Language Log

Thorin Engeseth noticed that, at the end of the Taiwanese video game "Detention", there are some interesting adopted Western names among the people involved in the game's creation — especially Coffee, Finger, and Smiler:

Distinguishing between "four" and "ten" in rapid, slurred Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is not always easy:  sì 四 vs. shí 十.  Try saying sìshísì 四十四 ("forty-four") quickly and it starts to feel like the beginning of a tongue twister.  Now, when speakers from the various topolects, even within the so-called Mandarin group, come together and tones, vowels, and consonants start flying off in all directions, things can become still hairier and sometimes even costly.

At Le Musée des Civilizations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseilles, there's an exposition called "Après Babel, Traduire", which includes a translated version of "The directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibility", 1/15/2009:

From LLOG:	From MuCEM:

In honor of MLK day, I've replicated something that Corey Miller did for a term paper in an introductory phonetics course in the early 1990s. The point of the exercise is that any given speaker can exhibit a wide variety of different pitch ranges. 25 years ago this was a somewhat complicated business, involving digitization of tape recordings, use of expensive high-end computer workstations and so on. Today the whole process from start to end took me less than half an hour, leaving out the time required to write this post. I've put links to the relevant scripts at the end of the post — six lines of shell commands and a dozen lines of R.

Barbara Philips Long writes:

Apple and other autofill writing software have contributed a lot to eggcorns, I suspect. I enjoyed this comment about supply-siders, which called them "supply spiders":

I am now imagining Carl Icahn as a supply spider.

I suspect that Barbara is right to attribute this coinage to someone's autocorrect function, in which case it would be an example of what Ben Zimmer suggested we call a Cupertino ("The Cupertino Effect", 3/9/2006). Of course it might also be a consciously-intended insult.

Patrick Shanley, "'Revenge of the Sith' Dubbed With Bootleg Chinese Dialogue Is a Fan-Made Masterpiece", The Hollywood Reporter 1/3/2017:

YouTuber GratefulDeadpool has done the unthinkable: He's made Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith cool.

Using the original Chinese subtitles, which feature multiple lost-in-translation misinterpretations, GratefulDeadpool redubbed the prequel trilogy's final installment — with hilarious results.

Entitled Backstroke of the West Highlights Part 1 (Star War: The Third Gathers), the recut features such memorable lines as "I has been hating you," from the villainous Count Dooku, and "The front is a lemon avenue flying straightly," spoken by Obi-Wan Kenobi while piloting a careening starship.

Dorkly explains the bizarre translations likely "began with a machine translation of the Chinese script to [Revenge of the Sith], which attempted to literally translate from Mandarin to English, despite the multitude of barriers between the two languages." The end result was great quips, such as "Smelly boy" from General Grievous to Kenobi and "Your dead period arrived, teacher" from a rebellious Anakin Skywalker during his fateful lightsaber duel with his master on Mustafar.

Zhou xiansheng,

You were my dear friend for decades.  I wish that you had gone on living forever.  You will be sorely missed, but yours was a life well lived.

As the "Father of Pinyin", you have had an enormous impact on education and culture in China.  After you passed the century mark, you spoke out courageously in favor of democracy and reform.

Now, one day after your 111th birthday, you have departed, but you will always be in our hearts, brimming with light, as your name suggests.

Tearfully,

Victor

I see this on zdic (online dictionary of Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese) from time to time:

Here's the transcript of that John Lewis exchange w @chucktodd, via @SZilberstein https://t.co/HIFbpKx4WX pic.twitter.com/a8GFM0iMeH

— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) January 13, 2017

Photograph taken by Hervé Guérin in the main lobby of IBM France:

From an anonymous reader, who spotted this photograph on Instagram, where it was posted by nanorie, who has given her permission to repost it:

A friend of mine who does research on the history of tea in China recently shared the following photo in a WeChat group that focuses on Chinese food culture:

For several days I've been aware of a strange poem that has gone viral in China:

"Read The Smog-Inspired Poem That China Can't Stop Talking About" (NPR, 1/12/17)

The strangeness of the poem is due to its being written from the perspective of lung cancer and addressed to the patient.  You judge for yourself — here's the complete poem: