North Korea is a scary, scary, scary place. Fortunately, at least for those of us not living in that People’s Paradise, every so often the country also provides important linguistic tips, which I am duty-bound to pass along to you.
For example, did you know that names without final consonants are “anti-socialist”? The wise authorities in North Korea have reportedly come to that conclusion and are presently dedicated to the task of cleansing that evil. Since October, “notices have been constantly issued at the neighborhood-watch unit’s residents’ meeting to correct all names without final consonants. People with names that don’t have a final consonant have until the end of the year to add political meanings to their name to meet revolutionary standards,” a resident of North Korea’s North Hamgyong told Radio Free Asia.
In meetings and public notices, officials have gone so far as to instruct adults and children to change their names if they are deemed too soft or simple …, another source said….
The government has threatened to fine anyone who does not use names with political meanings, a resident in the northern province of Ryanggang told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.
As I observed in "Alexa down, ChatGPT up?" (12/8/2022), there's reason to fear that LLMs ("Large Language Models") like ChatGPT will force major changes in writing education, by offered a cheap and easy way to generate essay assignments. A small sample of the extensive published discussion:
Of course, various other forms of cheating have been common for hundreds of years, starting with simple plagiarism and ghost-written submissions. The internet has made it easier to find texts to copy or ghostwriters to hire — but modern technology has also brought us plagiarism-detection systems, which catch at least the simplest cases. Will we see effective LLM-detection software?
Let me share the language feeling of a German with you. As you may have assumed, if a German explains feelings, he does it with a set of rules:
German wordcraziness rule # 1: Yes, there is a German word for everything. Simply because if there was none before, there is one the very moment you think of it or say it. And no, it does not mean that it is the same as listing many words one after the other in English. You can still list words one after the other in German and it has a different effect than creating a new longish word.
Quite a different set of attitudes from what young people in China are feeling nowadays. You will note that extreme abbreviation of words and phrases is a feature of the favored words in the contemporary Japanese lexicon. I would wager that this feature is a reflection of the tempo of Japanese life.
Taipa, an abbreviation of “time performance,” was selected by dictionary publisher Sanseidō as its word of the year for 2022, reflecting young people’s desire not to waste a second.
The latest allegations from Harry and Meghan are damaging for the Windsor family – and perhaps for the monarchy.
[…]
Saddest of all, surely, is the sight of so many unhappy people inside such a dysfunctional institution. Few of the principals appear undamaged, often seriously, by the pressures of the roles they play in front of an audience of sometimes infantilised millions.
There were about 5,000 different characters on the oracle bones, the first stage of Chinese writing roughly 3,300 years ago, but only around 1,200 of them have been identified with any degree of confidence.
The first major dictionary of individual characters, Shuōwén jiězì 說文解字 (lit., "discussing writing and explaining characters" [there are different interpretations of the title]), completed in 100 AD, contained 9,353 glyphs.
The Kāngxī Zìdiǎn 康熙字典 (Compendium of standard characters from the Kangxi period), published in 1716, which was the most authoritative dictionary of Chinese characters from the 18th century through the early 20th century, had 47,035 glyphs.
The discovery makes it possible to translate any word written in Sanskrit.
Laura Baisas (12/15/22)
Some universities require Sanskrit for all linguistics students and some universities have two first-year Sanskrit courses, one for linguistics students and one for Indologists and other humanists. That's a tribute to Pāṇini पाणिनि (ca. 6th-4th c. BC) — no, not the bread roll — rather, the world's first grammarian. His 3,996 verses or rules on linguistics, syntax, and semantics in "eight chapters" (Aṣṭādhyāyī) are as terse and precise as mathematical equations. You'd think that, after two and a half millennia of intense study by thousands upon thousands of pandits, they'd all have been solved by now. Apparently not, since one was just solved for the first time a few years ago.
A PhD student studying at the University of Cambridge has solved a puzzle that has stumped scholars since the fifth century BCE. Rishi Rajpopat decoded a rule taught by Pāṇini, an Indian grammarian who is believed to have lived in present-day northwest Pakistan and southeast Afghanistan.
Paul Krugman, "Why America Is Getting Tough on Trade", NYT 12/12/2022:
Since 1948 trade among market economies has been governed by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which sets certain ground rules for, um, tariffs and trade.
Purdue University Northwest’s Chancellor Thomas Keon is apologizing for a culturally insensitive remark he made during the first of two commencement ceremonies Dec. 10.
The comment was a response after commencement keynote speaker Jim Dedelow finished his speech. Dedelow in his speech talked about a made-up language he created to entertain his new granddaughter and at one point used it to calm the baby from the stage when she squawked during his speech.
As Dedelow sat down, Keon came back to the podium and said, “Well, all I can say is,” and proceeded to speak in a made-up language that sounded as if he were trying to speak Chinese. He then said, “That’s sort of my Asian version of his …,” trailing off before going back on-script.