Language Log

Our Language Log post on "Kanji of the year 2014", zei 税 ("tax"), was rather extensive, so it should suffice to give an indication of how the selection is made and the nature of the ritual surrounding the public unveiling of the choice.  I won't attempt to duplicate such a full treatment for the kanji that was chosen this year, but will focus on a significant difference between last year's KOTY and this year's.  For additional information concerning this year's selection, I recommend reading this report:

"2015 Kanji of the Year: 'An' Juxtaposes Security and Unease" (12/15/15)

My sources say that Elsevier is now actively trying to recruit scholars for the editorial team of Zombie Lingua (see these Language Log posts for the background: "Lingua is dead. Long live Glossa!", Lingua Disinformation"). Here's a redacted sample of what they are sending to people:

Subject: Editorial Position Opportunity

Dear Professor […]

First please let me introduce myself as the […] at Elsevier responsible for the Social Science Journals, including our Linguistics portfolio.

I hope you do not mind me contacting you out of the blue like this, but as you may be aware we are currently looking for a new editorial team to head up the journal, Lingua. In discussions regarding this your name was suggested as a potential candidate to be part of this team. If this is something you would be interested in considering and would like to discuss this further, with no obligations, then please let me know. I would be more than happy to provide more details of the role and responsibilities.

Thank you for your time in considering this proposal. I look forward to your reply and hope to discuss this further with you in the near future.

Best regards […]

Needless to say, I'm hoping that the community is sufficiently immunized by now and that Elsevier will fail to attract linguists to stand up a zombie version of Lingua, which would not have any legitimacy as a successor to the journal's proud tradition. The true successor to Lingua is Glossa.

By the way: Glossa is now open for business. The first few submissions have already been made.

I'm in Frankfurt for a week, and a stroll through the Weihnachtsmarkt last night with Caroline Féry and Ede Zimmermann reminded me of something I've wondered about for a long time: Why was German Brezel borrowed into English with an initial 'p'?

Bill Walsh, the keeper of the Washington Post's style manual, buries the lede in "The Post drops the ‘mike’ — and the hyphen in ‘e-mail’", 12/4/2015. After 16 paragraphs about mic, email, and Walmart, he finally gets to the most important part, namely the "cautious" adoption of singular they, both for "gender-nonconforming" people and for "those he or she situations that have troubled us for so many years":

I was a little surprised that the singular they has drawn stronger online reaction, both positive and negative, than the other style changes, especially because we are approaching it pretty cautiously. The stylebook entry retains the old advice to try to write around the problem, perhaps by changing singulars to plurals, before using the singular they as a last resort.

Bruce Balden was curious as to why the Chinese terms for "fire department" (xiāofáng duì 消防队) and "firefighting" (xiāofáng 消防) do not have the word for "fire" (huǒ 火) in them.  I had thought about that long ago, but never made an attempt to determine why it is so.  Now that Bruce has brought up this issue directly, I am curious how true it is for other languages of the world as well.

For East Asia, since Japan also uses the same expression (shōbō 消 防), it became a question of determining whether the modern terminology for firefighting developed first in China or in Japan.

Faith Jones writes:

I live in Canada, where even our Prime Minister goes canoeing and snowshoeing and stuff, so when I saw this headline on the CBC:

… I assumed the Finance Minister was hiking down an actual mountain somewhere in or around Ottawa. Then I got to "payment" and, because of my previous confusion, I still had it in my mind that the verb was "hikes down" but now I thought it was meant metaphorically, and tried to figure out what these "payment rules" were and what "hiking down" such a rule would entail.

Yeah. Minister Morneau has increased the minimum DOWN PAYMENT needed on houses over $500,000. Took me a good minute and a half to get there.

From the article "Trump brushes off widespread backlash" by Paul Koring, The Globe and Mail (Ontario Edition), Dec. 9, 2015, p. A13:

And the inevitable correction (The Globe and Mail, Dec. 11, 2015, p. A2):

Ryan Kilpatrick has an interesting article in Hong Kong Free Press:

"Taiwan city promises to ‘correct’ simplified road sign after public outcry" (12/7/15)

It includes this photograph, which illustrates some of the problems:

Don Clarke spotted this suspiciously named dish at the Diàoyútái dà jiǔdiàn 钓鱼台大酒店 (Diaoyutai Hotel) in Beijing on 12/9/15:

Dyami Hayes writes to point out that there has been a change over the past century in the relative popularity (at least in printed text) of constructions like these:

What this book sets out to do is to provide some tools, ideas and suggestions for tackling non-verbal reasoning questions.

What it attempts to do is provide a framework for understanding how local governments are organized.

The Google Books ngram plots for provide, look, tell, and say show similar patterns — or summed for those four verbs (with the to do is VERB version in red and the to do is to VERB version in blue):

Appearing in The Paris Review, Winter 2015:

From “A New English Grammar”

Jeff Dolven

Yesterday I explained why the long-tailed ("Zipf's Law") distribution of word frequencies makes it almost impossible to estimate vocabulary size by counting word types in samples of writing or speaking ("Why estimating vocabulary size by counting words is (nearly) impossible"). In a comment on that post, "flow" suggested that similar problems might afflict attempts to estimate vocabulary size by checking someone's knowledge of random samples from a dictionary.

But in fact this worry is groundless. There are many problems with the method — especially defining the list to sample from, and defining what counts as "knowing" an item in the sample — but the nature of word-frequency distributions is not one of them.

After Tim Friese's comment at the end of our last post on Daesh, I almost didn't want to think about the word again, much less write about it.  But then I came across this article by Matthew Weaver in The Guardian:

"Syria debate: the linguistic battle over what to call Islamic State.  David Cameron has started calling the group Daesh – a name based on a derogatory Arabic acronym – leading to heated exchanges among MPs" (12/2/15)