Language Log

The opening phrase of Donald Trump's speech in Mannheim PA, 10/1/2016, was sung on a single well-controlled pitch:

The fundamental frequency of this monotone chant is about 238 Hz, to which the closest tempered pitch class, at concert A=440, would be the B flat below middle C at 233 Hz. And the next phrase is about a semitone lower, at about 218 Hz, pretty close to A 220:

I haven't heard this type of chanting before from Mr. Trump, or indeed from any other political figure. (But see "Trump's prosody", 8/8/2016, for a different sort of sing-song delivery…)

How do you write Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump's names in Chinese?

As it turns out, the answer may vary depending on whether the person you ask is from mainland China (ZH-CN), Hong Kong (ZH-HK), Macau (ZH-MO), Malaysia/Singapore (ZH-SG), or Taiwan (ZH-TW).

Alex Kantrowitz, "Racist Social Media users Have A New Code To Avoid Censorship", BuzzFeed 10/1/2016:

Racist online communities have developed a new code for racial, homophobic and bigoted slurs in an attempt avoid censorship.

The code, using terms like Google, Skittle, and Yahoo as substitutes for offensive words describing blacks, Muslims and Mexicans, appears to be in use by various accounts on Twitter and elsewhere.

Good morning. Your Republican nominee has been up all night rage-tweeting. pic.twitter.com/mL1ovBY1bm

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) September 30, 2016

I'll leave the psychology and politics of rage-tweeting to others — my concern is its morphology.

Anne Henochowicz found this on the menu at Panda Gourmet, an incredible dìdào 地道 ("typical; authentic") Shaanxi restaurant in a Days Inn on the outskirts of DC:

Yesterday, Roger Lustig sent in a snapshot of the front page of the Princeton Packet, with the observation that

Maybe free speech, even the political kind, is in greater danger than we thought!

The online version of the headline is much longer, and not ambiguous in the same way: Philip Sean Curran, "PRINCETON: Police chief resists renewed calls to stop random license plate checks, focus more on speeding", The Princeton Packet 9/28/2016.

To access an article in the Financial Times yesterday I found myself confronted with a short market-research survey about laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Answer three our four layers of click-the-box questions, and I could get free access to the article I wanted to look at. A reasonable bargain: clearly some company was prepared to pay the FT for access to its online readers' opinions. And at the fourth layer down I faced a question which asked me to choose a single word that comes into my mind when I think of a certain Microsoft product.

My choice, from all the tens of thousands of words at my disposal, and the word I picked would go straight into the market research department of the one corporation, above all others, for whose products I have the greatest degree of contempt. Just choose that one evocative word and type it in, and I would be through to my article. A free choice. Which word to pick?

Tim Leonard points out that today's Questionable Content has a piece of dialogue in which their (in "their ship"), though referring to a male individual, could not felicitously be exchanged for his:

A couple of days ago, in a café in Paris,  someone noticed a young woman intently watching the Clinton/Trump debate, and commented "Isn't watching the debate so much better than working?" But the debate watcher was Ye Tian, a postdoc at the Laboratoire de linguistique formelle, Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7), part of a project whose acronym is DUEL — "Disfluencies, Exclamations and Laughter in Dialogue". And so her interest in the video was a professional one, with preliminary results that she published as a blog post here. Ye Tian's analysis is reproduced below, with her permission, as a guest post.

[This is a joint post by Eric Baković and Kai von Fintel, cross-posted at Kai's blog.]

We have been following an ongoing story involving Zombie Lingua with great interest. For those unaware of it, and perhaps for those with only some awareness of it, here is what we currently know.

It will help to start by identifying the main characters in this story:

• Islam Youssef, Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University College of Southeast Norway,
• Zombie Lingua, the illegitimate continuation of the journal Lingua that Elsevier has propped up after Lingua's entire editorial team left to start the fair open access journal Glossa (in case you missed it, or need a refresher, see our first joint post with the story), and
• Bassil Mashaqba and Anas Huneety, both of the Department of English Language and Literature at The Hashemite University in Jordan (and both of whom received their PhD from the University of Salford).

OK, here we go.

Drawn by a seven year old in Los Angeles:

Yesterday, Buzzfeed published an article titled "This Woman Ate A Pork Bun In A Typhoon And Now Everyone Loves Her" (9/28/16).  It featured this drawing:

A little over a year ago, we had our first look at "Konglish", Korean-style English.  If it was thriving then, it seems to be positively luxuriant now:

"The Beauty and Perils of Konglish, the Korean-English Hybrid" (Margaret Rhodes, WIRED, 9/29/16)