Language Log

An amusing "Anglo-EU Translation Guide" has been circulating widely in recent weeks. This seems to come from the same source as an old Economist column ("I understand, up to a point", 9/2/2004; discussed here), which attributed the joke to "the Dutch, trying to do business with the British", and which also gave some examples from a list "written by British diplomats, as a guide to the language used by their French counterparts".

To say the least, I was perplexed when a book that I co-edited with Mark Bender was described thus on Tao Blog:

In The river Anthology of Asiatic Folk and Popular Literature, digit of the world’s directive sinologists, Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender, getting the dimension of China’s oral-based literate heritage. This assemblage presents entireness worn from the super embody of test literature of some of China’s constituted social groups — including the Han, Yi, Miao, Tu, Daur, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Kazak — and the selections allow a difference of genres. Chapters counterbalance sept stories, songs, rituals, and drama, as substantially as poem traditions and professed storytelling, and feature both old and little-known texts, from the news of the blackamoor warrior Hua Mulan to the fuck stories of cityfied storytellers in the Yangtze delta, the priest rituals of the Manchu, and a hoaxer tale of the Daur grouping from the forests of the northeast. The Cannibal Grandmother of the Yi and another strange creatures and characters unsettle acknowledged notions of Asiatic story and literate form. Readers are introduced to phrase songs of the Tai and the Dong, who springy among the strange limestone hills of the Guangxi Tai Autonomous Region; impact and matchmaking songs of the mountain-dwelling She of Fujian province; and water songs of the Cantonese-speaking dish grouping of Hong Kong. The editors feature the Altaic poem poems of Geser Khan and Jangar; the depressing tale of the Qeo kinsfolk girl, from the Tu grouping of state and Qinghai provinces; and topical plays famous as “rice sprouts” from Hopeh province. These fascinating juxtapositions elicit comparisons among cultures, styles, and genres, and proficient translations preserves the individualist case of apiece thrillingly creative work.

The following is a letter written by Ives Goddard and Bruno Frohlich of the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution in response to the paper by Q. D. Atkinson claiming that the distribution of speech sounds in the world's languages demonstrates a single point of origin for human languages in Africa. Mark discussed this paper here. The letter was submitted to Science, which declined to publish it.

Today's Doonesbury:

Recently, the media have been bombarding us with stories about Harold Camping's calculations that the end of the world will start tomorrow: Ashley Parker, "Make My Bed? But You Say the World’s Ending", NYT 5/19/2011; Mark Washburn, "With Rapture at hand, why bother flossing?", The Charlotte Observer, 5/20/2011; Abby Sewell, "Entreprenuers offer post-'rapture' services", L.A. Times 5/19/2011; David Barnett, "Apocalypse now? Christian Rapture fiction and the end of the world", 5/20/2001; etc.

But this being Language Log rather than Eschatology Log, my interest this morning is in the word rapture and in various associated verbs, such as rapted and raptured. Somewhat to my surprise, it appears that the sense glossed by the OED as "A state, condition, or fit of intense delight or enthusiasm" is a couple of centuries older than the sense glossed as "the transport of believers to heaven at the Second Coming of Christ".

In commenting on language hat's link to Victor Mair's post on a "Nontrivial script fail" in Chinese, Vanya wrote:

Do we English or French speakers really suffer compared to Spanish or Turkish speakers because our writing system is far more illogical? Recent economic and cultural history might suggest otherwise. Look at all the waste and nonsense around the German spelling reforms – whose life has improved because of it? China seems to be doing pretty well right now, so what's the issue?

And many of the comments on Victor's post itself expressed similar sentiments; thus Rivers4:

Gosh, how will China ever become the world's second largest economy with such a cumbersome an inefficient writing system?

Oh, wait…

The big news in Beijing last week was the theft of millions of dollars worth of artwork from the heavily guarded Forbidden City.  The Telegraph reported that "The seven stolen items had come from a temporary exhibition of early 20th century Chinese furniture, jewellery boxes and bags from the collections of the privately-run Liangyicang Museum in Hong Kong."

According to the BBC, "The Beijing News reported that the Hong Kong museum had not insured the items for as much as it could have because it believed they would be safe in Beijing."

The daring theft occurred during the wee hours of the morning on Monday the 9th.  By Wednesday night, Beijing police announced that they had apprehended a person whom they declared was the suspected culprit and had recovered most of the missing objects.

While there was much hand-wringing and soul-searching over how such a brazen robbery could have occurred under the very noses and cameras of the massive security apparatus inside of the Forbidden City, the real fun began after the apprehension of the suspected criminal, and it has a cause that is rooted in the misuse of characters.

Chris Dammers writes to point out a classic British headline noun pile-up on the BBC's news index page, "Sack rape row Clarke – Miliband":

We have recently encountered an "Epic Dictionary Fail". Today, I should like to consider what happens when a script fails.

Catherine Saint Louis, "Dessert, Laid-Back and Legal", NYT 5/14/2011:

Remember melatonin? In the 1990s, this over-the-counter dietary supplement was all the rage among frequent fliers, promoted as the miracle cure for jet lag. Now it is back in vogue, this time as a prominent ingredient in at least a half-dozen baked goods that flagrantly mimic the soothing effects of hash brownies — and do so legally. At least for now. […]

“A hangover effect has been reported” with large doses, said Anna Rouse Dulaney, a toxicologist with the Carolinas Poison Center. But she added, “I don’t want to go on the record saying this drug ‘can’ cause respiratory issues, that should be a ‘may.’ ”

Sometimes life is bitter, and the heart is grieving, and the onward path is stony, and a person needs an opportunity to giggle at something really silly; and I want to recommend a glance at the Wikipedia article on toilets. It begins by patiently explaining that a toilet is "a plumbing fixture primarily intended for the disposal of human excreta: urine and fecal matter", and noting that in addition "vomit and menstrual waste are sometimes disposed of in toilets in some societies". And at present there is a box at the top of the article containing the following message:

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.

In the comments on various recent LL posts, someone using various names has been complaining repeatedly and at length about "Linguistic Post-Modernists" who allegedly believe that "there is no such thing as a 'wrong' usage, only nonstandard ones", and so on.

Since the associated set of confusions is all too common, I've collected below a list of some past posts that address it. I also recommend Geoff Pullum's 2004 address to the MLA, "Ideology, Power, and Linguistic Theory".

Yesterday's SAT "question of the day":

On my own blog, a (lightly annotated) inventory of linguablogs and other web resources on linguistics (very far from exhaustive), here. Much of it based on LLog's blogroll.