Language Log

From Adrienne Mayor:

I am writing about The Dry Tree or Solitary Tree, associated with Alexander the Great in medieval Alexander Romance and in Marco Polo, who located it in Khorasan.

Later, the Bavarian explorer Johannes Schiltberger trekked across Khorasan in about 1405-25 and reported that the Muslims called the tree “Kurrutherek” or “Sirpe,” meanings unknown.

Do the words ring any bells for you?

Could they be transliterated from Persian, Arabic, Turkic, perhaps phonetically?

A recent SMBC strip:

Ken Bensinger, "Ramaswamy Seemed to Call Zelensky a Nazi. His Campaign Says That’s Not What He Meant." NYT 11/8/2023:

A spokeswoman for Mr. Ramaswamy, Tricia McLaughlin, said that he had not called Mr. Zelensky a Nazi. Instead, Ms. McLaughlin said, he was referring to an event in September in which Mr. Zelensky visited Canada’s Parliament and joined a standing ovation honoring a 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian war veteran. The problem, it turned out, was that the veteran, Yaroslav Hunka, had served in a division that was under Nazi control during World War II. […]

But she acknowledged that, without context, the remark could be easily misunderstood. “He was talking quickly and kind of oscillated in his words,” she said.

From the get-go, I'm dubious about any claims that current AI can fully and accurately translate Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic (CC/LS) into Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM), much less English or other language, on a practical, functional basis.  Since the following article is from one of China's official propaganda "news" outlets (China Daily [CD]), the chances that we will get an accurate accounting of the true situation is next to nil anyway.

Language system translates ancient Chinese texts

By Li Wenfang in Guangzhou | China Daily | Updated: 2023-11-03 09:42

It starts out on a sour note:

If foreigners learning Chinese think the modern language is difficult to grasp, they should be glad they don't have to learn classical Chinese. Ancient texts are far more challenging, and not easy for even native Chinese speakers to decipher.

This is a cockamamie approach to the analysis of a written language in its ancient stages.  What is it about ancient classical Chinese texts that makes them so difficult?  How do they differ from modern Chinese texts?  What about their morphology, their grammar, their syntax, their phonology and prosody, their lexicon, their literary allusions…?

A fundamental, fatal flaw in the conceptualization of Sinitic on the part of conservative indigenous scholars is that there are no essential linguistic discrepancies between CC/LS and MSM, only stylistic disparities.

Anyway, for what it's worth, the CD article continues:

From the Korea Times (11/6/23):

Ihn says he was 'very disappointed' after ex-leader Lee spoke to him in English

(Yonhap)

Before you read the article, it's unlikely that you could begin to surmise what the commotion is all about.

The American Korean chief of the ruling People Power Party (PPP)'s innovation committee said Monday he was "very disappointed" that former party leader Lee Jun-seok treated him as a foreigner by speaking to him in English during a weekend event.

Committee Chairman Ihn Yo-han, who was born and raised in Korea, can speak perfect Korean. Still, however, Lee spoke to him in English during an event in the southeastern city of Busan on Saturday in what some critics described as racist behavior.

Ihn, a medical doctor, took over as the PPP's innovation chief in charge of reforms last month. He has since tried to patch up internal feuds in the party, including Lee's badly frayed relations with party leaders close to President Yoon Suk Yeol.

[This is a guest post by David Moser]

Just when you thought CCP propaganda couldn’t get more absurd, China Central Television (CCTV) has aired a short TV series in which Confucius and Karl Marx actually meet up for comradely chat about ideology. In typical fantasy time-travel style, Marx simply appears miraculously at the Yuelu Academy (estab. 976) in Hunan, and is warmly greeted by Confucius to chants of “A friend visiting from afar is a great delight.” (有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎？) The two gray-bearded philosophers then sit down together to discuss how their respective theories seem to merge harmoniously to form an ideal basis for governing China.

This bit of historical cosplay is part of Xi Jinping’s “Soul and Root” (魂和根) propaganda campaign, introducing the notion that Marxism and Confucianism – the “Two Combines” (兩個結合) – must be integrated to form a unified national identity, with Marxism being the “soul” and traditional culture, including Confucianism, being the “root.”

An alternative name for M Hànzì / J Kanji / K Hanja / C hon3 zi6 漢字 ("sinoglyph; Chinese character") is fāngkuàizì 方塊字 ("square shaped character").  I learned that the very first year of my Chinese language studies more than half a century ago.  From kindergarten and elementary school on up, Chinese children learn to practice writing characters with the concept of fāngkuài 方塊 ("square shaped") firmly in mind.  To assist them in that endeavor, they use a zìtiè / zìtiě 字帖 ("copy book") with the squares clearly marked.

In "LOL, ROTFL, IJBO" (11/2/23), all the talk of laughter made me think of the epitome of that particular animal behavior, the hyena.  Of all creatures on earth, the hyena is one of the most curious.  Can you imagine going through life laughing at everything, especially when life is so full of tragedy?

Listen:  here, here, here, and there are many other videos and audios of laughing hyenas online.

Hyenas are not members of the dog or cat families. Instead, they are so unique that they have a family all their own, Hyaenidae. There are four members of the Hyaenidae family: the striped hyena, the “giggly” spotted hyena, the brown hyena, and the aardwolf (it's a hyena, not a wolf).

(San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance)

Sign on a truck in Hong Kong:

King’s English and Cockney replaced by three new accents, study finds

Britons depart from overtly class-based post-war speech epitomised by either clipped vowels or working-class dialects

I vaguely recall an earlier study from about ten years ago that came to similar conclusions (including the emergence of a "multicultural" accent).  It's not surprising that differences would gradually diminish, especially under the influence of enhanced, pervasive mass communications and increased population mobility.

What we see, though, is that, as the older, established accents wither away, new ones arise among various shifting cultural, ethnic, and social regroupings.

Remember the Valley Girl accent, which people used to talk about a lot ten or twenty years ago?  Where is it now?

Many people have the (mis)perception that the French (mis)pronounce all languages with a heavy accent.  It turns out that the gold standard for correct pronunciation of borrowed words is a French gentilhomme /ʒɑ̃.ti.jɔm/.

How to Pronounce the Trickiest English Words: Ask This Frenchman

Millions of Americans, the curious and the insecure, consult Julien Miquel for help with words such as Worcestershire, macabre, and Siobhan

By Joe Pinsker
WSJ, Oct. 30, 2023

Read / listen to this article.  You're in for une gâterie.

———

No, not what you get by asking GPT-4 for insults — for that, see below…
This is the SMBC comic from a few days ago:

Dan Nosowitz, "The ‘Crispy R’ and Why R Is the Weirdest Letter", Atlas Obscura 11/2/2023:

The crispy R is a phenomenon that some linguists had noticed, but which had gone largely unstudied—until the phrase “crispy R” was bestowed on it by Brian Michael Firkus, better known as Trixie Mattel, the winner of the third season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, and later popularized via TikTok. The sound is easier to point out than it is to either describe or reproduce. Some of the most frequent users of this unusual-sounding R include Kourtney Kardashian, Max Greenfield of New Girl fame, Stassi from Vanderpump Rules, and Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend. It sounds, to me at least, like a sort of elongated, curled sound, a laconic way of saying R.