Language Log

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]

Ordan Buckley asked:

I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the slangy headline trend "X because of course X". Some examples:

World's largest Lamborghini dealer is in Dubai, because of course it is
Rob Gronkowski crashes Sean Spicer's briefing because of course he did
Seattle just broke a 122-year-old record for rain — because of course it did
Google Daydream doesn’t work on the Galaxy S8 because of course it doesn’t

My wife had an aversion to the first person pronoun.  She would do practically anything to avoid saying "I".  She thought it was egotistical to make frequent, direct reference to herself, whether in speech or in writing.  Among traditional Chinese, she probably was not entirely unique in that regard, but she was extreme in her first person avoidance, and it was through her that I became aware of the lengths to which someone might go to keep from saying "I".

I do not fully comprehend the psychological reasons why some people shy away from use of the first person pronoun, but my sense is that it has to do with not wanting to be assertive.

One more piece of Google Translate poetry, contributed by Mackenzie Morris:

My wife and I used to have a private language that was full of bilingual, cryptic references such as the following:

Yáo Shùn Yǔ 尧舜禹 (the names of three ancient, wise, Chinese rulers) || sānmíngzhì 三明治 ("three wise rulers"), the Chinese transcription of English "sandwich".

Thus, if we wished to ask each other, "Do you want to eat a sandwich?", we might say "Nǐ yào bùyào chī yī ge Yáo Shùn Yǔ? 你要不要吃一个尧舜禹?".  That sort of word play was usually just for fun or to avoid a word that was transcribed into Mandarin from some other language.