Language Log

At least they're new for me.

I'm always learning new expressions, constructions, usages, etc. in Chinese.  The Sinitic languages are changing so rapidly that it is a heady experience trying to keep up with them.  The two new Mandarin words I just learned are good examples of the kinds of transformations that are constantly taking place in Chinese.

Amy Stoller is a dialect coach operating out of New York City, known among many other things for her work with Anna Deavere Smith.

This valuable advice is from her November newsletter — reprinted with permission.

From Chris Cooper:

I was intrigued by this construction, which I'd never come across before. From the explanation of the German word "Bummel" in Jerome K Jerome's comic novel Three Men On The Bummel:

A 'Bummel', I explained, I should describe as a journey, long or short, without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started. Sometimes it is through busy streets, and sometimes through the fields and lanes; sometimes we can be spared for a few hours, and sometimes for a few days. But long or short, but here or there, our thoughts are ever on the running of the sand. […]

It was the repetition of "but" in the last quoted sentence that struck me – I've never seen this elsewhere. It reminds me of the constructions

whether long or short, whether here or there …

and the obsolete

nor long nor short,

(I can't think of any real-life examples of the latter, but I'm sure it was once common, at least in poetry.)

During the last few days, there has been a flurry of excitement over the circulation of photographs and information concerning an old Chinese textbook for learning English.  Here are a couple of pages from the book (click to embiggen):

We have looked at the Chinese typewriter again and again:

"Chinese Typewriter" (6/30/09)

"Chinese typewriter, part 2" (4/17/11)

"Chinese character inputting" (10/17/15)

By now we are thoroughly familiar with this unwieldy contraption.  Given that it has long since been consigned to the museum, where it properly belongs, it is strange that some folks continue to tout it as the wave of the future in information processing.

Inspired by "Trumpchant in B flat", Joel Roston sent me a link to his 1/22/2014 post "How's Carl this time?", where he proposes that

As the excitement builds over the course of each hour-long Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! episode, Carl Kasell’s exclamation of the last two syllables of the word “Chicago,” commensurately, rises in pitch.

This is an example of Carl Kasel's performance of  the word "Chicago", in the context of the obligatory periodic station identification in the cited show:

And here are the 30 instances of "…cago" that Joel investigated — six station breaks from each of five shows:

The United States of America and Great Britain / United Kingdom are not the only countries in the midst of political crises.  South Korea has a nasty one of its own involving the undue influence of a shamaness over their President.

"Tens of Thousands Call on South Korea's President to Quit" (ABC News, 11/5/16)

The other day, someone asked me about the claim that "a whopping 78 percent of the words that Trump uses are monosyllabic".

We've previously debunked the idea that Trump's speeches aim at a fourth-grade reading level ("More Flesch-Kincaid grade level nonsense", 10/23/2015).

And long ago, we took aim at careless assertions about how young people/media/txting/etc. are degrading the language to the point that "the top 20 words used … account for a third of all words": "Britain's scientists risk becoming hypocritical laughing stocks, research suggests", 12/16/2006; "Only 20 words for a third of what they say: A replication", 12/16/2006; "Vicky Pollard's revenge", 1/2/2007.

So here's a quick evaluation of that "78 percent" claim.

From P.S.:

Helen Wang writes:

I have a question – what's the etymology of the English word "mouthfeel"? In the last few weeks in the UK I have heard the word "mouthfeel" several times, spoken very naturally as though it's an established English word. I was surprised because I remember kǒugǎn 口感 (lit. "mouth-feel") as being "untranslatable" or an "awkward translation". So I looked up "mouthfeel" online to see when this direct translation made its way into English. It even has a Wikipedia entry! But no mention of kǒugǎn 口感 or any etymology. It seems to have just appeared in English – earliest usage in the 1930s.  See The Big Apple, "Mouthfeel" (4/10/12) by Barry Popik.

So I tried looking up kǒugǎn 口感 in Chinese and found it was not as ubiquitous as I'd remembered. My very quick and basic search gave the impression that kǒugǎn 口感 might be a translated term in Chinese, most examples being related to drinks such as wine or tea. I wondered if you knew more?

Laura Ellis, "Why Go There? A Linguist Dissects Jim Gray’s ‘Wild-Ass’ Zinger", WFPL 11/1/2016:

Kentucky U.S. Senator Rand Paul and his opponent, Lexington Mayor Jim Gray squared off Tuesday night in their only face-to-face debate of the election season. For an hour, they talked about the future of coal, Kentucky’s heroin problem, and more.

But it was one particular turn of phrase, used by Gray, that caught people’s ears. It includes a word for the human posterior.

What Jim Gray said:

He wants us to believe
that his wild-assed theories and philosophies
are the remedies for everything

Via Jason Cox, a Facebook post by Pochung Pektiong Chen:

Brendan O'Leary, "The Dalriada Document: Towards a Multinational Compromise that Respects Democratic Diversity in the United Kingdom", The Political Quarterly 10/27/2016:

Words and abbreviations matter, especially when they mislead. Brexit cannot and will not happen because ‘Britain’, a geographical expression, is not a polity, a sovereign state or a member state of the European Union, and cannot exit from any political organisation, let alone the European Union. The new Prime Minister Theresa May's early insistence that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ was not only a tautology which disguised her cabinet's indecision about what exit might mean, but was also nonsensical because the portmanteau has no political referent.

To insist that Ukexit rather than Brexit is the correct word for the phenomenon that may unfold is not pedantic or professorial quibbling. ‘Britain’ is inaccurate shorthand for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—for which more appropriate abbreviations are either the United Kingdom or the UK (UKGB & NI is an impossible mouthful). To use Brexit does verbal violence to the nature of the UK, which is a double union-state, not a British nation-state. It is tiresome to remind British people that Britain is not greater than Great Britain, and that Great Britain is part of the UK, not its entirety: tiresome but necessary.