Language Log

New old news:

"Dev Shah wins 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling 'psammophile'"
Chris Bumbaca
USA TODAY (6/1/23)

Another year, same story:

The 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee ended the old-fashioned way.

Two competitors left on the stage. No spell-off required.

Dev Shah, an eighth-grader from Largo, Florida, spelled "psammophile" correctly to win the 95th national Bee and the 50,000 dollar prize on Thursday. Charlotte Walsh, the hometown kid from just across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, could not nail "daviely" in the preceding round. Walsh's prize was 25,000 dollars for the second-place finish, while the third-place finishers ― Shradha Rachamreddy and Surya Kapu ― each won 12,500 dollars.

The question of how to pronounce Ron DeSantis' last name — and the observation that the candidate, his wife, and his campaign have made different choices at different times — is among the more trivial bits of political flotsam recently washing up on the shores of social and political media. In fact the issue has been discussed in the media since 2018, but it was revived last March by Donald Trump's references on Truth Social to  johnny maga's 3/16/2023 tweet, and more recently in PR moves by Trump's campaign  — "Trumpworld is attacking DeSantis over his inconsistent name pronunciation: 'If you can't get your name right, how can you lead a country?'" (Insider 6/1/2023). A few more links to coverage over the years:

I agree with Gov. DeSantis that Trump's attacks on his name pronunciation choices are "petty" and "juvenile". But the topic engages some non-trivial linguistic questions:

1. What kind of name is DeSantis, anyhow? If it's Italian, where does the initial "De" come from?
2. What are the phonetic variants actually or potentially used in pronouncing the first syllable of "DeSantis" in American English?
3. What are (some of) the socio-phonetic factors influencing the choice, and which of them are likely to be involved in this case?

I recently received this book:

Sūn Sīmiǎo, Sabine Wilms.  Healing Virtue-Power: Medical Ethics and the Doctor's Dao.  Whidbey Island WA:  Happy Goat Productions, 2022.

ISBN:  978-1-7321571-9-4

website

As soon as I started to leaf through the volume, I was struck by its unusual format and usages:  every Chinese character is accompanied by Hanyu Pinyin phonetic annotation with tones, and all terms and sentences are translated into English.  But that's just the beginning; after introducing the original author and the translator, I will point out additional features of this remarkable, praiseworthy monograph.

I listened to this Harry Styles song dozens of times on the radio, and every time I heard him sing "You know it's just the same as it was" over and over:

Handbook of Formosan Languages (Online): The Indigenous Languages of Taiwan

Editors:

Paul Jen-kuei Li, Academia Sinica
Elizabeth Zeitoun, Academia Sinica
Rik De Busser, National Taiwan Cheng-Chi University

Leiden:  Brill, 2023

Outright Purchase: € 2249 / US dollars 2495
Subscription: € 350 / US dollars 390

A print version is forthcoming (September 2023 ; 3 vols, ~ 2200 pp.)

Features

• The first comprehensive reference work on Formosan languages, relevant for decades to come.
• Sketch grammars of almost all known Formosan languages, living or extinct.
• Written by renowned scholars in the field from around the world.

Publication Schedule

Handbook of Formosan Languages Online was launched in May 2023 with 50% of the total content. The other 50% will be published in July 2023.

A recent Dinosaur Comics strip features T-Rex imitating (a certain kind of) speech style from the 1940s:

Mouseover title: "to t-rex's mind, and mine as well, all of the past takes place around the 1930s. well sure! and why not?"

Randy Alexander reports that during a guitar lesson, he asked his student:

Māmā de dìdi de nǚér shì biǎomèi ma？

妈妈的弟弟的女儿是表妹吗？

"Is your mother's younger brother's daughter your younger maternal female cousin?"

The student replied:

wǒyě bútài qīngchǔ děngyíxià

我也不太清楚等一下

"I don't quite know either, wait a minute."

Coby Lubliner called my attention to the Belgian Netflix series "Rough Diamonds." It takes place in Antwerp, so the default language is Dutch (Flemish), but the characters move into Yiddish, English and French with the greatest of ease. The subtitles don't indicate the language spoken in any one scene, except that when [Yiddish] appears what is actually heard is Ashkenazi Hebrew. (To someone who doesn't know either Dutch or Yiddish it will not be clear which one is spoken.)

The medical news site MedPage Today has recently added a daily game page, "Wordectomy", in which a medically-relevant Wikipedia article is presented with all letters blanked out except for punctuation and (some) function words, e.g.

Adam Taylor, Anastacia Galouchka & Heidi Levine, "Ukrainians fighting outside Bakhmut see Russian mercenaries withdrawing", Washington Post 5/282023:

“The Wagner guys have left and the [regular Russians] have come in,” said a 26-year-old commander who asked to be identified by his call sign, Chichen. He used an anti-Russian ethnic slur to refer to the troops who appear to be replacing the mercenaries […]

Taken at a restaurant in Hangzhou:

From Medievalists.net:

"By God’s Bones: Medieval Swear Words"

What were bad words in the Middle Ages? Cursing or swearing in medieval England was really different from today’s world.

May, 2023

The post begins:

Some historians have looked into the topic, such as Melissa Mohr, the author of Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing. In her chapter on medieval England, Mohr explains that people back then did not have much of an issue with describing bodily functions in ways that we might find less appropriate. Going into a city you might find a street called ‘Shitwell Way’ or ‘Pissing Alley’. Open a medieval textbook to teach reading to children and you might find the words arse, shit or fart. If you saw ants crawling around you would most likely call them ‘pisse-mires’.

Along with half a million other people, I logged onto Twitter at the designated hour to hear Elon Musk help Ron DeSantis announce his run for U.S. President. After about half an hour of  noises, silences, and puzzling graphics, I gave up — too early to catch the restart on a different account.

This event was generally covered as an embarrassing failure, with Twitter tags like #DeSaster and #FailureToLaunch. A few hours later, I checked again, and was able to find the Twitter Spaces recording of the rebooted event — which I found less entertaining than the initial parade of glitches, alas. But I also found this:

Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis did a Twitter Spaces thing today that many are calling a #DeSaster. Apparently it was glitchy and crashed a few times. Luckily the whole thing was caught on this video in 2 parts. Enjoy part 1 (This is a PARODY w/AI assist) pic.twitter.com/EPQFGERg9R

— Señor Don ˈPerədē (@scaredketchup) May 24, 2023