Language Log

Dean Barrett sent in this thought for the day from Yunnan Province:

The English rendering of the Chinese sign sounds somewhat profound and even poetic, but what does it really mean?

Yesterday's Beetle Bailey, pointed out by Karen Davis:

[Update: a memorial page for Bill, to which people can contribute thoughts, pictures, etc., can be found here.]

It saddens me greatly to report that William F. Shipley passed away on January 20, 2011. He was 89 years old. Bill was my first linguistics professor, my first advisor and mentor, my first academic collaborator, and my dear, dear friend. I already miss him more than I am able to put into words.

Bill completed his dissertation under the direction of Mary Haas at UC Berkeley in 1959, a grammar of the Native California language Maidu (published in the University of California Publications in Linguistics series in 1964, with a dictionary and texts published in 1963). In 1966, he left an appointment at Berkeley to be among the very first faculty to participate in the big experiment that UC Santa Cruz was at the time, and he retired from UCSC in 1991.

William Page, in his comment on "Happy New Year Rabbit You," correctly informs us that it is au courant to refer to gay men as "rabbits" (tùzǐ 兔子).  As for why gay men are referred to as "rabbits," this custom is said to have its basis in "Tale of the Rabbit God," about a deity who protected homosexuals, from Zǐbùyǔ 子不語 (What the Master [i.e., Confucius] Did Not Talk About), an old collection of strange stories by the famous Qing Dynasty author, Yuan Mei (1716-1797).  There are other speculations about the origins of using tùzǐ 兔子 ("rabbit") to refer to male homosexuals, but none of them seems as convincing to me as the one I have just offered.

There are many related terms, such as tùerye 兔兒爺 ("wabbit dad"), which refers to a gay. And tù bǎobǎo 兔寶寶 ("bunny darling / precious") refers to someone who is the girl boy in a gay relationship.

In the latest Tom The Dancing Bug:

All you whomophiles who were outraged by last month's casual reference to the death of whom, your day joke has come!

As my friends and acquaintances know, I'm a rather unreliable correspondent. I write a lot of messages, and I make a lot of phone calls, but the list of messages and calls that I ought to make always grows larger.  In fact, there seems to be a sort of positive feedback principle at work, whereby every time I discharge a communicative obligation, that very action somehow pushes several new tasks onto the stack. A similar problem afflicts my To Blog list, which reliably expands in direct proportion to my attempts to reduce it. No doubt I'm Doing It Wrong.

A few days ago, Michael Ramscar sent me a fascinating series of email messages, in which he wove together several recent LL themes:  coffee cup sizes, difficulties with multiple negation, word order typology, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. My contribution was limited to various forms of "you don't say!" and "tell me more", so I proposed, with his permission, to edit his emails together into a guest post.

But this morning, when I searched my email archive for the messages in question, I discovered a much earlier note from Michael that's almost equally interesting. So this one comes first. I'll get back before long to his theory about coffee drinks, modifier order, grammatical gender, and the cognitive processing of negation — really I will!

Back in December, a fan of Language Log e-mailed me with a simple query that I answered almost immediately, after checking my answer with a Stanford colleague who's a specialist in the area of the query (as I am not).

My original correspondent thanked the two of us, adding:

As a token of my appreciation for your time and responses, I made a small donation to Stanford. I hope I was successful in seeing that it would be directed to the Linguistics Department.

From Jesse Sheidlower, this headline:

Hooker Overcomes Illness, Slaps Beaver

It's a puzzler. Jesse says:

It's not about what you think it's about. Really. No matter what you think it's about, that's not it.

The other day, just before going through security at the international terminal at the airport in Melbourne, Australia, I noticed a second sign beside the sign of instructions on what you couldn't take onto the airplane.  The second sign was (I assume) the same set of instructions in Chinese, and it was headed "Chinese – Traditional".

A widely-reprinted picture from Danny-Ahmed Ramadan's twitpic feed, wtih the caption "on Qasr Nil bridge the lion says: Game Over Mubarak":

John Hill kindly sent me this photograph of a sign that he took at Tsokar in Ladakh:

Intrigued by the name of the establishment, I wondered just what sort of services Wild Ass Homestay offers.

In a recent LL post, I wrote about Northeast and Northwest Mandarin borrowings from Russian that — in the mouths of those who are not highly literate in characters — seem to have escaped the phonotactic constraints of the sinographic script. In this post, I write about a Beijing street name that began as a sinographically writable expression, but which — again in the mouths of those whose speech is not strongly conditioned by the characters — devolved into a form that cannot readily be written in characters.

In a recent post at Jezebel, Sadie Stein documents the usage of literally as in intensifier, and the often-intense negative reaction, both to the word-sense itself and to its sometimes-spectacularly-frequent deployment ("Saying 'Literally' All The Time Is Literally An Issue").