Language Log

I've mentioned my old friend Liu Yongquan in various posts and comments — see, inter alia, here, here, and here, where I wrote:

A colleague, Liu Yongquan 刘永泉, who spent most of his life working in Beijing as an applied linguist (especially concerned with machine translation and computer applications), spoke quite good MSM, referred to people who speak "like that" (as I have described colloquial Pekingese in the above paragraph) as méi xiūyǎng 没修养 ("lacking cultivation"). I'm not sure where Liu originally came from, though I think it was from somewhere in the northeast. He had a curious speech mannerism: whenever he said zhè'er / zhèr 这儿 ("here") and nà'er / nàr ("there"), they always came out as zhèher and nàher. For the first few months when I heard him talk like that, I thought that it was an affectation, but later I heard the same pronunciation from a few other people, so I suppose it has some basis in a regional variety of Mandarin.

Following up on this story, Matt Blaze makes a key point (and see the whole conversation):

(whispers to flight attendant): "I don't want to upset anyone, but I think the man in 15C is modeling credit default swaps".

— matt blaze (@mattblaze) May 7, 2016

Rachel Barney, "[Aristotle], On Trolling", Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5/3/2016:

That trolling is a shameful thing, and that no one of sense would accept to be called ‘troll’, all are agreed; but what trolling is, and how many its species are, and whether there is an excellence of the troll, is unclear. And indeed trolling is said in many ways; for some call ‘troll’ anyone who is abusive on the internet, but this is only the disagreeable person, or in newspaper comments the angry old man. And the one who disagrees loudly on the blog on each occasion is a lover of controversy, or an attention-seeker. And none of these is the troll, or perhaps some are of a mixed type; for there is no art in what they do. (Whether it is possible to troll one's own blog is unclear; for the one who poses divisive questions seems only to seek controversy, and to do so openly; and this is not trolling but rather a kind of clickbait.)

Read the whole thing.

Today's Tank McNamara:

The following photograph of a page of Chinese characters comes from this BuzzFeed article:

"21 Pieces Of Handwriting So Perfect They’re Borderline Erotic" (5/4/16)

The publisher's blurb for the fourth edition of Garner's Modern English Usage introduces a new feature:

With more than a thousand new entries and more than 2,300 word-frequency ratios, the magisterial fourth edition of this book — now renamed Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU)-reflects usage lexicography at its finest. […]

The judgments here are backed up not just by a lifetime of study but also by an empirical grounding in the largest linguistic corpus ever available. In this fourth edition, Garner has made extensive use of corpus linguistics to include ratios of standard terms as compared against variants in modern print sources.

The largest linguistic corpus ever available, of course, is the Google Books ngram collection. And "word-frequency ratio" means, for example, the observations that in pluralizing corpus, corpora outnumbers corpuses by 69:1.

Geoff Hackelford, "Olympic Golf: (Some) 'Powers-That-Be-Whiffed'", 5/6/2016:

But as Marika Washchyshyn writes for Golf, the women's side has a very different view, with not a single player declaring themselves out in spite of the health scare […]

Ron Irving, who sent in the link, notes that themselves is used to refer to an individual (if generic) woman, and adds that "a few years back I would have stared at this sentence in disbelief".

Nathan Hopson spotted this on Facebook:

This headline in yesterday's NYT caught my attention: "Despite His Credentials, Nyquist Has Many Doubters". Of course the story is about Nyquist the Horse, who is named after Nyquist the Hockey Player. But for a moment, I thought it might be about Nyquist the Engineer.

Now, you may not have heard of Nyquist the Engineer, but if you're reading this, then you rely on his work many times a day — every time you use a computer or a phone or a (digital) camera or a monitor, or pretty much any other digital device that interacts with continuous signals in the real world.

At least, you rely on some work that bears his name, the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem. But like Nyquist the Horse, Nyquist the Engineer has some doubters.

Today's Frazz deals with the phenomenon of flapping/voicing in American English:

Back in February, we covered the whole Donald Trump big league → bigly business at length, and if you want details, go read that post: "Bigly", 2/26/2016.

But Trump continues to say things like

And journalists, along with other members of the public, continue to hear him saying "we're going to win bigly" (70,400 hits in today's Google News index…).

[The following is a guest post by Mark Metcalf, a retired Naval officer and adjunct Lecturer in Chinese Literature at the University of Virginia.]

Quick! What does it say?