Language Log

This is NOT a post about misnegation, a frequent topic at Language Log.  This is a reflection on the sublimity of nonnegation, which is not quite the same as transcendental affirmation.  It is a linguistic and philosophical inquiry on the absence of nothingness.

First comes the linguistics; at the end comes the philosophy.

In Mandarin, we have expressions such as the following, where the bù 不 doesn't seem to make any sense in terms of its usual signification — "not":

suānbuliūliūde 酸不溜溜的 ("sourish; quite sour")

A friend of mine who works in the Federal government recently received an email posing this rhetorical question:

How do agencies mitigate risks and achieve FedRAMP compliance in multi-tenant environments to successfully pave their way to the cloud?

He naturally wondered whether there can ever be a paved road leading to a cloud. And I naturally wondered how anyone could get paid for writing jargon-laden garbage as bad as this. We can but wonder.

(I actually live in a multi-tenant environment. It's great; all the other tenants are lovely people. But I'm not sure whether I am FedRAMP-compliant. I hope I am.)

Because I like the Chinese term tǔ 土 ("earth; soil; dirt; ground; earthy; rustic; colloquial") so much, I was going to add the substance of the remarks below as a comment to the "Fun bun pun" (4/9/17) post, in which we devoted a lot of attention to one of my favorite expressions, "tǔbāozi 土包子" ("earthy steamed stuffed bun", i.e., "country bumpkin, hick, rube, clodhopper, backwoodsman, boor, dolt, yokel").  But the ramifications grew to such large proportions that they merited their own post.

We've looked fairly intensively at transcriptions of our new President's name in Chinese and, en passant, in Japanese, Korean, and other languages:

"Trump translated" (8/31/16) — about halfway down in the o.p.

"Transcription of "Barack Obama", "Hillary Clinton", and "Donald Trump" in the Sinosphere" (10/2/16)

"Chinese transcriptions of Donald Trump's surname" (11/23/16)

For those who are interested in how the POTUS's name and surname are rendered in Mongolian scripts, both Cyrillic and traditional Mongolian writing, we now have Bathrobe's post at Spicks & Specks:

"'Donald Trump' in Mongolian" (4/13/17)

Mr John Kelly, an attorney for Melania Trump, reading out a statement concerning why she has just scored nearly $3million in a London libel suit (reported here in The Guardian; I reproduce the use of "right-handed" found in the article, despite its oddness):

The article was illustrated with an old photograph of the claimant standing naked with her front against a wall but her face turned towards the camera. The photograph was prominently displayed and occupied almost the entire right-handed side of page 15. Readers of the newspaper could not fail to miss the article.

But of course Mr Kelly means they could not fail to see it. Or could not possibly miss it. Semantic overnegation again, this time in a prepared statement by an attorney dealing crucially with details of language and meaning. Amazing. But richly documented in scores of previous posts here on Language Log.

During the second half of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first century, Burton Watson translated a wide range of works of premodern Chinese literature into highly readable, reliable English. His numerous published translations span the gamut of Chinese texts from history to poetry, prose, philosophy, and religion.  He was also an accomplished translator from Japanese, especially of poetry and religious literature.

Recently this video, or a link to it, has been showing up on just about every web page I visit:

Just because I haven't written a post about Chinglish for many moons doesn't mean that it has disappeared.  In fact, the following is such a paramount specimen that I would be remiss not to bring it to the attention of Language Log readers.

From C. Grieve (who comments "I'm assuming the restaurant was a greasy spoon . . .") via Elizabeth Barber:

In 1975, Osamu Fujimura hired me as a Member of Technical Staff in his new Linguistics Research Department at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J.  I spent 15 formative years there, and I owe a great deal to the environment that he created.

Jocelyn Ireson-Paine came across the Language Log posts which mention blooming: the increase in size of translated texts. She draws, and this made her think that if line drawing is regarded as translation from an original scene to lines, blooming can occur there too. She has written a brief note on this in "Drawing as Translation".

The essay was inspired partly by Jocelyn's thinking about what she does when she draws, and partly by English lecturer Matthew Reynolds talking about his book Translation: A Very Short Introduction.

This is weird, and even slightly creepy — paste a list of countries like

Costa Rica, Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, France, Germany, England, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Peru, Puerto Rico, Scotland, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay, Venezuela, USA

into Google Translate English-to-Spanish, and a parallel-universe list emerges:

In a long list of LLOG posts over the years, we've observed the widespread (and false) folk-linguistic view that the grammatical term passive means "vague about agency". (You can learn what it really means from Geoff Pullum's 2011 post "The passive in English".)

This confusion arises partly because passive verbs can sometimes be used to sidestep embarrassing questions about agency, as in the famous example "Mistakes were made" — and perhaps also partly because of a broader confusion about "passive" being passive and thus somehow, well, unmanly and generally weak.

But avoiding embarrassing questions about agency is a garden of many paths. And in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN yesterday,  U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley offered a tour of several of them. For example:

The case of activist Gweon Pyeong 권평 / Pyong Kwon / Quan Ping 權平 is now going to trial in China.  Gweon stands accused of wearing a t-shirt with three Xi-themed slogans printed on it:

"T-shirt slogans" (11/7/16)

In this post, I would like to explore in greater depth one of the three slogans, namely "Xí bāozi 習包子" ("steamed, stuffed / filled bun Xi").

In the earlier post, I explained how Xi Jinping acquired that curious nickname.  It's really not that offensive, and it is by no means vulgar.  But just what does it imply to call Xi Jinping, China's supreme leader, a "steamed, stuffed bun"?