Language Log

A recent linguistic message from Dinosaur Comics:

It's a bad month in general:  dark, dreary, drizzly, dank, and damp.  Soon one's thoughts are flitting* about as though one had taken wings, like Eros or Cupid. In Chinese mythology, there is a deity called Yǔrén 羽人 ("Feathered Man").  It has an ambiguous origin — first appears in Shānhǎi jīng 山海經 (Classic of the […]

From the recent meeting between Putin and Wang Yi (Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party):

From the Twitter account of the famous popular science writer and muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin: 先把外资都赶跑、吓跑了，再死皮赖脸地请回来？ pic.twitter.com/FepFOsJnpY — 方舟子 (@fangshimin) February 20, 2023

Big news from China yesterday: "2,200-year-old flush toilet — oldest ever found — unearthed at palace ruins in China" Aspen Pflughoeft, Miami Herald / YahooThu, February 16, 2023 at 5:37 PM EST What a gift to humanity! All the terms in the title of this post mean one or another kind of toilet, but function […]

A Russian friend of mine told me that "Terrible" is a common, well nigh universal, mistranslation for the nickname of Ivan IV Vasilyevich (Russian: Иван Васильевич; 25 August 1530 – 28 March [O.S. 18 March] 1584).  He says that a closer translation would be "Enraged". The English word terrible is usually used to translate the Russian word […]

I've never heard of this "Chinese" proverb, but some American friends are asking if I can tell them the original proverb in Chinese.  I can't tell them the original proverb in Chinese, but I can tell them about its origins in Japanese.

I'm often surprised by the number of terms in modern Japanese that have their roots in ancient Buddhist usage.  Some of the most common ones are introduced in this article by Brendan Craine from The Japan Times (2/2/23): "The Buddhist terms that find their way into everyday conversation" A good example is aisatsu あいさつ /  […]

In this post, I will focus on the adversative passive usage of nèijuǎn 内卷 ("involution").  Etymology Calque of English involution, from its Latin roots. This sense was coined in Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia (1963) by Clifford Geertz, as an antonym of evolution, where Geertz observed Javanese and Balinese rice farmers […]

From Michael Carasik: I have been wondering whether Gandhi’s “ahimsa” can be related to Hebrew חמס, the reason (per Gen 6:11) that God brought the Flood. The OED has already assured me that ahimsa is a- (“non”) + himsa, which seems promising. Michael asks whether this connection is plausible. Though Sanskrit is an Indo-European language and Hebrew […]

Len Leverson sent me his unpublished paper titled "O 'pão' Português Conquista o Mundo" about how the Portuguese word for bread spread across the globe.  That got me to thinking about how many words of Portuguese origin are in Japanese.  I'll focus on "pão" more squarely in a moment, but first just a quick list […]

I've always associated the phrase eke out with cases where what's eked out is something good. That's the implication of the Merriam-Webster entry: 1: to make up for the deficiencies of : SUPPLEMENT eked out his income by getting a second job 2: to make (a supply) last by economy And similarly from the Wiktionary […]

Upon seeing that word for the first time, I had only the vaguest idea of what it meant, though I suspected that it was closely related to the dog breed name: schnauzer (n.) breed of terrier with a bearded muzzle, 1923, from German Schnauzer, literally "growler," from schnauzen "to snarl, growl," from Schnauze "snout, muzzle," […]