Language Log

[This is a guest post by German Dziebel, commenting on "PIE *gene- *gwen-" (8/10/23).]

I will strike a dissenting note here. The two roots in question – *g’enH1 and *gʷenH2 are likely cognates. There seems to be a non-random distribution of palatalized and labialized velars in IE stems with nasals – palatovelars are favored in stems with m, while labiovelars are favored in stems with n. E.g.,

nGʷ roots: *nogʷno- 'naked', *nogʷt- 'night', *snoigʷho- 'snow', *h₂ongʷo- 'anoint', *h1ngwni- 'fire', *negʷhro- 'kidney', *gʷenh₂ 'wife', *kʷoino- 'price', *penkʷe- '5', *h₁lengʷʰ- 'light', *gʷʰen- 'slay, strike', *sengʷh- 'sing', *neigʷ- 'wash' 

vs.

mG'-roots: *H3moiǵhlo- (assimilated to njegull(ë) in Gheg Alb), *meǵh₂s 'great', *meh₂ǵ- 'smear, anoint', *ǵheyōm 'winter', *dheǵhōm 'earth', *ḱoimo- 'household, family', *mreǵh-, *mosgho- 'brain', *h₂melǵ- 'milk', *smeḱur 'chin, beard', *deḱm̥ '10', *h1ḱm̥tóm '100' *h₂émǵʰu- 'narrow' (Hitt hamenk- 'tie, bind').

"Turkey’s döner kebab spat with Germany is turning nasty", by Daniel Thorpe, The Spectator (10/5/24)

Last April, German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier decided to bring along a 60-kilogram döner kebab on his state visit to Turkey. It did not go down well. Turks found the stunt condescending; Germans were mortified. Ankara lodged an official request with the European Commission to make the dish a ‘traditional speciality’, thereby regulating what can be sold under the name ‘döner’ in Europe.

The use of the word lost in this recent story caught my attention — Pankaj Doval, "Google set to revive lost Indian languages", The Times of India 10/3/2024:

As it gets deeper into India with generative AI platform Gemini and other suite of digital offerings, Google has taken up a new task in hand – reviving some of the lost Indian languages and creating digital records and online footprint for them.

I'll say more later about Google's important and interesting contribution to an important and interesting problem. But first, what does the article mean by "lost Indian languages"? I started from the idea that languages that are "lost" are extinct, i.e. no longer spoken — and a web search for the phrase "lost languages" confirms that others have the same interpretation.

However, the Times of India article makes it clear that this is not what they mean:

The idea is to enable people to easily carry out voice or text searches in their local dialects and languages.

As the work moves towards completion, people in the hinterland and various regions can easily do voice search in their own languages to gain accurate and valuable information from, say, Google's Gemini AI platform or carry out live translations, harness YouTube better to target their communities.

The project has so far reached 59 Indian languages, including 15 that currently do not have any kind of a digital footprint and were rather declining in usage.

The project has so far reached 59 Indian languages, including 15 that currently do not have any kind of a digital footprint and were rather declining in usage.

Great piece on the materiality of language. Part of the difficulty in implementing jiantizi in Singapore was just this: for example, in 1983, years after Singapore had begun introducing jianti, the limited availability of type meant that only 70% of publishers used them. https://t.co/GB9JxiI2wD

— Chien-Wen Kung 龔建文 (@kchienw) October 4, 2024

I'll be right up front by saying that I always spell the name as "Uyghur" because doing so helps me pronounce the name more like the way the Uyghurs themselves say their ethnonym.  If I spell the name as "Uygur", it has more of a tendency to come out sounding like a slur on an American ethnic group.

"EXPLAINED: What’s the controversy over ‘Uygur’ vs ‘Uyghur’?  Beijing’s use of the former ignores Uyghurs’ preference and aims to sow division: experts" By Kurban Niyaz for RFA Uyghur (2024.09.10)

Recently, a China-based New Zealander who’s a columnist for the Shanghai Daily generated a stir when he declared on X that “Uyghur” — referring to the 12 million-strong ethnic group living in northwestern China — should be spelled in English without an “h.”

Andy Boreham, who has a history of using his social media platforms to propagate Beijing’s political messages, says the word should be spelled “Uygur,” per a Chinese government directive back in 2012.

Google has created an experimental — and free — system called NotebookLM. Here's its current welcome page:

[This is a guest post from Mok LIng*.  Asterisked notes by VHM are given below.]

Since October is the month of Halloween**, I figured I'd share an appropriately macabre folk etymology.

The New York Review of Books recently spammed me with an email that led off like this:

I received a communication with that at the top.  I had never seen it before and had no idea what it meant.  So I looked it up, and this is what I found on Wiktionary:

Phrase

B"H

1. 1. (Judaism) b'ezrat hashem (Transliterated form of ב״ה, written at the top of documents).

“With the Help of God.” A common phrase used by Jews and non-Jews when hoping for good fortune and God’s support for a better tomorrow.

1. 1. (Judaism) baruch Hashem

As the name of a constituent college of the City University of New York system and the financier-statesman whom it honors, "baruch" is fairly well known in English, though not many non-Jews would realize that it means "blessed".  "B'ezrat" is not so well known in English; it means "help".

Hashem (Hebrew: הַשֵּׁם⁩‎ haššēm, literally "the name"; often abbreviated to ה׳‎ [h′]) is a title used in Judaism to refer to God.  (Wikipedia)

With conflict in the Middle East intensifying, I can understand why people might be prompted to use this expression, B"H, now.

I downloaded rev.com's transcript of last night's vice-presidential debate, and did a bit of analysis — the most interesting stuff will come later, but to start with I did a couple of my standard simple-minded analyses, starting with the type-token plots:

A relative's new refrigerator magnet:

These are two premodern words for Chinese watercraft that have worked their way into the English lexicon.  Their etymology, however, is not as straightforward as it might seem.

"Language Matters | Where did English get the words ‘sampan’ and ‘junk’ from? Probably Cantonese and Javanese:  Scholars are split on the roots of ‘sampan’ and ‘junk’, with some pointing to Chinese and others to Old Malay and Javanese respectively", by Lisa Lim, SCMP (9/30/24)

Sampans – typically small, light, wooden boats with a relatively flat bottom, propelled by a pole, oars, or a single long stern sculling oar – have a long history in East and Southeast Asian coastal and river waters.

Usually open, with a shelter aft, they were – and still are – used as a means of transporting passengers and goods over short distances; fishing; or to get to larger vessels out at sea. They also constituted homes for sea-dwelling communities, including the Tanka or Séuiseuhngyàn “people born on or of the water”, of coastal southern China and Hong Kong and Macau.

A recent email from Jean Gallier to the members of Penn's Department of Computer and Information Sciences included this picture

…under the comment "Apparently the Greeks had already figured that there was a connection between wine and linear algebra." The connection to Linear A(lgebra) is provided by Jean's two-volume 2020 book Linear Algebra and Optimization with Applications to Machine Learning.