" treatments that the lǎobǎixìng 老百姓 ("common people") indulge in every day, such as foot massage, cupping (báguàn 拔罐), medicinal foot baths, moxibustion, etc.

At a Semantics Workshop in the Rutgers Philosophy Department last weekend, my job was to comment on an excellent paper by Alex Lascarides & Julian Schlöder, "Understanding Focus: Tune, Placement, and Coherence". Here's the opening section of my presentation:

We modulate our linguistic performances in many ways, expressing our state of mind and our attitudes towards the interaction and towards the content of the message.

These modulations include officially phonologized aspects of prosody, like phonological phrasing, pitch accents, and junctural tones.

But they also include local and global modulations of other aspects of pitch, of speaking rate, of voice quality, of gesture, posture, gaze, etc. …and in text, there's layout and typography.

Scholars have recognized for at least a century that English intonation includes elements that are tropic to stress (“pitch accents”), and elements that are tropic to boundaries (“”boundary tones”). Current theory quantizes and phonologizes these elements in a particular way, turning them into tonal symbols that are integrated into phonological representations. There are also obviously many other communicatively-relevant aspects of prosody, which are treated as paralinguistic modulation, or ignored.

But posture, gesture, gaze, etc. include elements that are tropic to stress and elements that are tropic to boundaries. These are not generally quantized or phonologized in current linguistic theory.

Are these the right choices?

Robin Andrews, "Female Dragonflies Fake Their Deaths To Avoid Annoying Males", IFL Science 4/28/2017:

So, you’re in a bar, or on a bus, or grabbing a coffee, something like that – and that guy that kept grinning at you like a deranged werewolf decides to saunter on over, say hello, and strike up a highly unwanted flirtatious conversation. No matter how many hints you drop, he persists in trying to win you over – so what do you do?

Well, you could always take a cue from female dragonflies, who have come up with a rather effective way off putting off overly aggressive male suitors. When push comes to shove, they plummet to the ground, spasm around a bit, then play dead.

Writing in the journal Ecology, Rassim Khelifa – an entomologist from the University of Zurich with a penchant for the hovering critters – describes this as an “extreme sexual conflict resolution,” which we suppose is fair enough. Desperate times call for desperate measures, though.

This video was passed on by Tim Leonard, who remarks, "real-time video translation at its best":

From Clarissa Wei, "The Struggles of Writing About Chinese Food as a Chinese Person", Munchies (4/24/17)

I hold myself to high standards when it comes to writing about Chinese food, yet I live in a world that can be quite insensitive in their approach to the cuisine.

For example, many writers (especially on the East Coast) still use the Wades-Giles spelling of Chinese locations, a phonetic system that was invented by British diplomats Herbert Giles and Thomas Wade. It is a dictionary that is largely outdated and widely inaccurate in its representation of Chinese phonetics. In the Wade-Giles system, Sichuan is Romanized to Szechuan. Nanjing is Nanking. Beijing is called Peking. These writers are the same people who still refer to Guangdong province as Canton.

At Riddled, sometime LLOG commenter Smut Clyde has posted an impressive series of Goofle Translate experiments. You can read them at the links below — I've added locally-stored images, based on previous experience with bit rot as well as recent advice from James Angleton.

"Mayor Snorkum will lay the cake" [Snorkum1]
"Reveal to me the unknown tongue": [UnknownTongue1, UnknownTongue2, UnknownTongue3, UnknownTongue4, UnknownTongue5]
"Go home, Google Translate. You are drunk.": [Lovecraft1, Lovecraft2, Lovecraft3]