Language Log

In discussions of literacy in contemporary China, because of the unreliability of government statistics and the emotional, controversial nature of the topic, it is sometimes good to adopt a more historical perspective.  Consequently, I shall from time to time write blogs drawing on first-hand records from earlier periods.

On July 23, 1845, a British missionary named George Smith visited a mosque in the city of Ningbo, which is a major commercial city on the coast about a hundred miles south of Shanghai.  He recorded the remarkable observations he made on that occasion in his book entitled A narrative of an exploratory visit to each of the consular cities of China (London:  Seeley, Burnside, & Seeley; New York:  Harper & Brothers, 1847), pp. 154-155:

Researchers at Google have responded to current events in Iran by offering an alpha version of Persian-to-English machine translation. I'm a big fan of statistical MT, and for that matter of Google's MT team, and current events in Iran are gripping, so I thought I'd try it out.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about Hamrah Sho Aziz ("Join us, my dear"), a song perfomed by Mohsen Namjoo on his 2008 album Adad. This song was used as the sound track for a YouTube clip posted in June of 2008; it was used in a Mousavi campaign video; and during the past few days, it's been used in several videos about the current wave of post-election demonstrations.

I found these clips by searching on YouTube for Mohsen Namjoo, whose music I've admired in the past. And as a result of posting them, I learned quite a bit about this particular song. Farzaneh Sarafraz, in a comment, identifies the original as having been composed by Parviz Meshkatian during the 1979 revolution in Iran. This translation, provided in another comment by Troy S., suggests why the lyrics work as a background to the current protests:

Come along with us, my dear.
Suffer not alone,
For our shared suffering
Can never be healed in separation.

The troubles of life
Will never get easier for us
Without a shared resolve.

And in a third insightful comment, Bernhard observed that the opening phrase, at least, is the same as the famous Yiddish show tune Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen. He's right:

Samuel Johnson has been commemorated on a special 50p coin, as Geoff Pullum notes, but he's not the only linguist (or linguistically inclined scholar) that has been pictured on currency.  Sejong the Great, the 15th-century Korean ruler who developed the Hangul alphabet, can be found on the South Korean 10,000-won banknote.

This is from the most recent series of South Korean currency (the 2006-2007 series), though Sejong has been featured on Korean banknotes in the past. According to Wikipedia, the new note also features text from Yongbieocheonga, the first work of literature written in the Hangul script.

For more about Sejong and Hangul, see Bill Poser's Oct. 9, 2005 post, "Hangul Day." And for more pictures of scientific scholars on paper currency, see the online collection of Jacob Bourjaily.

I only just today happened to come into possession of one of the 50-pence coins issued in 2005 to commemorate a man we have to recognize as an early linguist: Dr Samuel Johnson, who published the first really successful monolingual dictionary of the English language, 250 years earlier, in 1755. I got the coin in change from the 7th-floor common room coffee vending machine in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences here in Edinburgh. I was amazed to look down and see a tail side with text where there is usually a picture, and a fragment of an etymology ("Saxon"), and a part of speech annotation ("n."), and a gloss ("plural of penny"), and the name of a lexicographer.

In today's Get Fuzzy, we learn about Bucky Katt's extension of the Principle of Explosion to the semantics of questions:

A song performed by Mohsen Namjoo, whose title is transliterated as "Hamrah Sho Aziz", has been posted a number of times on YouTube with different images. The earliest one that I've found is from 6/20/2008. There's a version posted on 5/27/2009 that seems to have released by Mir Hossein Mousavi's campaign, with some added strings and speeches. Since the election, there have been several versions with different images and mixed-in audio, on 6/13/2009 and 6/16/2009. The last half of the latest one (below) is a TV interview with Mousavi.

9 Chickweed Lane, for June 15, illustrates something about prescriptivist pain:

Like many others, I've spent much of the past few days reading the sites that offer news about events in Iran; and I appreciate the depth of information that the "New Media" collectively provide, including transcriptions and translations of many of the slogans. Thus Nader Uskowi's weblog features a YouTube video of a wounded girl being loaded into an ambulance ("Casualties in Teheran", 6/15/2009), and also transcribes and translates the chants of the crowd:

Protestors chanting: Mikosham, Mikosham, Ankeh Baradaram Kosht (“Will Kill, Kill, Those Who Killed My Brother”) and Marg Bar Dictator (“Death to Dictator”)

Using the first of these chants as a Google probe, thinking to find other reports and commentary on current events, I stumbled on an interesting account of exactly the same chant being used against the Shah in 1978.

Yesterday, I posted about an Iranian government entity whose Persian name, Majma'a Tash-khees Maslahat Nezam (مجمع تشخیص مصلحت نظام), literally means something like "The Council for Discerning the System's Interest", but is normally given in English as "The Expediency Discernment Council of the System", or the "Expediency Council" for short. I found this translation to be odd, because expediency often has rather negative connotations in English, especially in a context where it might be implicitly opposed to concepts like principle, justice, duty, or honor. As evidence (or at least illustration) for these connotations, I offered a few quotations chosen more or less at random from a search of Literature Online.

One of these quotations set off a different sort of bizarreness reaction in John V. Burke, who wrote:

I never thought to see Robert Montgomery's name outside The Stuffed Owl, an Anthology of Bad Verse, edited by D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee.

Well, bad poetry may be a better source for stereotypical associations than good poetry is — though my first randomly-chosen example came from Hugh MacDiarmid, who was a very good poet indeed.

According to recent reports out of Iran, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has resigned as chairman of an entity whose full name is given in English as the "Expediency Discernment Council of the System", or the "Expediency Council" for short.

The Wikipedia entry says that the organization "was originally set up to resolve differences or conflicts between the Majlis and the Council of Guardians, but 'its true power lies more in its advisory role to the Supreme Leader.'" But this post is not about the nature of the organization or the meaning of Rafsanjani's reported resignation, but rather about the English name, which I found bizarre.

I haven't revisited the topic of nerdview for some time now, but I thought of it again when I saw the utter, dispiriting uselessness of the sticky label I saw on Thursday morning:

THIS REFUSE HAS BEEN CHECKED FOR ILLEGAL PRESENTATION.

What the hell, I hope you are asking yourself, is that about? You need to live in Edinburgh's New Town to figure it out instantly. For the rest of you, I will explain.

From an interview with a high-school pitching prospect at a Milwaukee Brewers' fan site, "BCB Interview: 26th-round LHP Lex Rutledge", 6/12/2009":

BCB: So, speaking of football and late-round baseball picks, did you hear about this Florida State defensive tackle recruit the Brewers drafted? Jacobbi McDaniel. He's a 285-pound third baseman.
LR: [laughs] No, I didn’t. Dang. Does he even play baseball anymore?
BCB: He said he wants 1.5 million to sign, and now the Noles fans are freaking out because there's a report the Brewers offered him 800k.
LR: Wow. I wish they would offer me that. He must can hit.
BCB: Yeah, no kidding. Gain some weight and become a five-star DT recruit and you can make the big bucks.
LR: [laughs] I just don’t see that happening. Oh well, maybe I can throw 103 and get the big bucks like Strasburg.

There are two links in this passage. The first one is to a note on an FSU fan site, about whether Jacobbi McDaniel plans to play baseball or football. The second one is to a Language Log post by Geoff Pullum, "Do double modals really exist?", 11/20/2007.