Language Log

The press release is here:

In its 27th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted for dumpster fire as the Word of the Year for 2016. Defined as “an exceedingly disastrous or chaotic situation,” the term dumpster fire was selected as best representing the public discourse and preoccupations of the past year.  

Presiding at the Jan. 6 voting session were ADS Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College and Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. Zimmer is also the language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

LLOG covered "Dumpster fire" a little more than six months ago. Can we repeat-predict the 2017 WOTY? Stay tuned …

It's one thing to lose your first language when you move as a child to another country where a second language is spoken, but it's quite a different matter when you go to another country as an adult and make a conscious choice to give up your native tongue and adopt the language of the place you have chosen to live.

Yiyun Li (b. 1972), the Chinese American author, is such a person.  In some respects, her story of conversion to English reminds me of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), who wrote in English as the natural outgrowth of his cosmopolitan multilingualism, and Ha Jin (b. 1956), who chose English "to preserve the integrity of his work".

Nicola Davis, "Bat chat: machine learning algorithms provide translations for bat squeaks", The Guardian 12/22/2016

It turns out you don’t need to be Dr Doolittle to eavesdrop on arguments in the animal kingdom.  

Researchers studying Egyptian fruit bats say they have found a way to work out who is arguing with whom, what they are squabbling about and can even predict the outcome of a disagreement – all from the bats’ calls.  

“The global quest is to understand where human language comes from. To do this we must study animal communication,” said Yossi Yovel, co-author of the research from Tel Aviv University in Israel. “One of the big questions in animal communication is how much information is conveyed.”

Ad in the Beijing subway:

A readworthy article by Julie Sedivy: "Is the Chinese Language a Superstition Machine?  How similar-sounding words in ambiguous languages may lead to taboos", Nautilus (1/5/17).

David Brooks may be a fantasy-nonfiction author manqué, but Jorge Luis Borges has set a standard in that space that's hard to match. From  "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", in Ficciones:

There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tlön, which is the source of the living language and the dialects; there are impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes which have the force of adverbs. For example, there is no word corresponding to the noun moon, but there is a verb to moon or to moondle. The moon rose over the sea would be written hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or, to put it in order: upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling. (Xul Solar translates it succinctly: upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.)

An excellent article by Lane Greene: "Language: Finding a voice", The Economist 1/5/2017.

Federico Escobar pointed me to an essay by David Brooks, "The 2016 Sidney Awards, Part I", NYT 12/27/2016:

Perry Link once noticed that Chinese writers use more verbs in their sentences whereas English writers use more nouns. For example, in one passage from the 18th-century Chinese novel “Dream of the Red Chamber,” Cao Xueqin uses 130 nouns and 166 verbs. In a similar passage from “Oliver Twist,” Charles Dickens uses 96 nouns and 38 verbs. […]

Link notes that Indo-European languages tend to use nouns even when verbs might be more appropriate. Think of the economic concept inflation. We describe it as a thing we can combat, or whip or fight. But it’s really a process.

Link takes this thought in a very philosophical direction, but it set me wondering how much our thinking is muddled because we describe actions as things. For example, we say someone has knowledge, happiness or faith (a lot of faith or a little faith, a strong faith or a weak faith); but faith, knowledge and happiness are activities, not objects.

Of course I wondered about this, since David Brooks was post-truth before post-truth was cool (see e.g. "Reality v. Brooks", 6/1/2015). And it's likely to puzzle both philosophers and psychologists to be told that they view faith, knowledge, and happiness as objects.

So I went to the cited essay — Perry Link, "The Mind: Less Puzzling in Chinese?", NYRB 6/30/2016.

For some reason, the Chinese have taken to comparing President Elect Trump to a rooster, this year's symbol in the 12-year cycle of the zodiac.

A giant chicken sculpture outside a shopping mall in Taiyuan, north China's
Shanxi province, that looks like US president-elect Donald Trump Getty Images

On Twitter, John Lewis shared a prime example of the perils of global search-and-replace: what happens when "km" gets expanded to "kilometres" in an edition of Trivial Pursuit.

Trivial Pursuit makers change all mentions of "km" to "kilometres" as a universal find and change. Can't see what could go wrong there. pic.twitter.com/956hYeJw3B

— John Lewis (@JohnELewis) January 3, 2017

In several recent posts, I have pointed out how Chinese and Japanese announcements and greetings for foreigners are often pronounced in a special way that deviates markedly from what Chinese and Japanese would say to each other:

• "Tones and the alphabet" (4/27/16) (last three paragraphs)
• "'Ni hao' for foreigners" (10/11/16)
• "Bus announcements in Okinawa" (12/6/16)

Bruce Humes writes:

I noticed this news item today (below) that foresees teaching young South Korean students how to read Chinese characters.

I don’t know Korean, but I’ve always been interested in how Chinese characters are used (or not) in Korean and Japanese. I look forward to the occasional piece in your Language Log, touching on topics such as what the re-emphasis on hanja signifies, why it might “boost understanding of Korean terms,” etc.

Guy Almog sent me this photograph of a detail from a poster that he and I spotted at several places in and around the Haifa subway: