Hi sunt amici Stemali.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130517.html

The Waterfall and the World at Night

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4631

Liwei Jiao sent in a selection of signs from a Chinese website that was originally part of a collection assembled in the Daily Mail. We've seen most of these Chinglish signs before, and have already discussed several of them over the years. But this one is new, at least to me, and unusually inept:

mínzú yuán 民族园 ([Minority] Nationalities Park)

The mistake arises from making the wrong choice among the multiple meanings of the word mínzú 民族 ("ethnic group; race; nationality; people").

The reason this mistranslation is particularly inappropriate is because of the infamous (but not historically accurate) sign at the entrance to Huangpu Park in semi-colonial Shanghai — "No dogs or Chinese allowed" — which is one of the most frequent instantiations of racism from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4629

From the 5/16/2013 decision of the Third Circuit, invalidating an NLRB decision based on the argument that the "recess appointment" of one of the board's members was invalid:

The "main purpose" of the Recess Appointments Clause, therefore, is not—as the Eleventh Circuit held and the Board argues—only "to enable the President to fill vacancies to assure the proper functioning of our government." Evans, 387 F.3d at 1226. This formulation leaves out a crucial aspect of the Clause‘s purpose: to preserve the Senate‘s advice-and-consent power by limiting the president‘s unilateral appointment power. Accord Noel Canning, 705 F.3d at 505 (explaining that the Eleventh Circuit‘s statement of the Clause‘s purpose "omits a crucial element of the Clause, which enables the president to fill vacancies only when the Senate is unable to provide advice and consent" (emphasis in original)).

The importance of this aspect of the Clause‘s purpose is difficult to understate. [emphasis added]

More than you probably want to read on this topic:

"Why are negations so easy to fail to miss?", 2/26/2004
"We cannot/must not understate/overstate" 5/26/2004
"Overstating understatement" 6/22/2004
"Multiplex negatio feblondiat" 7/14/2007
"Weird logic and Bayesian semantics" 7/15/2007
"'Cannot underestimate' = 'must not underestimate'" 11/6/2008
"Misunderestimation" 4/4/2009
"Gov. Cuomo and our poor monkey brains", 1/21/2011
"…not understating the threat", 6/5/2012
"(Not) Underestimating the Irish Famine", 9/16/2012
"Overestimating, underestimating, whatever", 1/10/2013
"CIA unable to underestimate the effect of drone war", 4/7/2013

But in case you need more….

[h/t Jonathan Falk]

http://lessaccurategrandmother.blogspot.com/2013/05/review-a-a-prime-by-moto-hagio.html

Comic digest, 207 pages Published 1997 (contents: 1981) Borrowed from  the library Read May 2013

A, A′ [A, A Prime]

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4624

There's an ongoing argument about the interpretation of Katherine Baicker et al., "The Oregon Experiment — Effects of Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes", NEJM 5/2/2013, and one aspect of this debate has focused on the technical meaning of the word significant. Thus Kevin Drum, "A Small Rant About the Meaning of Significant vs. 'Significant'", Mother Jones 5/13/2013:

Many of the results of the Oregon study failed to meet the 95 percent standard, and I think it's wrong to describe this as showing that "Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years."

To be clear: it's fine for the authors of the study to describe it that way. They're writing for fellow professionals in an academic journal. But when you're writing for a lay audience, it's seriously misleading. Most lay readers will interpret "significant" in its ordinary English sense, not as a term of art used by statisticians, and therefore conclude that the study positively demonstrated that there were no results large enough to care about.

Many past LL posts have dealt with various aspects of the rhetoric of significance. Here are a few:

"The secret sins of academics", 9/16/2004
"The 'Happiness Gap' and the rhetoric of statistics", 9/26/2007
"Gender-role resentment and the Rorschach-blot news reports", 9/27/2007
"The 'Gender Happiness Gap': Statistical, practical and rhetorical significance", 10/4/2007
"Listening to Prozac, hearing effect sizes", 3/1/2008
"Localization of emotion perception in the brain of fish", 9/18/2009
"Bonferroni rules", 4/6/2011
"Response to Jasmin and Casasanto's response to me", 3/17/2012
"Texting and language skills", 8/2/2012

But Kevin Drum's rant led me to take another look at the lexicographic history of the word significant, and this in turn led me back to the Oregon Experiment — via a famous economist's work on the statistics of telepathy.

The OED's first sense for significant has citations back to 1566, and  in this sense, being significant is a big deal: something that's significant is "Highly expressive or suggestive; loaded with meaning". This is the ordinary-language sense that makes the statistical usage so misleading, because a "statistically significant" result is often not really expressive or suggestive at all, much less "loaded with meaning".

The OED gives a second sense, almost as old, that is much weaker, and is probably the source of the later statistical usage: "That has or conveys a particular meaning; that signifies or indicates something". Not necessarily something important, mind you, just something — say, in the modern statistical sense, that a result shouldn't be attributed to sampling error. A couple of the OED's more general illustrative examples:

1608   E. Topsell Hist. Serpents 48   Their voyce was not a significant voyce, but a kinde of scrietching.
1936   A. J. Ayer Lang., Truth & Logic iii. 71   Two symbols are said to be of the same type when it is always possible to substitute one for the other without changing a significant sentence into a piece of nonsense.

And then there's an early mathematical sense (attested from 1614):

Math. Of a digit: giving meaningful information about the precision of the number in which it is contained, rather than simply filling vacant places at the beginning or end. Esp. in significant figure, significant digit. The more precisely a number is known, the more significant figures it has.

The OED gives a few additional senses that are not strikingly different from the first two: "Expressive or indicative of something"; "Sufficiently great or important to be worthy of attention; noteworthy; consequential, influential"; "In weakened sense: noticeable, substantial, considerable, large".

And then we get to (statistically) significant:

5. Statistics. Of an observed numerical result: having a low probability of occurrence if the null hypothesis is true; unlikely to have occurred by chance alone. More fully statistically significant. A result is said to be significant at a specified level of probability (typically five per cent) if it will be obtained or exceeded with not more than that probability when the null hypothesis is true.

In an earlier post, I characterized sense 5. as "[a]mong R.A. Fisher's several works of public-relations genius". However, I gave Sir Ronald too much credit, as the OED's list of citations shows:

1885   Jrnl. Statist. Soc. (Jubilee Vol.) 187   In order to determine whether the observed difference between the mean stature of 2,315 criminals and the mean stature of 8,585 British adult males belonging to the general population is significant [etc.].
1907   Biometrika 5 318   Relative local differences falling beyond + 2 and − 2 may be regarded as probably significant since the number of asylums is small (22).
1925   R. A. Fisher Statist. Methods iii. 47   Deviations exceeding twice the standard deviation are thus formally regarded as significant.
1931   L. H. C. Tippett Methods Statistics iii. 48   It is conventional to regard all deviations greater than those with probabilities of 0·05 as real, or statistically significant.

In 1885, Sir Ronald's birth was still five years in the future. So who came up with this miracle of mathematical marketing? It seems that the credit is due to Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, better known for his contributions to economics. The OED's 1885 citation for (statistically) significant is to his paper "Methods of Statistics",  Journal of the Statistical Society of London , Jubilee Volume (Jun. 22 - 24, 1885), pp. 181-217:

The science of Means comprises two main problems: 1. To  find how far the difference between any proposed Means is accidental or indicative of a law? 2. To find what is the best kind of Mean; whether for the purpose contemplated by the first problem, the elimination of chance, or other purposes? An example of the first problem is afforded by some recent experiments in so-called "psychical research." One person chooses a suit of cards. Another person makes a guess as to what the choice has been. Many hundred such choices and guesses having been recorded, it has been found that the proportion of successful guesses considerably exceeds the figure which would have been the most probable supposing chance to be the only agency at work, namely 1/4. E.g., in 1,833 trials the number of successful guesses exceeds 458, the quarter of the total number, by 52. The first problem investigates how far the difference between the average above stated and the results usually obtained in similar experience where pure chance reigns is a significant difference; indicative of the working of a law other than chance, or merely accidental.

So the first use in print of "(statistically) significant" was in reference to an argument for telepathy!

Edgeworth gives no detailed analysis of the "Psychical Research" data in this article, though he notes that

we have several experiments analogous to the one above described, all or many of them indicating some agency other than chance.

But he went over the issue in great detail in a paper published in the same year ("The calculus of probabilities applied to psychical research", Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 3, pp. 190-199, 1885), which begins with an inspiring (though untranslated) quote from Laplace ("Théorie Analytique des probabilités", 1812):

"Nous sommee si éloignés de connaître tous les agents de la nature qu'il serait peu philosophique de nier l'existence de phenomènes, uniquement parcequ'ils sont inexplicables dans l'état actuel de nos connaissances. Seulement nous devons les examiner avec une attention d'autant plus scrupuleuse, qu'il parait plus difficile de les admettre; et c'est ici que l'analyse des probabilités devient indispensable, pour determiner jusqu'à quel point il faut multiplier les observations ou les expériences, pour avoir, en faveur de l'existence des agents qu'elles semblent indiquer, une probability supérieure à toutes les raisons que l'on peut avoir d'ailleurs, de la réjéter."

"We are so far from knowing all the agencies of nature that it would hardly be philosophical to deny the existence of phenomena merely because they are inexplicable in the current state of our knowledge. We must simply examine them with more careful attention, to the extent that it seems more difficult to explain them; and it's here that the analysis of probabilities becomes essential, in order to determine to what point we must multiply observations or experiments, in order to have, in favor of the existence of the agencies that they seem to indicate, a higher probability than all the reasons that one can otherwise have to reject them."

Edgeworth then undertakes to show that telepathy is real:

It is proposed here to appreciate by means of the calculus of probabilities the evidence in favour of some extraordinary agency which is afforded by experiences of the following type: One person chooses a suit of cards, or a letter of the alphabet. Another person makes a guess as to what the choice has been.

After considerable application of somewhat complex mathematical reasoning, e.g. the passage below, Edgeworth concludes that the probability of obtaining the cited results by chance — 510 correct card-suit guesses out of 1833 tries — is 0.00004.

Even if we grant his premises, Edgeworth's estimate seems to have been quantitively over-enthusiastic — R tells us that the probability of obtaining the cited result by chance, given his model, should be a bit greater than 0.003:

binom.test(458+52,1833,p=0.25,alternative="greater")
Exact binomial test
data: 458 + 52 and 1833
number of successes = 510, number of trials = 1833, p-value = 0.003106
alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is greater than 0.25

But the p-value calculated according to Edgeworth's model — whether it's .00004 or .003 — is not an accurate estimate of the probability of getting the cited number of correct guesses by chance, in an experiment of the cited type. That's because his model might well be wrong, and there are plausible alternatives in which successful guesses are much more likely.

Recall his description of the experiment:

One person chooses a suit of cards, or a letter of the alphabet. Another person makes a guess as to what the choice has been.

He assumes that the chooser picks among the four suits of cards with equal a priori probability; and that the guesser, if guessing by chance, must do the same. But suppose that they both prefer one of the four suits, say hearts? If the chooser always chooses hearts, and the guesser always guesses hearts, then perfect psychical communication will appear to have taken place.

More subtly, we only need to assume a slight shared bias for better-than-chance results to emerge. And the bias need not be shared in advance of the experiment — since the guesser learns the true choice after each guess, he or she has plenty of opportunity to estimate the chooser's bias, and to start to imitate it. In other words, this is really not a telepathy experiment, it's the world's first Probability Learning experiment! (See "Rats beat Yalies", 12/11/2005, for a description of this experimental paradigm.)

If the result is equivalent to a shared uneven distribution over the four suits, then things are very different. With shared probabilities of 0.34, 0.33, 0.17, 0.16, for example, the probability of getting at least 510 correct guesses in 1833 trials is about 55%. And I assert without demonstration that such an outcome could easily emerge from a probability-learning process, without any initial shared bias.

My point here is not to debunk psychical research, but to observe that here as elsewhere, it's important to pay attention to the the details of the model, the data, and the outcome, rather than just looking at the p value.

And this brings us back to the contested paper, Katherine Baicker et al., "The Oregon Experiment — Effects of Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes", NEJM 5/2/2013.

Since this post has already gone on too long, I'll try to make this fast (for the two of you who are still reading…) Here's the background:

In 2008, Oregon initiated a limited expansion of its Medicaid program for low-income adults through a lottery drawing of approximately 30,000 names from a waiting list of almost 90,000 persons. Selected adults won the opportunity to apply for Medicaid and to enroll if they met eligibility requirements. This lottery presented an opportunity to study the effects of Medicaid with the use of random assignment.

Specifically

Our study population included 20,745 people: 10,405 selected in the lottery (the lottery winners) and 10,340 not selected (the control group).

They were able to interview 12,229 people, 6387 lottery winners and 5842 among the controls, about two years after the lottery.

But it's not quite as simple as that:

Adults randomly selected in the lottery were given the option to apply for Medicaid, but not all persons selected by the lottery enrolled in Medicaid (either because they did not apply or because they were deemed ineligible).

A more detailed picture of the lottery process is given in the paper's Supplementary Appendix:

In total, 35,169 individuals—representing 29,664 households—were selected by lottery. If individuals in a selected household submitted the appropriate paperwork within 45 days after the state mailed them an application and demonstrated that they met the eligibility requirements, they were enrolled in OHP Standard. About 30% of selected individuals successfully enrolled. There were two main sources of slippage: only about 60% of those selected sent back applications, and about half of those who sent back applications were deemed ineligible, primarily due to failure to meet the requirement of income in the last quarter corresponding to annual income below the poverty level, which in 2008 was $10,400 for a single person and $21,200 for a family of four.

In other words, we would expect that only about 30% of the lottery winners in this paper's sample were actually enrolled in the insurance program.  Thus the lottery selection was random, but the enrollment step for lottery winners was not: and the various reasons for failing to get insurance are presumably not neutral with respect to health status and outcomes.

When I first began reading this paper, this seemed to me to constitute a huge source of non-sampling error, since the lottery winners who actually enrolled may constitute a very different group from the lottery participants as a whole.

However, it turns out that this doesn't matter. Although the paper's title announces itself as a study of the "Effects of Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes", the authors did not compares the outcomes of those who were actually enrolled against the outcomes of those who were not. Instead, they compared the outcomes of those who won the lottery—and thus were given the opportunity to try to enroll—against the outcomes of those who didn't win the lottery (even though some of these did have health insurance anyhow). So realistically, it's a study of the "Effects of an Extra Opportunity to Try to Enroll in Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes".</span>

Of the 6,387 survey responders who were lottery winners,  1,903 (or 29.8%) actually enrolled in Medicaid at some point. A reasonable number of the control group had OHP or Medicaid insurance as well, and by the end of the period of the study, the differences between the two groups in enrolled in proportion enrolled in public insurance had nearly vanished (we're given no information about how many might have had employer-provided insurance, but presumably the proportion was small):

Of course, the study's authors set up their model to compensate for this situation:

The subgroup of lottery winners who ultimately enrolled in Medicaid was not comparable to the overall group of persons who did not win the lottery. We therefore used a standard instrumental-variable approach (in which lottery selection was the instrument for Medicaid coverage) to estimate the causal effect of enrollment in Medicaid. Intuitively, since the lottery increased the chance of being enrolled in Medicaid by about 25 percentage points, and we assumed that the lottery affected outcomes only by changing Medicaid enrollment, the effect of being enrolled in Medicaid was simply about 4 times (i.e., 1 divided by 0.25) as high as the effect of being able to apply for Medicaid. This yielded a causal estimate of the effect of insurance coverage.

And there was indeed a period of differential enrollment proportions between between the lottery winners and losers, as well a period of different enrollment-opportunity proportions, and so it's plausible to look for effects across the sets of winners and losers as a whole.

But the main physical health outcomes that the study examined (blood pressure, cholesterol, glycated hemoglobin, etc.) are age- and lifestyle-related measures that are not very likely to be seriously influenced by a short period of differential access to insurance. The things that were (both statistically and materially) influenced — self-reported health-related quality of life, out-of-pocket medical spending, rate of depression — are much more plausible candidates to show the impact of having a brief opportunity to get insurance access.

And as in F. Y. Edgeworth's analysis of card-suit guessing, the p values in the regression are not as important as the details of what the observations were, and what forces plausibly shaped them.

[Note: For more on the subsequent history of psychic statistics, see Jessica Utts, "Replication and Meta-Analysis in Parapsychology", Statistical Science 1991.)

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4630

This is the allegedly libelous remark on Twitter that might cost Sally Bercow tens of thousands in damages:

How (you might ask) could it possibly be libelous simply to ask a question about why Lord McAlpine, after twenty years of living in retirement, was suddenly a hot topic on Twitter?

Well, McAlpine was being tweeted about in an unpleasant context. There were rumors about a famous person facing allegations of child sexual abuse. A man thought he remembered being sexually interfered with while he was a child living in a children's home, and had come to believe that his abuser from many years before was Lord McAlpine. A BBC TV program uncovered this, and mentioned "a senior Conservative" (McAlpine once served in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet) without releasing the name. The name got out anyway, and a rumors started to spread on Twitter. However, on being shown a photo of Lord McAlpine the accuser immediately realized he had been mistaken about his abuser's identity.

As for the point about merely asking a question, under the British case law governing defamation it is well established a question can convey a statement by implication. You do not have to assert a defamatory claim: an implicature will do just fine to put you at risk of being found liable for huge damages.

Sally Bercow, who is the high-profile wife of the speaker of the UK House of Commons, could be in deep trouble. You can read here about the efforts of her defense attorney to claim that it was just an innocent question, and that *innocent face* was some kind of mood indicator meaning that she was sincere and didn't know the answer. The plaintiff in the case, Lord McAlpine, thinks the appended phrase was clearly a wink-wink nudge-nudge tipoff implicating that the growing Twitter rumors should be believed. Although he has dropped similar cases against Twitter users with few readers, he is not prepared to drop this one, because Sally Bercow has tens of thousands of followers, and was a major player in getting the rumors about him spread to millions.

Good luck with the innocent-face defense, Sally; but take your checkbook to court, you may need it.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130516.html

Swinging around the Sun's eastern limb on Monday,

http://nydersdyner.blogspot.com/2013/05/what-i-saw-at-sci-fi-london-film.html

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4628

Just yesterday, in "The enigmatic language of the new Windows 8 ads", we saw how delicate and uncertain is the comprehension of forms of Chinese that one is not intimately familiar with. A significant part of the problem is the result of a psychological barrier to understanding that comes from unfamiliarity with the context and content of what is being said. Thus, even though there was a considerable amount of Mandarin spoken in the videos of my post about the Windows 8 ads, of the scores of native speakers whom I consulted, no one could pick it out from the stream of sounds they were hearing.

The most important obstacle to intelligibility, of course, is the sheer difference (in grammar, syntax, phonology, vocabulary, etc.) among the topolectal varieties of Chinese. In this post, to show how dissimilar Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is from one of the most important Sinitic topolects, we shall look closely at a text composed in rather colloquial Shanghainese.

In "Nerd, geek, PK: Creeping Romanization (and Englishization), part 2", we discussed the corresponding Shanghainese terms for these and related expressions. This prompted a friend who knows Shanghainese to send me an interview which is laden with vernacularisms in that language. The interview begins in Mandarin.

A CCTV reporter asks a resident of the city of Shanghai: "What do you think of the plan for the microblogs to start charging a fee?"

Shanghai resident: "May I speak in Shanghainese?"

Reporter: "Yes."

Whereupon the Shanghai resident replies in raunchy Shanghainese colloquial.

Most Language Log readers will have heard spoken Mandarin, so I give the resident's diatribe in three audio files in order that the very different sounds of Shanghainese can be fully appreciated. All three speakers are male because the female Shanghai speakers whom I asked to record the passage uniformly refused.

I will not give a word-by-word transcription of the Shanghainese, because you can hear for yourself from the audio files what it sounds like. I will, however, provide a rough translation of the whole, and then follow up with some notes.

"Bonk! This bunch of beasts are crazy over cash. If our government does not get this matter under control, then we're really screwed. Twat! Didn't the new boss Xi say that he was gonna give us common people a "China Dream"? Gimme a break! Bonk these businessmen who control the internet and the Development and Reform Commission! They're all a bunch of gangsters. If the Ministry of Industry lets them do whatever they want, then our "China Dream" will be a bonkin' pipe dream our whole life. Twat! Just thinking of these floating corpses in their coffins makes me angry — idiots! gangsters! beasts! damn devils! Muddleheads! If your shoes don't fit, wouldn't you just change to another pair? If your toes hurt, wouldn't you just cut them off? To hell with it! I'm not gonna talk about those bonkers anymore, I'm gonna go have a flat cake and fritter with some soybean milk. Bye bye!"

“拆那! 格邦宗桑想钞票想疯特勒，格宗桑活阿拉政府啊勿管额孩画，个么正宗一脚气了。娘比，新来额习老板勿是岗要拨阿拉 老八姓一只中国忙做做阿是啦？帮帮忙澳，拆那格底忙落运营桑德之发改委一帮瘪三，工信部要是再娘伊拉为诉越为，个么阿拉额中国忙一桑一丝啊就是拆那娘做白 热忙娄。娘 比，想想格帮棺材否尸缺西瘪三宗桑赤佬磨子就促气! 戆徒，鞋子佛适意好调一桑佛啦，脚节头痛好宰特佛啦? 算了算了，册那佛岗了， 爷叔要吃豆腐浆大饼油条去了，拜拜!"

[N.B.: The Sinographic transcriptions in many cases are tentative, since there are not always established, "standard" representations of Shanghainese morphemes in characters. I'm sure that some Language Log readers can do a better job of translating the colloquial passage, but I hope that my rough rendering can at least give an impression of the quality of the language.]

Lexical and general notes:

In this context, Shanghainese 生活 probably corresponds best to Mandarin gòudang 勾当 ("business; deal"; premodern yíngshēng 营生 ["earn a living"]).

The Shanghai / general Wu curse "animal" has an apparent Buddhist origin: zhòngshēng 众牲 < zhòngshēng 众生 ("sentient beings").

娘比 variant, short form of 娘希匹 (apparently this was Chiang Kai-shek's favorite curse).

The part about shoes not fitting and toes hurting is inspired by Xi Jinping's use of this analogy for how to make policy adjustments.

Speculation on the origin of the folk expression "floating corpse": to curse that someone's ancestral tombs be flooded — one of the the most vicious imprecations in premodern China. This certainly predated the recent spate of thousands of pig corpses floating in one of the main rivers of Shanghai.

The expression bāngbāngmáng 帮帮忙 still means primarily "(please) help me" in Mandarin and in most northern topolects, but in Shanghainese, it has become almost exclusively a euphemism for "don't insult my intelligence", similar to the evolution of English "Give me a break!"

Phonological notes from Matt Anderson, who is currently in Shanghai doing research on oracle bone inscriptions:

I've consulted the Shanghaihua da cidian 上海話大詞典, which is something of a misnomer, as it's not really a dictionary and it's not at all comprehensive (and the words are not only not arranged alphabetically, but they're not even arranged by any other system — just according to rough semantic categories, so you need to consult the index, which is only arranged by stroke order). It naturally doesn't have a lot of the single words in this text, and I don't think it has any of the most vulgar ones (though I may just not be able to find them).

I've put together a list of some transcriptions of some of the key terms (see below). In all cases, the Shanghainese transcription is for the last character or group of characters on a line.

宗桑/畜牲(畜生) ts‘oʔ33 sɑ̃44

桑活/生活 sã55 ɦuəʔ21

勿/不 vəʔ12

孩/好 hɔ34

一脚气/一脚去 iɪʔ33 tɕiᴀʔ55 tɕ‘i21

岗/讲 kɑ̃34

八/百(as in 老八/百姓). 百 pᴀʔ55

阿是 ᴀʔ33 zɿ44

瘪三 piɪʔ33 sᴇ44

娘/让 ȵiã23

否尸/浮尸 vɤ22 sɿ44

磨子/模子 mo22 tsɿ44

戆徒/戆大 gɑ̃22 du44

脚节（头）(I included the last syllable because that’s how it was listed in the dictionary and I don’t know how its absence might affect the tones) tɕiᴀʔ33 tɕiɪʔ55 dɤ21

脚趾（头） (I’ve also included this one because it was your correspondent’s translation / transcription and it was also in the “dictionary”) tɕiᴀʔ33 tsɿ55 dɤ21

Shanghainese is definitely alive and well in my neighborhood. In my apartment complex (or however you translate xiaoqu 小區), it's probably the primary language. I haven't really been able to learn anything, though, except for a few words.

Glosses from Richard VanNess Simmons:

I think the "Shanghai_interview.doc" that you supplied is quite effective in showing how the passage was transcribed into characters. There are actually very few words that are purely Shanghainese, even counting the few vulgarisms. So much of the character transcription is simply using characters to gloss the Shanghai pronunciation of a common Chinese word -– thus effectively making it look as strange as it sounds to a person who knows Mandarin but does not speak Shanghai. For example 岗 glosses the Shanghai pronunciation of 讲 'say', which would be Romanized as /gã́w/; and 娘 glosses the pronunciation of 让 /niã́/ 'let, allow'; 八 for 百 /bāq/ 'hundred'; 桑 for 生 /sã̀/; 丝 for 世 /sì/; 忙 for 梦 /móng/, etc. In a few places, the characters are fairly standard ways of writing the actual Shanghai words, such as

阿拉 (=我们) āq-la
伊拉 (=他们) ‘yí-la
佛／勿 (=不) veq
额 (=的) g’eq
勒 (=了) leq
个么 (=那么) gēq-meq
特 (=掉) tēq
格底 (=这点) g’eq-di
适意 (=舒服) sēq-yi
阿是 (=是不是) āq-zï

Much of the rest is the same in both Shanghai and Putonghua, as can be seen by the fair amount of overlap where the characters are what they usually mean and are thus the same in both.

[Thanks to Sanping Chen, Richard VanNess Simmons, Matt Anderson, Wenkan Xu, Jidong Yang, Zhichen Zhao, Bill Hannas, Rebecca Fu, and Rostislav Berezkin]

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130515.html

What caused this mess?

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4627

Nicholas Thompson, "Terrible News About Carbon and Climage Change", The New Yorker 5/12/2013:

We’ve got more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at any point since the Pliocene, when there were jungles in northern Canada. And the number hurdles ever upward, as ocean levels rise and extreme weather becomes routine. Three-fifty was the old target; four-fifty is the new one. But what indication is there that we’ll stop at five hundred, six hundred, or even more?

The OED (in an entry not updated since 1899) calls hurtle, v. "Now only literary or arch.", giving the etymology as

apparently a diminutive and iterative of hurt v., in its original sense of ‘strike with a shock’.

One sense that remains active in contemporary journalistic use is "6. To dash, rush, hurry; esp. with noise", perhaps because of resonance with hurry and hurl. (Though the "with noise" part seems to have withered away…)

The half-dozen most recent uses in the NYT are:

Without any changes, over the next decade or so, the gross federal debt, now nearly $17 trillion, will hurtle toward $30 trillion and soar to 150 percent of gross domestic product from around 105 percent today.

At the precise millisecond the nut succumbs, the jaw muscles sense the yielding and reflexively let up. Without that reflex, the molars would continue to hurtle recklessly toward one another, now with no intact nut between.

You reach down and take a small hand, and joined, you hurtle toward the future.

It was one of the premier skiing venues in the nation in the 1930s and 1940s, drawing up to 5,000 people to watch top skiers like Dick Durrance hurtle past them on seven-foot-long wooden skis.

The combination is lethal, and as I hurtle toward the end of my 30s, my guilt has gone rogue.

But Mr. Obama’s effort to define success on his terms is coming up against two primary counterarguments as the White House and Congress hurtle toward the next budget showdown in coming weeks.

For most Americans, hurtle is pronounced exactly the same way as hurdle. And hurdle, in addition to being commoner than hurtle (about 7.69 per million for the "hurdle" and "hurdles" in COCA, compared to 0.60 for "hurtle" and "hurtles"), has the advantage of referring to a concrete type of object and a specific associated action.

This creates the perfect situation for eggcorn creation: a relatively rare and somewhat archaic word that is pronounced in just the same way as another word that is much more common in everyday usage, and has a clear meaning that overlaps at least metaphorically with most examples of the more unusual word.

If you hurtle through or towards something, you don't necessarily hurdle any obstacles — but if there were any obstacles in your way, you probably would hurdle them. And the idea of moving quickly without regard for obstacles is not a bad proxy for the usual uses of hurtle.

Given all this, it's surprising that hurdle for hurtle is apparently not very common — it's not in the Eggcorn Database, and news or book searches for some obvious cases (e.g. "hurdle recklessly"  or "hurdle toward") don't turn up many relevant examples. But it's Out There:

From Financial World at some point in the 1950s:

For another — in electronics — we expect gross to hurdle upward 160% and net income to climb from 51 a share to around $1.30.

From The Adélie Penguin: Bellwether of Climate Change:

The seals lurk below and hurdle upward, crashing through the soft ice to snare a penguin.

A few examples from a Google News search:

The remaining survivors are huddled together on the titular train that hurdles through brutal landscapes of ice and endless snow.

“Someday girl, I don’t know when, we’re gonna get to that place where we really wanna go and we’ll walk in the sun,” Springsteen croons as the song hurdles toward its titanic finale, “But until then, tramps like us, baby we were born to run.”

One of New Jersey's most famous boardwalks, in Seaside Heights, is hurdling toward completion as well.

You can double jump, which sends your robot unicorn hurdling into the air while it expels a rainbow.

We're hurdling towards the end of the term and graduation.

After seeing 40 oz. glass bottles hurdling through the air, I wasn't surprised at the injuries we saw.

Her death again sent the home hurdling toward foreclosure and possible demolition.

The Eagles actually beat the Ravens last season in week 2, 24-23 to begin the season 2-0 before hurdling into the NFC East's abyss.

Hysterical! Screaming flower girl goes hurdling down the aisle.  (link to video)

[h/t to Monte Davis]

http://lessaccurategrandmother.blogspot.com/2013/05/review-bill-boy-wonder-secret-co.html

Hardcover, n.pag. Published 2012 Acquired August 2012 Read May 2013

Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator of Batman

http://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/millennial-women-virginia-kidd/

http://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/?p=949

Millennial Women, Virginia Kidd (1978)
Review by Ian Sales

The mid-1970s appears to have seen a brief surge in interest in sf by women authors – not just this anthology, Millennial Women; but also Pamela Sargent’s Women of Wonder trilogy (1975 – 1978), a series which would not be repeated until twenty years later. Though long-deserved, it’s hard to know what triggered this interest. Ursula K LeGuin had won the Hugo Award in 1970 for The Left Hand of Darkness, the first woman to do so; and she won again in 1975 for The Dispossessed, only the second female-authored book to win. In 1977, Kate Wilhlem won; and in 1979, Vonda N McIntyre… and books by women writers have won several times ever since – three times in the 1980s, five in the 1990s, and three in the  first decade of this century. It’s by no means parity, but it’s a huge improvement on earlier decades – prior to 1970, only two women had ever been shortlisted for the best novel Hugo: Marion Zimmer Bradley in 1963 and Andre Norton in 1964.

Kidd’s introduction in Millennial Women provides no clues to her motive for putting together the anthology. She gives a few comments on each of the six stories – one is actually a short novel – but there is little real discussion of the role of women in the science fiction field, except this:

But what seems to me one of the most impressive aspects of the collection is that all of these science fiction writers avoid hard-core science fiction for sociology, soft-pedal radical feminism for humanism, and write about women simply as women. (p 3)

Which, if anything, reads like a shot across Joanna Russ’s bows. And it’s certainly true that the contents of Millennial Women are not in the least bit radical. They are, in fact, well-crafted science fiction stories very much in keeping with the less-pulpish elements of the genre of the time. If it was known as “social science fiction” back then – either to distinguish it from sf involving space battles and such, or simply to differentiate it from sf written by men – the label is no longer used, and any need to hold it apart from heartland genre sf has long since vanished. But that quote does feel a little like it’s feeding into the stereotype of women writers in science fiction: “unlike men, they only write a particular kind of sf (which you might like)”. This is nonsense, of course. True, not all women sf writers wrote “radical feminist” sf, but it is deeply unfair to characterise what they did write as “social science fiction”, no matter what characteristics it shared with other subgenres. As Russ herself described it in How To Suppress Women’s Writing: “she wrote it, but she isn’t really [a science fiction writer], and it isn’t really [science fiction]“.

So, it should come as little surprise that the stories in Millennial Women cover a number of subgenres of science fiction, from near-future (mundane) sf to that involve galaxy-spanning spaceships. The various focuses of the stories are no different to what might be expected in any other non-themed anthology of the time, irrespective of the writers’ genders. Perhaps the fact all the stories feature female protagonists might have been considered notable in 1978 – though, in truth, Le Guin’s takes a chapter or two before settling on its eventual female protagonist – but to a modern reader, there’s nothing remarkable in it. Nor should there be.

To be honest, ‘No One Said Forever’ by Cynthia Felice doesn’t even actually read as science fiction, and it’s slightly baffling that it would be considered genre – even in 1978. Carol and Mike are both working professionals – he is a miner, she works for a computer company. And now she’s been offered a contract in Antarctica which she cannot afford to turn down. Neither wants to give up their careers, nor are they keen on separation. Eventually, they reach a solution, but it’s a dilemma predicated on attitudes and sensibilities which no longer hold sway (mostly), and so makes the piece feel bizarrely dated rather than futuristic.

‘The Song of N’Sardi-El’ by Diana L Paxson, as can probably be guessed from the presence of an apostrophe in the title, is much more blatantly science fiction. The narrator is a xenolinguist aboard a merchant ship which is rushing to the world of Cithal in order to be the first to sign a lucrative trade deal with its natives. They also have aboard several survivors from the lifeboat of another ship that was destroyed by aliens while leaving their world. One of these survivors is a young girl who’s suffering from nightmares. The narrator befriends her and then discovers that her ship was destroyed leaving Cithal, and that the girl can speak the native language, Xicithalian. As a result, the traders are well-prepared when they arrive on Cithal. And then the girl recognises the alien repsonsible for the death of her family… The title refers to a Xicithalian epic poem, and its story allows the narrator to use the aliens’ culture to demand concessions and open trading.  There’s nothing untypical about ‘The Song of N’Sardi’ and it would not look out of place in pretty much any sf anthology. Its focus on xenolinguistics does not make it “social science fiction”, though it does it in parts read a little like a story from an earlier decade.

‘Jubilee’s Story’ by Elizabeth A Lynn is post-apocalypse. A group from a women-only settlement stop off en route to another in a tiny hamlet, and find a pregnant young woman close to term. Her husband is afraid she’ll die, so the travellers stay to help. But it seems the situation in the house is somewhat fraught – the husband’s brother claims the baby is his, and the father is an old school Christian fundamentalist, who calls the the young woman a whore and wants her gone. Events come to a head. The set-up may be science fiction, but there’s little in how the story plays out that makes it genre. It could just as easily have been set in some rustic part of the US and nothing would really need to be changed. When you wonder why a story has been written as science fiction, you have to sometimes wonder why it was written at all.

Older women do not appear very often as protagonists in sf stories, but that’s what the narrator of ‘Mab Gallen Recalled’ by Cherry Wilder is. She served as a medical officer aboard a starship, but now she has retired. Much of the story consists of an extended flashback, describing a scene in which she had to stabilise an injured person in the cargo-hold of a damaged ship. Also present was a lay preacher, and the narrator tries to stress on her the importance of not sacrificing her air in order to save the injured man. She does sacrifice some of it, of course. But they all survive. And the narrator thinks back on that lay preacher, and on a lover she saw defect to the other side, and she compares them to the fresh-faced young medical missionaries to whom she is about to speak.

‘Phoenix in the Ashes’ by Joan D Vinge is also post-apocalypse, but in this world South America has remained technological while North America has devolved to an agrarian society. A Brazilian is prospecting by helicopter in south-west USA for oil, when his helicopter crashes in California. Which is where a theocratic society descended from immigrants from further south now holds sway. The women are very much second-class citizens, especially Amanda, who refused to marry the man her father had arranged as her husband. She has been exiled from the family homestead, and now lives in a hovel on the family land, and weaves cloth to pay for food. The helicopter pilot did not die in the crash, though he was left for dead. Later he stumbles across Amanda’s hovel, and she takes him in and tends to his wounds. He has lost his memory, and can remember nothing of his life before. Eventually, they marry, and he introduces crop rotation to the local farmers – including Amanda’s father, which helps ease his entry into the family. Such societies are almost a staple of the genre, and while ‘Phoenix in the Ashes’ predates The Handmaid’s Tale by almost a decade, the two stories are not dissimilar.

‘The Eye of the Heron’ by Ursula K Le Guin is the longest piece in the anthology. It’s a short novel and this is its first appearance in print. It’s been subsequently reprinted as a standalone novel. In fact, Millennial Women was published in the UK in 1980 under the title The Eye of the Heron and Other Stories, with LeGuin’s name considerably more prominent than Kidd’s. In an interview in Whole Earth Review, LeGuin said of this story:

“While I was writing ‘The Eye of the Heron’ in 1977, the hero insisted on destroying himself before the middle of the book. “Hey,” I said, “you can’t do that, you’re the hero. Where’s my book?” I stopped writing. The book had a woman in it, but I didn’t know how to write about women. I blundered around a while and then found some guidance in feminist theory. I got excited when I discovered feminist literary criticism was something I could read and actually enjoy. I read The Norton Book of Literature by Women from cover to cover. It was a bible for me. It taught me that I didn’t have to write like an honorary man anymore, that I could write like a woman and feel liberated in doing so.”

Certainly the female protagonist is not at all obvious in the opening chapters. ‘The Eye of the Heron’ opens with an expedition returning home after exploring the wilderness. When the explorers reach their home village, they call for a meeting in order to describe what they’ve discovered. But one of the Bosses is also present, and he tells the villagers that they are to make no move without the Bosses’ approval – even though it is plan the villagers wish to found a new settlement elsewhere in order to no longer be in the Bosses’ thrall. This is an alien world, settled by two groups of people – the People of Peace, who live in near-poverty and perform peasant labour; while the other live in luxury from the fruits of the first group’s labours. It’s such a polarised set-up that it’s hard to swallow. The Spanish Colonial feel to the world only helps obscure that this is a new world, and not some colonial period in Earth’s history. At least if it were the latter, there’d be the weight of history to justify the blatant inequality of the society, and bolster the arrogance of the Bosses. The desire by the People of the Peace to found a new colony away from the Bosses precipitates a confrontation, made worse by the Bosses’ plans to open new areas locally for farmland – or, as they see it, plantations with themselves lording it over People of the Peace labourers. Caught in the middle of all this is Luz Marina, the daughter of the head of the Bosses. She doesn’t want to marry the man her father has picked out for her, nor does she want to be like her married friends. When she learns of plans by a new troop of musket-armed Bosses’ sons to attack the People of the Peace, she runs away to warn them. And ends up staying, further throwing the two groups into conflict.

‘The Eye of the Heron’ is perhaps a more blunt story than LeGuin typically writes. The People of the Peace are so committed to their ideals, it seems a miracle they’ve survived as long as they have. The Bosses insist they represent “law and order” and so must be obeyed, but you can’t help wondering whose law and order, and why should they be obeyed given they’re outnumbered. Indeed, the People of the Peace do practice civil disobedience, but a violent confrontation proves unavoidable (and incidentally is the even LeGuin refers to in the first sentence of the quote above). There’s perhaps little too much suspension of disbelief required for ‘The Eye of the Heron’ to work as smoothly as it should – especially since, like some of the other stories in Millennial Women, it’s only really the setting that characterises the story as science fiction. Having said that, it’s clearly the best of the six stories in the anthology, and certainly bears rereading.

If the reasons for putting together Millennial Women are not entirely clear, the end result is still an anthology worth reading. Perhaps the other stories suffer somewhat in comparison to the LeGuin, but in other venues they would be more than strong enough to stand on their own. There is nothing genre-redefining or remarkable about Millennial Women. If anything, it amply demonstrates that labelling sf by women writers as anything other than sf does both women and the genre a huge disservice. There is no plausible justification for segregation, even if it takes a women-only anthology to prove it…

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130514.html

What happens when two galaxies collide?

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4626

Everybody has been puzzling over the language of the series of online ads for Windows 8 that it recently released in Asia.

• Seattle Times:  "Those weird and wacky Windows 8 ads: What language are they in?"
• Forbes:  "Microsoft's Asian Windows 8 Ads Are Relatively Insane"
• Mashable:  "Windows 8 Releases Kooky Ads in Asia — But in What Language?"

Native speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean declare that it is not any of those languages.  The first time I listened to them, the ads sounded as though they contained elements of some Wu topolect, a bit like mangled Shanghainese, but I could also definitely hear bits of Mandarin, albeit with unusual tonal contours and slurring.  What was most perplexing of all to me was that, although I was certain that the ads contained Chinese phrases and sentences, every Chinese person to whom I showed them emphatically maintained that they could not understand a single word!  In contrast, several non-native speakers of Mandarin said they could pick out a word of Chinese here and there.

Here is a sampling of the scores of replies I received from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean speakers (all native except where otherwise noted):

Mandarin speaker:  It's a made-up language.

Speaker of many Chinese topolects:  It's gibberish.  My wife and I together know all the major non-Mandarin dialects. We listened to the ads, but did not understand any. Who are Microsoft's consumers? Who does it target at?

Mandarin speaker:  The kids have invented their own language.

Mandarin speaker:  They do not sound like any Chinese language.

Shanghainese speaker:  I don't understand any of the words in these ads. They're not like any Wu languages that I know. I guess they speak Microsoftish.

Korean speaker:  I'm not sure but I don't think it is Korean. It's funny that MS declined to say what language these commercials are in!

American speaker of Mandarin and a bit of Shanghainese:  It does have hints of something Wu but I can't place it.

Speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese:  I am too busy to be bothered with those strange ads.

Fluent American speaker of Japanese who also knows a little Korean and Mandarin: First one is Chinese, second one is Korean, third one is very mumbly, probably Japanese based on the actors.

Korean speaker who also knows some Mandarin and Japanese:  I have no idea. They aren't speaking in Korean for sure, and it doesn't sound like Japanese either. I only can think that they are speaking in a Chinese dialect (including Taiwanese) or South Asian language.

Korean speaker who also knows some Mandarin and Japanese:  I don't recognize the language either. But it will be definitely one of Chinese dialects. Funny commercial though.

Fluent American speaker of Japanese who also knows a bit of Mandarin:  Sounds like make-believe Chinese for non speakers. In Italy there's a big tradition of comedians "speaking" various regional dialects by catching just enough of their sounds and rhythms to sound plausible. What was that poem? Mimsy are the borogoves….

Korean speaker who also knows some Mandarin and Japanese:  They surely are funny, and I don't know what language they are speaking either. ^^; Microsoft is being weird I guess.

Fluent American speaker of Japanese who also knows some Mandarin:  No idea whatsoever.

Speaker of Taiwanese and Mandarin:  I could not understand them, either. However, the tones and pronunciation indeed remind me of Korean language. I am not sure whether they are trying to imitate Koreans or not.

Japanese speaker: If you, an outstanding polyglot, can't tell what language they are speaking, how would I know!?????  Clever ads.  The boys in the 3rd ad are bad pianists but terrific pingpong players!

Fluent American speaker of Korean who also is very advanced in Japanese and Mandarin:  No kidding, Victor. Just crazy. A real mystery! Well, the language is definitely not Japanese or Korean, or Mandarin Chinese or any other variety of Chinese I've ever heard.  Still, here's my guess: Although it's not Chinese, in the first video there's a ma at the end of a clause, isn't there? And I hear yihou (with the wrong tones) introducing a clause in a set of instructions. That's why I think Microsoft just got some Chinese speakers to start making things up. What I'm saying is that I think it's made-up language, gibberish. Oh, and by the way, the styles of clothing, etc. look Chinesy, at least to me. They don't really look Japanese or Korean.

Speaker of Mandarin and a Hunan topolect:  I asked several friends about the three ads. We think the first one may be a Wu topolect 吴方言 (maybe Shanghainese 上海话), the second one like a southwest topolect 西南方言 (maybe Sichuanese 四川话). And we really don't know about the third one. However, we can not confirm with the guess.

Speaker of Mandarin and Hangzhounese:  All three ads speak Korean.

Speaker of Shanghainese and Mandarin:  Are they foreign students trying to speak Shanghainese?  I can't understand any of it.

Fluent American speaker of Mandarin who also know Shanginese and other Wu languages:  The ads are entertaining. But I think the language is fake. Though it seems intended to sound like some incomprehensible Chinese dialect. I guess that there is a remote chance that it is real. But I will be really surprised if someone identifies any of it as a real language. The ads were probably filmed in the U.S., maybe the west coast, all in the same room, which if you look closely has hazard signs all printed in English and no Chinese at all.

Speaker of Taiwanese and Mandarin:  I do not understand any of them. Quite creative!

Fluent American speaker of Mandarin who also is conversant with Min topolects:  There's only enough to listen to in the first one. I hear 人 and 一點 in what sound like Wu forms. I'm surprised, however, not to hear the ubiquitous Wu form of 不.

Speaker of Mandarin and several Wu topolects:  It is none of the Yangtze Delta dialects I understand. Check with someone from Fujian or native Tawanese?

Fluent American speaker of Mandarin who also knows a lot about many of the topolects:  I do not speak any Wu dialect, but it should be fairly easy to find someone who does and ask them about it. There are Shanghai speakers all over the place in the US now, and Philly must be full of them.  I can understand some words and phrases in it, which leads me to suspect that it could perhaps be some form of Mandarin. Southern Mandarin of the Yangtze watershed would be a possibility, it seems to me. Or even some sort of Central Plains Mandarin (中原官話).  My wife says she cannot understand a single word of it, which I frankly think is a gross exaggeration due to a psychological block of some kind. (Some people totally shut down when they hear a speech form that is even slightly unfamiliar to them.  My wife is one of those people. For example, she also says she can't understand a word of Chaozhou/Shantou, but even I can sometimes catch entire phrases of it when I hear it, and I am not a native speaker of Southern Min. I think she just doesn't want to understand these things.)</span></span>

A couple of people from China suggested to me that the language might be that of Ruian (near Wenzhou) 瑞安的温州话, which has about 5,000,000 speakers.  But I only think they said that because the speech of Ruian is famous for being virtually impossible for outsiders to comprehend in the slightest, so much so that (along with other Wenzhou topolects) it has supposedly been used in wartime as a secret language (e.g., when the Chinese fought against the Vietnamese in 1979).

For references, see here, here, and here.

And, in this Wikipedia article, there is a section about the legendary incomprehensibility of Wenzhou topolects:

Due to its long history and the geographical features of the region on which it is located, Wenzhou Chinese is so eccentric in its phonology that it has the reputation of being the "least comprehensible dialect" for an average Mandarin speaker. It preserves some vocabulary from classical Chinese lost elsewhere, and has noticeable grammatical differences from Mandarin.

For those who wish to hear what Wenzhounese sounds like, here are some YouTube videos: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

One of my Chinese friends told me that someone online stated that the female speaker in the first video was from a place in Shanxi called Lishi 離石.  But I think that he said that only because that area — like Ruian in Wenzhou — has a reputation for being hard for outsiders to comprehend.

But what do the ads really say, and in what language are they spoken?  Here I concentrate only on the first ad because the other two ads have such a small amount of speech, and it is sotto voce.

The first expression spoken in the ad is one of the most ubiquitous utterances in Chinese:  zàijiàn 再見 ("goodbye").  It is strange to me that no Chinese speakers could recognize it.  Perhaps it is because it comes right at the beginning, is totally out of context, is spoken very quickly, and is not Modern Standard Mandarin.

A bit later comes yǐhòu 以後 ("after"), though with altered tones.  The same tonal alteration of yǐhòu 以後 ("after") is heard soon again and then once or twice more later on.

Other words that I hear are the following:

wúlùn 無論 ("regardless")

néng bùnéng wǎn yīdiǎn 能不能晚一點 ("can you [come] a bit later?")

zhèyàng ba 這樣吧 ("like this")

nǐ tīngjiàn 你聽見 ("did you hear?")

pò zhège zhōngguó màozi ("ruining this Chinese hat" [?])

nǐ gàn ma 你幹嘛 ("what are you doing?")

shénme dōngxi 什麼東西 ("what thing?")

yǒu zhème hǎo fǎzi 有這麼好法子 ("there's such a good way" [not sure of the next-to-last syllable])

tèbié 特別 ("special")

wǒ gěi nǐ nòng 我給你弄 ("I'll do it for you")

N.B.:  the order of what I've written down here is not necessarily that which is the actual sequence in the video, since I just quickly jotted down what I heard during several passes through the video. I probably can grasp twice again the amount of what I've given here, but this should afford an idea of the nature of the speech.  I'm fairly certain that it is basically some variety of Mandarin.

Of  course, what the voice is saying is totally unrelated to the actions in the video, so I suppose — in addition to the fast speed and muttered, altered quality of the speech –  that is a major factor in causing native speakers of Chinese to aver that they cannot understand anything that is being said.  Another problem is that at a number of points the pronunciation is electronically modulated in an unnatural way.

My question to Language Log readers is this:  why do foreign speakers of Chinese languages seem to pick up more of these ads than the native Chinese speakers for whom they were intended?

[Thanks to Mark Liberman, Ben Zimmer, W. South Coblin, Bob Ramsey, Richard VanNess Simmons, Sanping Chen, Cecilia Segawa Seigle, Xu Wenkan, Zhu Qingzhi, Minglang Zhou, Jidong Yang, Feng Shengli, David Spafford, Frank Chance, Kellen Parker, Nathan Hopson, Grace Wu, Haewon Cho, Gianni Wan, Cheng Fangyi, Rebecca Fu, Daniel Sou, Yunu Song, Sophie Wei, Chin Yi Young, Frank Lin, Summer Hu and her parents, and Stefan Krasowski]

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4625

Barbara Scholz died exactly two years ago today. Had she lived, I would have been drawing her attention to Newt Gingrich's latest YouTube video "We're Really Puzzled". Not because she would have liked this latest Gingrichian piece of Republican-oriented self-promotion (she would have hated it), but because he appears to be flirting with what she used to call strong or global or metaphysical Whorfianism, in a naive lexical variant form. (You can read Barbara's discussion of strong and weak Whorfian theses in this section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on philosophy of linguistics.) Holding up a smartphone, Gingrich says:

We're really puzzled here at Gingrich Productions. We've spent weeks trying to figure out: What do you call this? I know, you probably think it's a cell phone . . . But if it's taking pictures, it's not a cell phone."

Now, this may at first sound ridiculous; but in fact I do have an inkling of what moved Gingrich to embark on his piece of burbling.

I only recently abandoned my old cell phone (an ancient castoff from my brother, who still likes dumbphones) and acquired my first full-function smartphone. And indeed, phone doesn't seem quite the right root, not even with the smart- prefix. There is no way this thing is a telephone. It is a text-sending web-surfing FM radio alarm clock calculator calendar camera chronometer database e-reader task-manager music-player photo-editor navigator newspaper notepad stopwatch video-player voice-recorder phone. And that's really very different.

I have often tried here on Language Log, in playful or polemical ways, to critique naive lexical strong Whorfianism, which seems to take up most of the discussion of language that you find among the general public. And Gingrich's point is really grist to my mill.

Naive lexical global Whorfianism comes in two flavors. One, the world-to-word flavor, says that when a nation or tribe becomes enormously interested in some new activity or concept they feel impelled to make a new word to denote it. The other, the word-to-world flavor, says that we can't form a concept if we don't have a word to serve as the name for it. For real enthusiasts of the word-to-world flavor, the world as we perceive it is just a patchwork of concepts created by the network of words that we have.

Either way, it is alleged, you can tell what interests the members of a culture simply by examining the dictionary of their language. Nonlinguists are just entranced by this idea, as you can learn from magazine articles just about every week. Here's an absolutely typical recent example: a page devoted to a map of 19 emotions that English allegedly has no words for.

Let's take the tired old example of Schadenfreude. The idea is either (world to word) that (i) the feeling of experiencing joy at the misfortune of another person is so important for Germans that they made sure they developed a special word to name it, or (word to world) that (ii) German speakers only see Schadenfreude because they have that word, and English speakers in exactly the same contexts don't see it because they don't have the word for it (unless they manage to borrow the word Schadenfreude for it, of course, which seems to drive a coach and horses through the notion we're talking about; but set that aside for now).

Well, we English speakers have never had a word for a text-sending web-surfing FM radio alarm clock calculator calendar camera chronometer database e-reader task-manager music-player photo-editor navigator newspaper notepad stopwatch video-player voice-recorder phone. The concept was almost unimaginable as recently as about 1990. Yet the developers of these devices formed the concept quite easily, and invented products such as the iPhone.

Moreover, we all latched onto the idea of these devices quite easily without having a word to name them with. We had absolutely no noun that was remotely appropriate as the name for a text-sending web-surfing FM radio alarm clock calculator calendar camera chronometer database e-reader task-manager music-player photo-editor navigator newspaper notepad stopwatch video-player voice-recorder phone, and yet we have proved capable of learning about them, buying them, and using them everywhere all the time.

To refer to them we simply made use of a word we already had: phone. We used that as a lexical workaround for the magic things. Not that it mattered: we could have called them navigators, or web-searchers, or palm-browsers, or nanocomputers, or (borrowing from Star Trek) tricorders . . .

It doesn't matter that you don't have a word to name a certain concept (which is why Gingrich's appeal to his viewers to think one up is unnecessary). You get by. You cope.

Naive lexical global Whorfianism, in either flavor, is bunk.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130513.html

It was just eight minutes after sunrise, last week, and already there were four things in front of the Sun.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4621

One reason that I was so interested in San Duanmu's work on Chinese "elastic words" is that I'm in the middle of reading Perry Link's recent book An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics.

From the introduction:

In the fall of 1988, shortly after I arrived in Beijing for a year of work in the Beijing office of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China (administered by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences), I noticed a sign that was intended for pedestrians crossing Haidian Road. In other countries such a sign might have said “Caution” or “Look both ways.” But this one read: Yi kan, er man, san tongguo 一 看 ， 二 慢 ， 三 通 过 ‘First look, then go slowly, then cross’. The phrase is not only rhythmic but exhibits the 1– 2, 1– 2, 1– 2– 3 pattern of syllables that is at least as old as mirror inscriptions of the Han period and that has pervaded not only elite poetry but folksongs, proverbs, and storytelling in many later eras. (In Chinese it is called qiyan 七 言 ‘seven speakings’, and I will ask the non-Chinese-speaking reader to adopt it as a technical term.) A banner stretched above the road’s northbound lane, apparently intended for vehicles headed out of the city, read:

Gaogao xingxing chu cheng zou 高 高 兴 兴 出 城 走
An’an quanquan hui jia lai 安 安 全 全 回 家 来

Have a happy trip leaving the city, and be very safe in coming home.

Here was a couplet that exhibited not only the qiyan rhythm but grammatical parallelism and “semantic antitheticality” (i.e., paired opposites in meaning: chu ‘exit’ versus hui ‘return’ and zou ‘leave’ versus lai ‘come’) of a kind favored by classical poetry. The message seemed somehow more formal and exalted than if it had been put in ordinary language.

Formal? Exalted? I crossed the street and saw a public toilet. A sign warned: Jinzhi suidi daxiaobian 禁 止 随 地 大 小 便 ‘Don’t just relieve yourself anywhere you like’. Qiyan again. The pattern seemed useful in a variety of contexts, exalted or not, but in any case seemed to bear a kind of authority. Its partner wuyan 五 言 , the equally classical 1– 2, 1– 2– 3 syllabic pattern, was also widely in evidence. A television advertisement for cockroach killer promised: Zhanglang siguangguang 蟑 螂 死 光 光 ‘Cockroaches dead to the last one!’ Somehow the poison seemed a bit more lethal in wuyan. A notice for a childbirth class promised wutong fenmianfa 无 痛 分 娩 法 ‘pain-free delivery’. Could wuyan mollify even labor pain? No, I thought. But it was apparent that someone, somewhere had felt that wuyan could add credibility to a claim about pain reduction.

http://lessaccurategrandmother.blogspot.com/2013/05/review-ring-goes-east-by-j-r-r-tolkien.html

Hardcover, 189 pages Published 2000 (originally 1954) Acquired February 2011 Read May 2013

The Ring Goes East: Being the Fourth Book of The Lord of the Rings

'And we shouldn't be here at all, [said Sam] if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those that went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?' 

'I wonder,' said Frodo. 'But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to.' 

'No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it [...]. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! [...] Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?' 

'No, they never end as tales,' said Frodo. 'But the people in then come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later – or sooner.' 

[...] 'Still, I wonder if shall ever be put into songs or tales. We're in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: "Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring!" And they'll say: "Yes, that's one of my favorite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn't he dad?" "Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that's saying a lot."' 

'It's saying a lot too much,' said Frodo, and he laughed, a long clear laugh from his heart. [...] 'Why Sam,' he said, 'to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you've left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. "I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn't they put in more of his talk, dad? That's what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn't have got far without Sam, would he, dad?"' 

'Now, Mr. Frodo,' said Sam, 'you shouldn't make fun. I was serious.' 

'So was I,' said Frodo, 'and so I am.' (pp. 149-51)

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4616

During my recent visit to Michigan, San Duanmu told me about some really neat work that he published last year as "Word-length preferences in Chinese: a corpus study", Journal of East Asian Linguistics 21.1: 89-114, 2012.

San starts from the observation that many Chinese words have two forms, a two-syllable form and a one-syllable frorm, whose meanings are more or less the same.  For example:

In "How many Chinese words have elastic length?", in Feng Shi and Gang Peng, Eds., Festschrift in honor of Prof. William S-Y. Wang's 80th birthday, 2011, San found that that

80%-90% of all Chinese words have elastic length. In addition, the percentage for verbs is higher than the average, and the percentage for nouns is higher still.

And he observes that

The long form may look like a compound, but it is not. For example, the long form of hu ‘tiger’ is laohu, which literally means ‘old tiger’. However, laohu simply means ‘tiger’, not ‘old tiger’, because even a baby tiger can be called laohu. Similarly, the long form of mei ‘coal’ is meitan, which literally means ‘coal-charcoal’ but actually means ‘coal’, not ‘coal and charcoal’.

But the one-syllable and two-syllable versions are not equally likely to be used in all contexts. Specifically, in a closely-associated two-word sequence, there are four logical possibilities:

2+2  2+1  1+2  1+1

Based on a quantitative analysis of the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese, San's study found that

1+2 is overwhelmingly disfavored in [N N] and 2+1 is overwhelmingly disfavored in [V O]. In addition, it is found that apparent exceptions, ranging between 1% and 2%, are limited to certain specific structures, and when these are factored out, both 1+2 [N N] and 2+1 [V O] are well below 1% in either token count or type count.

Others have noted these regularities, though San's paper is the first to support the intuitions with systematic corpus-based counts.

A non-corpus-based illustration: in combining méi (tàn) "coal" with (shāng) diàn "store" to make a noun+noun combination meaning "coal store", we could have méi tàn + shāng diàn = 2+2, or méi tàn + diàn = 2+1, or méi + diàn = 1+1, but NOT méi + shāng diàn = 1+2.

And in combining zhòng (zhí) "to plant" with (dà) suàn "garlic", to make a verb+object combination meaning "to plant garlic", we could have zhòng zhí + dà suàn = 2+2, or zhòng + dà suàn = 1+2, or zhòng + suàn = 1+1, but NOT zhòng zhí + suàn = 2+1.

So to repeat, [N N] can be anything except 1+2, while [V O] can be anything but 2+1.

Why?

Some people have argued that this is a prosodic restriction: basically, in an [N N] structure, the first N should be stronger (and hence not smaller than) the second one; but in a [V O] structure, the object should be stronger than the verb. Others have argued for a syntactic or semantic treatment.

San observes that there are several reasons why a careful study of usage is helpful in answering these questions. For example, there are quite a few exceptions, such as 皮手套 pí shǒutào "leather glove" or 喜歡錢 xǐhuan qián "love money". Then there's the question of the relative frequency of the preferred patterns (2+2, 2+1, 1+1 for [N N], 2+2, 1+2, 1+1 for [V N]). And there are cases where different patterns exist for the same phrase, with slightly different meanings. And so on.

Here are a couple of graphs from the paper:

For San's explanation of the exceptions as well as the rules, you should read his paper, which is quite accessible for outsiders.

Corpus-based studies of this kind are becoming more frequent, for theoretical as well as practical reasons. I have a modest suggestion for making them more useful, which is to publish the details of the underlying annotations as well as the summary statistics and the resulting conclusions.

San does something like this in part, by adding an appendix that lists all of the 45 exceptional 1+2 [N N] examples and all of the 56 exceptional 2+1 [V O] examples from the Lancaster corpus.  But he doesn't provide their detailed locations in the corpus, nor the identity and locations of the (much larger number of) regular cases.

The annotation of the regular cases is non-trivial, since the Lancaster corpus provides no annotation of syntactic bracketing. San had to find all the instances of noun-noun and verb-noun sequences not separated by punctuation, and then screen (a 10% sample of) these manually to determine the "error" rates for different subcases. His final numbers were determined by applying the resulting proportions to the total string-based counts.

Other researchers may well want to check or extend this annotation, or to look at other aspects of the differentiation among length patterns, in this or other collections of Chinese text. In doing so, they should be able to start from an exact documentation of San's annotations.

Obviously, it wouldn't make sense to offer such data as a traditional "printed" appendix (even if no one ever actually printed it out). But it would be easy to define a form of stand-off annotation that would encode exactly which cases were classified in which way; and the results could be published as "supplementary materials".

If such documentation became common, then it could be interpreted by interactive programs for browsing, annotating, or analysing corpora, just as people now use Praat TextGrids (or other common annotation formats) in the case of audio collections.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130512.html

Sometimes the sky above can become quite a show.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4620

Reader J.W.J. sent in a link to "A brief list of misused English terminology in EU publications", a document to be found on the web site of the European Commission under the heading of "Translation and Drafting Resources". Though perhaps "brief" by the standards of the European Commission, this remarkable document is in fact 33 pages long. Its Introduction begins:

Over the years, the European institutions have developed a vocabulary that differs from that of any recognised form of English. It includes words that do not exist or are relatively unknown to native English speakers outside the EU institutions (‘planification’, ‘to precise’ or ‘telematics’ for example) and words that are used with a meaning, often derived from other languages, that is not usually found in English dictionaries (‘coherent’ being a case in point). Some words are used with more or less the correct meaning, but in contexts where they would not be used by native speakers (‘homogenise’, for example).

The body of the document includes footnoted examples, with explanations and suggested alternatives. For example:

Planification

Explanation: ‘Planification’ does not exist in English, but it comes up quite regularly. The example below comes from a published Court report.

Example: ‘Simplified procedures and better planification should make it possible to even out the caseload under FP6, improving internal control and speeding up processes⁸³.’

Alternative: planning.

Footnote 83 leads here, though unfortunately I get a "504 Gateway Time-out" error for that link. However, a web search for {"simplified procedures and better planification"} locates this alternative link.

Among the many lovely examples of Eurenglish (Euroglish?) on display, there are some for which Brussels bears at most secondary responsibility:

Comitology

Explanation: There are 1 253 instances of the word ‘comitology’ in EUR-Lex. However, not only does the word not exist outside the EU institutions, but it is formed from a misspelt stem (committee has two ‘m’s and two ‘t’s) and a suffix that means something quite different (-ology/-logy means ‘the science of’ or ‘the study of’. It is therefore highly unlikely that an outsider would be able to deduce its meaning, even in context.

Example: ‘The Commission must draft new rules setting out the powers and workings of the bodies replacing the Committees in the framework of the now-abolished comitology procedure, to ensure that the new system operates properly³².’

Alternative: The official term is ‘committee procedure’.

"Comitology" actually has an OED entry, with the first citations well before the 1993 Maastricht Treaty established the European Union:

Originally: the study of the organization and functions of committees. In later use also: committees and their practices considered collectively, now esp. in the context of the implementation of European Union legislation and policy.

1956   C. N. Parkinson in Economist 3 Nov. 395/1   The Life cycle of the committee is so basic to our knowledge of current affairs that it is surprising that more attention has not been paid to the science of comitology.
1966   Times 15 Sept. 1/4   Comitology (the Science of Committee-sitting) is an old method of playing for time.
1974   Amer. Speech 49 215   We need a term for the study of committees, their structure and functioning. How about commitology?

And the (entirely straight-faced) Wikipedia article suggests that even the OED's gloss is too limited:

Comitology in the European Union refers to a process by which EU law is modified or adjusted and takes place within "comitology committees" chaired by the European Commission. Comitology committees are part of the EU's broader system of committees that assist in the making, adoption, and implementation of EU laws.

Anyhow, although the misused-terminology memo seems a bit fussy in spots, it includes many lovely quotations:

‘In case of pigs and poultry, at least 20 % of the feed shall come from the farm unit itself.’

‘The rights of the operators should be guaranteed through a contradictory procedure with its Flag State, the criteria for the listing should be clear, objective and transparent, and the de-listing process when the criteria are not met any longer should also be foreseen.’

‘An alert mechanism that allows competent authorities to warn other Member States of a serious risk caused by an economic operator to the proper and secure functioning of the Single Market.’

‘This proposal for a new basic regulation is justified because there is a need to precise the objectives of the CFP.’

‘Whereas Article 4 (a) of Commission Regulation (EEC) No 1164/89 (3), as last amended by Regulation (EEC) No 2095/93 (4), lays down, inter alia, that the aid is to be granted only in respect of areas harvested, on condition that normal cultivation work has been carried out; whereas, if the aid scheme is to operate properly, a definition should be given of what is meant by harvest, on the one hand, and on the other only those cultivation practices which seek to valorize almost the whole of the product cultivated should be accepted.’

‘An important part of the system is the role played by the Control and Finance Section which has to visa all transactions before they can be authorised.’

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4619

In "Unknown Language #7", I described the case of a woman in a refugee center in Kathmandu, Nepal who spoke in an unidentifiable tongue and who wrote in an odd mixture of languages and scripts.  The post generated a large number of comments (173 at last count), with a tremendous amount of helpful information and analysis being shared by Language Log readers.

Now I have just heard from Son Ha Dinh, who first brought this case to my attention, that — with the help of Language Log readers and the diligent efforts of his colleagues — the identity of the woman has been determined.

Here is the summary report that Son Ha sent to me:

Dear all,

I am sorry I haven't posted something here even though I often thought of this forum, all the commentators, and the vexing mystery of the lady's origin.  While my colleagues in Kathmandu continued to work on the puzzle, I went on a 2-week vacation.  The only good news I got prior to leaving for vacation was that she responded well to her new environment.  With that development I was hoping that eventually she would also regain her memory.  Upon returning to Nepal, I received news of a potential breakthrough in the case: the woman mentioned the name of her adviser while she was at the university.  Using Google, my colleagues found a match and decided to email this professor.  This prof was able to identify the lady via archived photos and provided an Indian address in Delhi.  Another colleague checked out the physical address and found a vacant house.  We thought it was a dead-end, but fortunately the neighbors provided more clues which eventually enabled us to contact a family member and receive a second confirmation that her nationality is Indian.  We are now formulating the best ways to move forward for our lady.

I wanted to thank you all of you and professor Mair for all the insightful comments and suggestions (many of which we've tested and tried via sending voice and written samples to colleagues and missions around the world).

Outside of this case, I have marked this site for frequent visit and reading, so you will probably see me commenting on other posts in the future.

I am very grateful to Son Ha for sharing this report with us and for his own hard work in solving the identity of the lady.  We have learned that the last known address of the lady was in New Delhi, but  questions remain.  I still wonder whether she might originally have come from somewhere in the area between Sikkim-Bhutan and Myanmar / Burma. The route she took from Delhi to Nepal also remains a puzzle.  Perhaps we shall never know the full story behind the woman who spoke an unknown language and wrote in an indecipherable combination of scripts, but at least we know where she came from before entering the refugee center in Nepal, which is a lot more than we knew when we began this quest on February 27, 2013.  I wish to express my personal gratitude to all who participated in this worthy endeavor.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4618

Yesterday afternoon, I got this interesting email message:

The departure time for US Airways flight # 3314, from Detroit to Philadelphia on May 11 at 6:05 PM has changed. The flight is delayed due to air traffic at the destination airport. Your estimated time of Departure is 6:05 PM.

6:05 PM was the originally scheduled departure time, so this communication puzzled me. Then I read an earlier email, which by the last-in-first-out logic of email queues came later in my list of pending messages:

The departure time for US Airways flight # 3314, from Detroit to Philadelphia on May 11 at 6:05 PM has changed. The flight is delayed due to air traffic at the destination airport. Your estimated time of Departure is 6:40 PM.

It's easy to guess the algorithm that led to this sequence. But I'm at a loss for terminology. Is there a word for a silly or meaningless communication, generated in a specific class of circumstances by an algorithm that normally generates sensible messages?

Update — I should add the the flight did leave on time, and that I was happy to have been told that there would be a delay, and then that there wouldn't be a delay. But it's interesting that there's no "never mind" message template.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4617

Just now I was washing breakfast dishes and mentally composing a Facebook post, which started out “Last night was not a good night for Orioles – Red Sox – anti-Yankees fans! The three way tie for first place got broken in the worst direction! Us and our Red Sox buddies …” and I forget how that sentence was going to end, because I was caught up short noticing how it began. I’ve known about the ongoing spread of the ‘accusative’ pronouns forever – Sapir wrote about it (as a case of “language drift”), and Ed Klima, one of my favorite grad school professors, had worked on it and talked with us about it (we tried to figure out what kinds of rules would make ‘us’ and ‘me’ not get nominative in conjoined subjects while "I" and "we" as simple subjects are obligatorily marked nominative, and discussed similarities with French ‘disjunctive’ pronoun ‘moi’ vs. clitic subject 'je'). And it was the source of my oft-repeated anecdote about my son Morriss in 4^th grade asking me to proofread a composition he had just written – it started out ‘Seth and I went to the mall’ and he pointed to ‘Seth and I’, and said to me “That’s how you spell “me and Seth”, right?”.

But none of that had prepared me for having it emerge in my own dialect. But there it was. And when I think about putting “We and our Red Sox buddies” instead, it sounds over-formal, doesn’t fit in the context of baseball buddies. So it looks like “us and …” has made the move from passive recognition to becoming an active part of my (most?) colloquial register, at least the baseball buddies register.

Fun – I think I just gave myself a little lesson both about language change and about sociolinguistics and registers. Now I’m just waiting to see whether in my baseball register, I’ll start using the simple-present counterfactuals that I have found so interesting in baseball interviews (“He catches that ball, we’re into extra innings.” They’ll never say “If he had caught that ball, we would have been into extra innings” – though they might say “If he would of caught that ball, we would have been into extra innings.” I think the simple-present one is new since my brother’s day, but I’m not a dialectologist, that’s only my subjective impression.)

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130511.html

This week the shadow of the New Moon

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130510.html

Face-on

http://lessaccurategrandmother.blogspot.com/2013/05/faster-than-dc-bullet-birds-of-prey_10.html

Comic trade paperback, n.pag. Published 2012 (contents: 2011-12) Borrowed from the library Read May 2013

Birds of Prey, Volume 1: Trouble in Mind

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4615

A topic which I have raised here and elsewhere a number of times is that of Sinitic topolects and languages (www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf), and I have also called attention to the increasing domination of Mandarin in education and the media.  Even native speakers within China sometimes don't appreciate quite how varied the Sinitic group of languages can be.  People often say that someone can move from one valley to the next, or one village to the next, and just not be able to make themselves understood.  But until you've been in that situation yourself, it doesn't really hit home.  Before long, I'll post on Shanghainese and will provide audio recordings that will demonstrate clearly just how different it is from Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM).  There are countless other varieties of "Chinese" that are just as different from each other as Shanghainese (or Cantonese or Taiwanese, for that matter) are from MSM.

As I reported some time ago in "The Phasing out of Chinese 'Dialects'", this extraordinary richness is steadily diminishing and the government is gradually removing "dialect" programming from prime-time TV.

A new website called Phonemica, or Xiāngyīn Yuàn 乡音苑 (lit., "garden of local accents / pronunciation"), is part of a project to collect recordings in every variety of spoken Sinitic.  It has 50 recordings from the mainland and Taiwan as of now, mapped and categorized according to the variety of "Chinese" being spoken, and is aiming to have 500 within the next year, including recordings from Chinese-speaking communities outside "Greater China", i.e., throughout the "Sinosphere".

The recordings are all made and transcribed by volunteers, with the goal of getting close friends and relatives to record each other speaking their most casual, unrehearsed, and authentic mother tongue.  Anyone who doubts just how different the so-called dialects of "Chinese" are can click on a map to hear samples of speech from different parts of the country. The homepage is here in English or here in Mandarin.

I believe that Phonemica is a valuable site.  I would urge everyone who is interested in Sinitic dialectology and phonology both to use it and to contribute to it.

[Thanks to Steve Hansen and Kellen Parker]

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130509.html

As the New Moon

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4614

This marvelous device is the pride of Hang Fung Industrial Co. Ltd of Shantou / Swatow, Guangdong Province, PRC.  Here's a basic introduction to the tool:

Useful assistant tool Can helps some arthritis, the waist, the knee, the pregnant woman and also The luo river to solve the question. Multifunctional tool Multifunction tool for the accident situation security, reliable for the Escapes from the broken glass window and the safety belt cut off.

This information is provided under "Product Details" at this website.

Looking at the picture of this enigmatic tool and carefully reading over the explanation of its supposed uses only left me deeply perplexed, so I had no choice but to go in pursuit of yet one more Chinglish snark.

Fortunately, there is a more elaborate presentation on the nature of the handybar here.

Useful assistant tool

Can helps some arthritis, the waist, the knee, the pregnant woman and also the Luo river to solve the question.

Multifunctional tool

Multifunction tool for the accident situation security, reliable for the escapes from the broken glass window and the safety belt cut off.

Presented in this format, with more photographs and the cute, trundling car at the top of the page, the purposes of the handybar become somewhat clearer, but you're still probably wondering just what the real virtues of this miraculous tool are.  Fortunately, we have the Chinese originals for these Chinglish translations:

Duō yòngtú fúzhù gōngjù

Yāobù, xiàzhī sǔnshāng jí guānjié yánhuànzhě, yùnfù de xiàchē fúzhù gōngjù.

Duō yòngtú zìjiù gōngjù

Zìjiù gōngjù bùkě quēshǎo Aqua Gear™ fúshǒubǐng, zài shìgù qíngxíng xià de ānquándài kòu shīlíng, zuì kěkào jiěkāi ānquándài hé pòsuì bōlíchuāng de táoshēng gōngjù.

多用途扶助工具

腰部， 下肢損傷及關節炎患者，孕婦的下車扶助工具。

多用途自救工具

自救工具不可缺少Aqua Gear™扶手柄，在事故情形下的安全帶扣失靈，最可靠解開安全帶和破碎玻璃窗的逃生工具。

Multi-use support tool

Tool for those with injuries of the back or lower limbs or who are suffering from arthritis, or for supporting pregnant women getting out of a car.

Multi-use self-rescue tool

Essential Aqua Gear™ support handle self-rescue tool, for use in accidents when one's seat belt buckle is inoperable, this is the most reliable escape tool for getting out of one's seat belt and for breaking through glass windows.

Even with these more accurate translations, there is much that remains puzzling about the handybar.  While many of the problems are solved by the visuals here (you can click on this jpg to make it larger),  the verbal explanations (both in Chinese and English) in many cases only add to the confusion.  Above all, smack dab in the middle of this impressive slide, we find "PURPOSE USE", with the mystifying explanations of "An assistant tool" and "Multifunctional tool" that we have already labored over.  Most tormenting of all is the reference to "the Luo river to solve the question", which is completely missing from the Chinese text!

I've asked about a dozen native speakers what they make of this incredibly baffling reference, and so far none of them has a clue.  Some of them said that it makes their brain hurt to think about it.  What is still more aggravating is that this same direction — "the Luo river to solve the question" (or different formulations of the same expression) — appears in instruction manuals for other Chinese products.  And you know that you have a truly serious conundrum on your hands when even the Australian Kayak Fishing Forum devotes a long discussion to (unsuccessfully) unravelling it.

Since no one else seems to have come up with a satisfactory explication of "the Luo river to solve the question", I guess that I'll have to take a stab at it.

The first thing that I thought of when I saw "the Luo river" are the famous luò shū 洛書 ("Luo Writing / Inscription") and the hé tú 河圖 ("River Chart") which are invariably paired in ancient writing.  If you Google on    luo river chart   (no quotation marks) in English and   河圖洛書   (no quotation marks) in Chinese, you will find many references to these mystical diagrams that are important in numerology and geomancy.  Basically, the "Luo Inscription" and the "River Chart" are explanatory devices in traditional Chinese correlative cosmology.  To speak of them in a non-specialist way in modern times is tantamount to saying "explanatory chart", which, I believe, is roughly what the authors of the advertising material for the handybar were attempting to express when they spoke of "the Luo river to solve the question".  In other words, the handybar comes with an illustrated instruction sheet to answer questions and explain its usage.

The only other thing I might add is that the "Luo river" may conceivably have morphed out of the nonce term " luótú" 羅圖 ("display chart"), but that would not have been necessary for the author(s) of the advertising copy to get to "the Luo river to solve the question" in the sense of "explanatory chart".

[A tip of the hat to Dan Chall]

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130508.html

A tremendous explosion has occurred in the nearby universe and major telescopes across Earth and space are investigating.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4613

A month ago, I posted an "SOS for DARE," detailing the impending financial threat faced by the Dictionary of American Regional English, a national treasure of lexicography. At the time it appeared that the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, where DARE is based, would be unable to provide support to offset the loss of federal and private grant money. But now there's finally some good news out of Madison, in the form of new funds from the University and external gifts.

UW-Madison News reports:

Last month, the financial picture looked bleak for the Dictionary of American Regional English.

But the picture has improved with a $100,000 gift from an anonymous donor, announced last week following the dictionary's Board of Visitors meeting in Chicago, and a $30,000 gift from the American Dialect Society — the group that in 1962 asked the late Frederic Cassidy, a UW-Madison English professor, to create a dictionary of dialects of American English.

The dictionary known as DARE is also receiving one-time funding of $100,000 in non-tuition, non-state funding from the UW-Madison College of Letters & Science, which has been working with the dictionary staff to develop a new business plan to attract more new donors to the project. Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Paul DeLuca and Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration Darrell Bazzell have also committed $130,000 a year in central campus support for DARE for the next three years.

While this is indeed welcome news, DARE will still need to rely on the generosity of private donors to fund much of its budget in coming years. If you're interested in contributing, just click the "Donate" button on the DARE home page.

Update: Here's some local coverage of the news, from WKOW Madison:

Update #2: Gifts have continued to pour in, as Mark Johnson reports in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4612

On the web site of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in the "Early Edition" section, is an article by Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade: "Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia". The authors claim that a set of 23 especially frequent words can be used to establish genetic relationships of languages that go way, way back — too far back for successful application of the standard historical linguistics methodology for establishing language families, the Comparative Method.  The idea is that, once you've determined that these 23 words are super-stable (because they're used so often), you don't need systematic sound/meaning correspondences at all; finding resemblances among these words across several language families is enough to prove that the languages are related, descended with modification from a single parent language (a.k.a. proto-language).

This is the latest of many attempts to get around the unfortunate fact that systematic sound/meaning correspondences in related languages decay so much over time that even if the words survive, they are unrecognizable as cognates (sets of words descended from the same word in the parent language).   This means that word sets that have similar meanings and also sound similar after 15,000 years are unlikely to share those similar sounds as the result of inheritance from a common ancestor; if they were really such ancient cognates, they would almost surely not look much alike at all. (See "Scrabble tips for time travelers", 2/26/2009, for a discussion of some earlier work.)

I'm not qualified to judge Pagel et al.'s statistics, although I remain skeptical of their basic claim that words that haven't been replaced often in a handful of language families with vastly different time depths can be predicted to be super-stable in all language families. But there are problems with their premises in this article, in which their goal is to compare words from seven different language families and to show that, according to their statistics, all seven should be grouped together into a single super-family. I think they have a serious garbage in, garbage out problem.

Pagel et al. used their statistical method to compare reconstructed words for the seven language families they identify: Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Dravidian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Kartvelian, and Uralic. One problem is that Eskimo is not a language family; it's part of the Eskimo-Aleut language family, and any effort to find deeper genetic relationships for Eskimo that doesn't take Aleut data into account is not likely to be useful.

A more serious problem is that Altaic is at best highly controversial as a proposed language family. The hypothesized Altaic family comprises three well-established families — Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus — plus Korean and Japanese. It's a very old idea, but efforts to provide convincing evidence that all these languages belong in a single Altaic family have failed to convince most specialists. A prominent recent exchange appeared in the journal Diachronica (2004, 2005), starting with Stefan Georg's devastating review of Sergei Starostin et al., Etymological dictionary of the Altaic languages, and continuing with Starostin's reply and Georg's reply to the reply. In his reply, Starostin commented plaintively that he had hoped `that the publication of more than 2000…Altaic etymologies would put an end' to the dispute about whether an Altaic language family exists. To this Georg responds, though not in these words, that 2000+ unconvincing etymologies do not add up to any convincing etymologies at all.

In his review, Georg criticizes Starostin et al. for erroneous reconstructions of words in the individual language families and for a very loose standard of semantic "matching". The latter may be the most common criticism of word comparisons in efforts to establish very distant linguistic relationships; the other major criticism is a very loose standard of phonetic "matching". Given enough semantic and phonetic latitude, it's possible to amass a large number of "matching" sets of words for any set of two or more randomly selected languages. (If you don't believe me, try it: take bilingual dictionaries and search for similar-looking words that have vague semantic connections. It's an easy exercise.)

So I went to the website from which Pagel et al. got their data, the Languages of the World Etymological Database, and checked their 23 words in the Altaic database, which is presumably derived from Starostin et al.'s three-volume etymological dictionary. Only two of the 23 words have a single "Proto-Altaic" etymon each in the database, `what' and `spit (verb)'. All the others (except perhaps `I', `we', and `ye', which I couldn't find due to problems with the search function) have 2-7 "Proto-Altaic" forms each, and at least nine of the words have five or six each. How did Pagel et al. decide which "Proto-Altaic" word to compare to their other six reconstructed proto-languages? They apparently examined all of the possible words for each translation, e.g. five "Proto-Altaic" words for `that', four for `hear', 5 for `flow', 4 for `hand', and so forth; they then chose just one proto-word for each meaning, namely, the one `that the LWED proposed as cognate between language families', and used that one for their statistical analyses. This is a puzzling procedure, for two reasons. First, the Altaic database (and the Indo-European database too, and perhaps others as well) often lists more than one proto-word as cognate with words in some of the other six proposed language families. Pagel et al. do not say how they decided which set of putative cognates to select. Second, while acknowledging that linguists often `propose more than one proto-word for a given meaning', they observe that these proposals `can reflect synonyms in the proto-language or, more likely, uncertainty as to which of the words used among a language family's extant languages are most likely to be cognate to the ancestral word.' But if they believe (erroneously!) that synonyms are unlikely in proto-languages, and that apparent synonyms probably reflect linguists' uncertainty, how can they be confident that any selection from one of several options for a given meaning for the proto-language is the genuine one and only word for that meaning in the proto-language? What does this indeterminacy do to their claim that words for certain meanings are super-stable, unlikely to be replaced over thousands of years? And doesn't it introduce an element of circularity into their statistical calculations when they choose the set of proto-words to be compared according to its putative match with other language families and not according to an independent criterion?

There are other serious problems too. Unlike Altaic, most of the other families in the LWED databases are genuine language families. But if the "Proto-Altaic" reconstructions are representative of the quality of the reconstructions for the established families, it would be rash to rely on them. This is in spite of the fact that some of the reconstruction databases (e.g. Indo-European and Dravidian) are based on standard etymological dictionaries. The "Altaic" database contains variables in numerous reconstructions — usually V for an unspecified vowel, but also optional and alternate consonants — that make phonetic "matching" even easier (and therefore less reliable). This is a feature of many reconstructions carried out by people engaging in long-range comparison of languages, including efforts to establish a Nostratic super-family. In at least some of the individual LWED databases, the reconstructions based on standard sources have been `revised and significantly modified' (quoting George Starostin, Dravidian database) by others, and those others are believers not only in Altaic but in the super-family Nostratic. Reconstructions carried out by true believers in Nostratic are all too likely to be influenced by knowledge of words with vaguely similar meanings and/or forms in other proposed Nostratic languages — namely, in the LWED databases, the seven families compared by Pagel et al.

I also checked Pagel et al.'s supposedly super-stable words in the LWED's Indo-European (IE) database. One notable fact is that, of these 23 words, English retains only 6 or 7, assuming that the LWED's database is accurate — a fact that might be expected to limit Pagel et al.'s confidence in the reliability of their 23 words as an indicator of genetic relatedness. The count for English depends in part on whether the IE database has accurate reconstructions — `spit' in particular is dubious, because this IE database disagrees with the Oxford English dictionary (OED) here and the sounds don't match well enough to be convincing. I haven't checked all of the relevant LWED etymologies, but it looks there's a reasonable Proto-Indo-European etymology for the English words give, man, mother, fire, flow, and worm, in their current meanings.

The IE database has a sizable number of eyebrow-raising etymologies; like the database for "Altaic", it does not inspire confidence, although there is of course no question about the relatedness of the IE languages. There are many variables in the reconstructions, and many the forms themselves often bear little resemblance to mainstream Indo-Europeanists' reconstructions. The semantic looseness is often extreme. For instance, the database glosses a reconstructed form *(a)den@gh- (where @ = schwa) as `to reach, to seize, to have time'. Among the proposed descendants of this form are a Tocharian B form meaning `rise, raise oneself up', an "Old Indian" (Sanskrit?!) form meaning `reach, strike', an "Old Greek" (Ancient Greek?!) form meaning `with the teeth, biting together', and an Old Irish form meaning `repress, oppress, suppress, crush, put down'. This is typical of the semantic latitude. Formally, too, there are problems. The proposed "Old Indian" descendant of this proto-word is given as daghnoti, possibly on the assumption that the nasal of the reconstructed root metathesized with the gh; but the nasal of the Sanskrit form is a present tense suffix, not part of the root at all. So Sanskrit (by whatever name) doesn't match the database's proto-word phonetically.

If the reconstructions used by Pagel et al. for their statistical analyses are not reliable in either form or meaning, then the statistical results of comparing these reconstructions cannot provide any evidence for distant relationships among the seven groups they compare. If the selection procedure for choosing among several candidate proto-words to use for the statistical analysis is flawed, then there may be problems with the statistics as well. But even if there are no statistical flaws, the Pagel et al. paper is yet another sad example of major scientific publications accepting and publishing articles on historical linguistics without bothering to ask any competent historical linguists to review the papers in advance.

There is a larger moral here too. Early in their paper, Pagel et al. report, correctly, that after 5,000-9,000 years, `most words are thought to suffer from too much semantic and phonetic erosion to allow secure identification of true cognates', in particular (though they don't emphasize this point) because of the decay and loss of `the sound and meaning correspondences…which are thought to indicate that they derive from common ancestral words.' The authors intend their statistical method to provide evidence for relatedness of languages that are beyond the reach of the Comparative Method. Like other long-rangers with dreams of discovering bigger and bigger family groupings — maybe even the ur-human language, what the late Joseph Greenberg called Proto-Sapiens — Pagel et al. believe that abandoning the one method that is known (not just "thought") to be reliable can achieve the goal. But you still can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Update — also see Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis, "Do 'Ultraconserved Words' Reveal Linguistic Macro-Families?", GeoCurrents 5/10/2013.

http://lessaccurategrandmother.blogspot.com/2013/05/faster-than-dc-bullet-birds-of-prey.html

Comic trade paperback, n.pag. Published 2012 (contents: 2011) Borrowed from the library Read May 2013

Birds of Prey: The Death of Oracle

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4611

"Disney files to trademark Mexican holiday, Dia de Los Muertos", Stitchkingdom 5/6/2013; "Disney files to trademark 'Dia de Los Muertos' for movie-themed products", 89.3 KPCC 5/7/2013.

Applications were filed to cover:

I guess all these products are out of luck…

Update — Apparently there were some complaints, and Disney decided that it might not try to own this holiday after all.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4610

Once you've written down your responses to the dozen audio clips in yesterday's perception experiment, you can check them against the truth, and also against the transcripts generated by Google's automatic captioning system, both given below.

These clips all come from the YouTube videos of Donald Kagan's farewell address ("Donald Kagan's farewell", 5/5/2013). I noticed the mistaken ASR segments when I used the text of the automated transcription to skim the content.

My point here is not at all to make fun of Google's speech recognition capabilities. I've long been a staunch defender of current ASR technology in general, and Google's implementation of it in particular. And in fact, the overall quality of the Kagan transcripts is very good — there are stretches where nearly all the words are correct.

Still, errors of the kind illustrated above indicate some of the… shall we say, areas for potential improvement.

There are some cases where the transcript is a plausible rendering of the pronunciation, but is not very plausible as English-language content, e.g. "the searched ford general …" in place of "the search for general …", or "like adams molecule selves and tissues" for "like atoms molecules cells and tissues". I'm surprised that the recognizer's n-gram language model, which is contemporary ASR's approximation to what makes sense, made these choices. And there are a few things that are just bizarre, where I can only imagine that some obscure bug has short-circuited Google's language model entirely:  "became evermore phadke" for "became ever more vague", or "tutsi you can write" in place of "to each new generation".

But I'm most interested in cases where the language model is producing plausible sequences that are totally inconsistent with the sound. "What use electrolytic pickling?" is an exhilaratingly poetic substitution for "What is a liberal education?" Unfortunately, there's no way that anyone who knows English can hear Kagan's "a liberal education" as "electrolytic pickling":

Something similar has happened when the self-correction in "fa- sciences" leads it to be rendered as "font size is":

Or when "repository of learning" turns into "repulsive tory of learning":

The ASR system can hear "a liberal education" as "electrolytic pickling", or "fa- sciences" as "font size is", or "repository of learning" as "repulsive tory of learning", only because current ASR's acoustic models are extremely diffuse, extremely forgiving of deviations from the sounds they have been trained to expect. This is partly a virtue, because it allows systems to cope with speaker variation, pronunciation variation, and variation in recording conditions. But it's also a weakness, because it allows the language model to introduce this kind of phonetically impossible interpretation.

Of course, there's also a language-modeling issue here, because in the context of Kagan's overall talk, "electrolytic pickling" is a highly implausible bigram, and an adaptive language model should have noticed this. But I want to underline what these examples illustrate about the problems with the acoustic models in current ASR systems, as discussed in "High-entropy speech recognition, automatic and otherwise", 1/5/2013.

As promised in that post, we're going ahead with the idea of creating a high-entropy isolated-word test set. The idea is to define a list of about 60,000 English wordforms that most literate speakers would know (how to use, how to pronounce, how to recognize, how to spell); to record a set of speakers reading randomly-selected items from that list; to test the recognition accuracy of a set of listeners on those test sets; and to compare this to the recognition accuracy of ASR systems.

The goal is to evaluate the extent to which the fuzziness of current acoustic models is really a problem, and to provide a task where the quality of acoustic models can be tested in a high-entropy (~ 16 bits per item) setting.

Creating the list of wordforms is not an entirely trivial problem. I started with the commonest words in the Google unigram corpus; but a random sample of the 64k commonest all-alphabetic words includes about 10-15% of things like glycosuria, tiefmeyer, politica, and azam. Similarly inappropriate things can be found even in the commonest 30k wordforms in that list, while there are plenty of appropriate choices at ranks lower than 64k.

So I made a list of about 80,000 wordforms by combining items from a number of different lists; and I've recruited some people to judge these for appropriateness, with the idea of cutting the list back to a more plausible subset. We're about 40% through this process — if you're a native speaker of American English, with good intuitions about what words ordinary literate Americans are likely to know, and you'd like to volunteer to help out, send me email.

http://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/the-mile-long-spaceship-kate-wilhelm/

http://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/?p=906

The Mile-Long Spaceship, Kate Wilhelm (1963)
Review by Joachim Boaz

Kate Wilhelm, famous for her Hugo-winning masterwork Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976), started her writing career with more modest works. The Mile-Long Spaceship collects some of her earliest short stories from the late 50s and a few written for the collection in the early 60s — Clone, her first novel, co-written with Theodore L Thomas would come out in 1965. However, her best sf was published in the late 60s to the mid-70s. Before then her work tended to be straight-forward with an occasional interesting idea or poignant scene but generally unremarkable….

Three stories are worth reading in this collection: an early work of feminist science fiction – ‘No Light in the Window’ (1963), a moody rumination on the claustrophobia of space travel – ‘The Man Without a Planet’ (1962), and an intriguing but underwhelming first contact story – ‘The Mile-Long Spaceship’ (1957).

Recommended for fans of Wilhelm who are curious about her earliest forays into the genre or those (like myself) who are obsessed with 50s + 60s sf. Less fanatical sf fans will be disappointed.

‘The Mile-Long Spaceship’ (1957): Telepathic alien explorers make mental contact (of the non-verbal kind) with an Earthman. Unfortunately, contact causes him to crash his car and end up in a hospital. In their moments of contact the telepaths “transport” him to a conjured mile-long spaceship. The aliens attempt to find out how to visit Earth by suggesting he watch various “films” on the “spaceship” in order for him to identify stars which might suggest Earth’s location. But the Earthman doesn’t have much interest in astronomy, and assumes his delusions are a result of his crash…. A slightly atmospheric tale — but lacking wonder.

‘Fear is a Cold Black’ (1963): Wilhelm’s take on sf/horror is a slightly claustrophobic tale but plods over old ground. An interstellar space cruiser is stricken with a mysterious illness after investigating an abandoned spaceship wreck. The passengers are transformed by their fear: “Giroden making plans for his funereal pyre, Perez creating an enemy to be destroyed, even poor Custens, the least imaginative man on the ship, theorizing that the thing traveled with the food, depriving himself of the sustenance hoping to forestall further spread” (p21). Soon, the true nature of the disease is discovered and the captain has to make a controversial decision to save the crew.

‘Jenny with Wings’ (1963): A downright silly fantasy installment better suited for the Romance sf subgenre — a girl born with wings is raised by her grandfather and scares off all the boys who fall for her when she reveals her wings. They either think she’s an angel and start praying or want to sell her to the circus for some quick cash. She gets word of a nice doctor who cares for others with strange abnormalities (for example, people who sleep underwater). Her doctor’s office visit is filled with sexual tension as the doctor inquires about her life and examines her. She admits she is not well versed in the ways of sex — the doctors reveals (well, in an early 60s manner) that there are other positions. When she flies off to meet her “love” she discovers his true intentions…. Thankfully, there’s someone who really understands her. And they fly off together. A single word comes to mind, “lame.”

‘A is for Automation’ (1959): A sinister tale that ultimately fails to deliver. An automated factory — whose brain center is named Sarah — creates robotic toys. A government inspection arrives to see whether the facility is safe, if it is there’s the possibility of a lucrative Defense Department contract. Old Man Mike, kept on the payroll for goodwill purposes alone due to the automated nature of the factory, detects some strange occurrences but no one believes him — one better not “teach” Sarah too much or “she” might try to reproduce…

‘Gift from the Stars’ (1958): An unscrupulous urban developed wants to get his grubby hands on an entire city block… Unfortunately for him an electronics store with ridiculously low prices is the only business that won’t leave. Mr Talbot is convinced the store is a front for a racket of some sort — he breaks his watch on purpose in order to get the opportunity to scout out the place — he discovers, a (wait for it), “gift from the stars”. A simple, predictable, alien presence on Earth type short story with similar theme to ‘The Mile-Long Spaceship’ — mankind is too stupid, self-centered, and ignorant for first contact.

‘No Light in the Window’ (1963): Easily the best story in the collection…. A thought-provoking work of early feminist social science fiction dealing with relevant themes — in this case, the ramifications of careers on marriage. Connie, a biochemist, and Hank, an astrophysicist are recently married. However, looming over their shoulder is the possibility that both of them will not be selected for one of the few positions on a colonizing spaceship. Hank is calm and convinced that he’ll be going along with his wife. However, Connie is convinced that she will not be going and struggles to digest the potential ramifications for her marriage. Surprisingly, she is selected for the mission and Hank is not….

‘One for the Road’ (1959): A commentary on cold war paranoia, which strangely retains the “scientists are idealists that wouldn’t dream of hurting others” narrative instead of complicating said narrative. The scientist remains guiltless while the public is simply a paranoid mob needing guidance. Massive riots spread across the world due to a badly edited radio broadcast that claimed that the radioactivity due to atomic testing overseen by scientists would cause most people to die from cancer (the proper context removed entirely from the broadcast). Of course, science comes to the rescue before the rioting gets out of hand. A story weakened by its naive message… Of course, when the true ramifications of nuclear testing became known to the American public such stories would be strangely out of place…

‘Andover and the Android’ (1963): Roger thinks women are “simpering females” and would never dream of getting married. However, if he doesn’t get married he won’t get promoted to the vice-presidency of a company. So, he marries a robot. And falls in love with her…. A satirical take on 50s/60s views of women — humorous but far too slapstick for my taste.

‘The Man Without a Planet’ (1962): The second best story in the collection — a moody, psychologically taught story about the strains of a lengthy space voyage to colonize Mars. And, as the crew feels the effects of close quarters, seat thirteen with its strange occupant casts an aura of unease. This dark and contained rumination hints at the heights reached by Wilhelm’s later masterpieces.

‘The Apostolic Travelers’ (1963): A satirical tale about immortality… The Longevity Board on Earth randomly grants a few individuals every year immortality — all the others on Earth can live a prescribed 250 years. Two Brothers (of the monkish variety) of rather dubious standing are selected to appear before the Board in order to become immortal. The true downside of immortality is revealed but the monks agree anyway so that they can convert others for the faith… So they’re supplied with a FTL spaceship in order to prevent the overpopulation of worlds (if everyone could be immortal…).

‘The Last Days of the Captain’ (1962): The idea behind ‘The Last Days of the Captain’ is far superior than the forced/unexciting/dry delivery — Captain Winters is attempting to move all the colonist on a planet to the evacuation extraction point due to a suspected alien invasion. He holds the planet-bound colonists in low esteem — as do all spacers. However, he becomes personally responsible for moving to the extraction point a colonist named Marilyn, who is unsure whether her son and husband will get to the extraction point in time. Eventually, he overcomes some of his prejudice against the simple folk of the farms.

This review originally appeared on Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130507.html

To see a vista like this takes patience, hiking, and a camera.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4609

Here are a dozen short audio clips from a lecture, stripped from YouTube, and re-encoded after editing as mp3 files. Despite being handicapped by this marginal sound quality, and even more by the lack of context, you will probably be able to transcribe them fairly well. Please do so, and retain your results for discussion tomorrow morning (where "tomorrow" = Wednesday 5/8/2013).

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4608

Steve Kleinedler spotted this crash blossom on the home page of the New York Times today: "G.O.P. Critics of Immigration Bill Plan Offensive." Screenshotted for posterity:

The article itself has the less interesting headline, "G.O.P. Opponents Plan Immigration Bill Attack."

Here's a syntax tree for the intended reading:

In the crash-blossomy reading, plan switches from verb to noun and offensive from noun to adjective (with an implied copula are, which would be deleted in headlinese):

One's opinion of the lawmakers in question will, of course, prime the crash-blossom pump.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130506.html

What caused the interestingly intricate tails that Comet Lemmon displayed earlier this year?

http://www.bobgreenberger.com/index.php/2013/05/06/iron-man-3-was-great-fun-but/

http://www.bobgreenberger.com/?p=2415

Like most people, I enjoyed the heck out of Iron Man 3 over the weekend. It was fast, loud, noisy, and things blew up really well. The handoff from Jon Favreau to Shane Black was a step in the right direction and the casting was superb. There’s little doubt why it earned its $175.3 million here and over half a billion worldwide.

The movie is definitely a sequel to The Avengers and not Iron Man 2, which everyone now seems to have declared a misfire. Clearly, the United States government has backed off demanding the armor now that they owe him their lives. It didn’t hurt that he allowed Jim Rhodes to keep the War Machine armor for America’s use.

Having Tony Stark deal with the aftermath of nearly dying while trying to end an alien invasion gave the film a nice weight, allowing us to explore the character from a new perspective. The metaphor of his anxiety and the malfunctioning Mark 42 armor was nicely handled without being heavy-handed. This was definitely a Tony Stark movie and Robert Downey Jr. nailed it. We saw his cockiness, insecurities and sheer brilliance, but all the same person.

While Stark is tinkering on armor after armor to combat his sleepless nights, a global terrorist named the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) has reared his head, hijacking the airwaves and demonstrating a cold-blooded approach. He keeps promising the President of the United States (William Sadler) a lesson and Black’s script gets fuzzy about what it is the Mandarin wants.

Meanwhile, Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) arrives at Stark Industries seeking something and again, what he wants is unclear but Pepper Potts nicely turns him down. As we have already learned, Killian has cleaned up nicely since his 1999 encounter with Stark when he first explained his desire to form a company called Advanced Idea Mechanics. In between, he wound up partnering with Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), the brilliant scientist Stark blew Killian off to bed. The two have wound up creating a bio-repair formula dubbed Extremis that not only can repair injuries but somehow superheats the body. Early experiments resulted in subjects going boom but Killian and his flunky Savin (James Badge Dale), and others have mastered it, becoming superhuman engines of destruction.

Now that we have all the elements in place, Black stirs the pot and things happen. Unfortunately, they don’t all blend terribly well so you have the richness of Stark’s dilemma but Hansen’s fall from grace is half-baked at best, a disappointment and waste. As much as the film is a joy to watch, I came away thinking it could have been better had everyone but Tony Stark been given more to do.

Pepper has no character arc this time around. She loves Tony, is frustrated by him, and becomes a damsel in distress, looking great all the while. But, she’s given no time to actually reflect on what happens to her in the final act and how that colors her view of the world that has changed around her. I also missed the wit of the exchanges between them that came from Joss Whedon’s pen. Here, it was perfunctory. Same with Rhodes. There’s a nice running gag about War Machine being renamed Iron Patriot but he just flies around and banters with Tony. The President and Vice President (Miguel Ferrer) should have had more to do than be chess pieces Black rapidly moves around the board.

Speaking of rapid, the ease with which the armors attach and detach themselves to Stark (and others) strained credulity throughout the film. When all the armors arrive for the fiery climax, they are readily shredded making on wonder if they are attached with Velcro. There’s been a steady increase in speed with which the suits of armor can come on and off, which is to be expected, but this has gone too far, too fast.

As for those who will complain about the radical reinterpretation of The Mandarin from his comic book past – I sympathize. But even when he was introduced in the early 1960s he was already a bit of an anachronistic foe. Frankly, this was the best way he could have been used without inviting commentary about it being a racist gesture, angering their Chinese co-producers. And by casting Ben Kingsley, you couldn’t have asked for a more perfect choice. He steals every scene he’s in.

The film kicks off Marvel Cinema Universe Phase 3 but does nothing obvious to continue the threads we saw at the end of Phase 2, the threat from Thanos. The closest we come is seeing that time has past and Tony is still hanging around with Dr. Banner. I’ll be curious which film really propels us towards 2015′s Avengers 2. Despite the total absence of SHIELD in the film, the world is richer with the addition of AIM and Roxxon, elements we will no doubt be seeing on film — and television — in the future.

Finally, while I loved seeing it nice and large on IMAX, it didn’t need to be in 3D. The extra cost and effects really didn’t enhance the viewing experience. Come November, I will likely wait on Thor: The Dark World until I can see it on a 2D screen.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4607

David W. Donnell has brought this signage from Chinatown, NYC to my attention:

"From Forsythe Street." (VHM: that should be "Forsyth Street.")

Here are the sentences in the photo:

友情告示

公共场所請大家保持个人卫生，如
有长期不洗澡者、不换衣裤者，不得入
内，影响大家娱乐活动。
Bad. Odor. Are.
Prohibited. Here!
THANK. You. For. Cooperation.

Pinyin transcription:

Yǒuqíng gàoshì

Gōnggòng chǎngsuǒ qǐng dàjiā bǎochí gèrén wèishēng. Rú yǒu chángqí bù xǐzǎo zhě, bù huàn yī kù zhě, bùdé rù nèi, yǐngxiǎng dàjiā yúlè huódòng.

English translation:

Friendly Notice

This is a public place where everyone should maintain their personal hygiene. Those who haven't taken a bath or changed their clothes for a long time are not permitted to enter to avoid influencing the enjoyable activities of others.

The notice is sufficiently clear that it does not require explanation.

[Thanks to Cao Lin and Cheng Fangyi]

http://lessaccurategrandmother.blogspot.com/2013/05/review-urban-realism-and-cosmopolitan.html

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130505.html

Is that a spaceship or a cloud?

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4606

Allison Flood, "Academics chastised for bad grammar in letter attacking Michael Gove", The Guardian 5/3/2013:

It was a blistering attack on Michael Gove for eroding educational standards and "dumbing down" teaching. But now the 100 academics who wrote an open letter in March criticising the education secretary's revised national curriculum have had their own accuracy questioned. Their letter has been dubbed "simply illiterate" by the judges of the inaugural Bad Grammar awards.

The professors, from universities including Nottingham Trent, Leeds Metropolitan, Oxford and Bristol, had warned that Gove's national curriculum proposal meant children would be forced to learn "mountains of detail" for English, maths and science without understanding it. But according to the Idler Academy Bad Grammar awards, they made a string of grammatical blunders including using adjectives as adverbs and mixing singulars with plurals.

I haven't been able to locate the text of the Idler's critique, but Flood's article quotes two specific grammatical complaints.

Gwynne, author of Gwynne's Grammar, highlighted a particular paragraph from the academics' letter for criticism:

"Much of it demands too much too young. This will put pressure on teachers to rely on rote learning without understanding. Inappropriate demands will lead to failure and demoralisation. The learner is largely ignored. Little account is taken of children's potential interests and capacities, or that young children need to relate abstract ideas to their experience, lives and activity."

Gwynne's attack opened with a consideration of the phrase "demands too much too young".

"Presumably they mean something like 'demands too much when children are too young to be ready for so much', but, as worded, it simply is not English," he said. "In that sentence as worded, 'too young' can only be two adverbs, 'too' qualifying the adverb 'young', and 'young' qualifying the verb 'demands', as would, for instance, 'soon' or 'early'. But 'young' is an adjective, and cannot ever be an adverb. And it certainly is not doing the work of an adjective in that sentence, because there is no noun that could be 'understood' and which would turn that sentence into English."

The phrase in question is a classical allusion, referencing The Specials' 1979 song "Too Much Too Young":

In the lyric, "(much) too young" is (I guess) in apposition associated with the subject "you":

You've done too much
much too young
Now you're married with a kid
when you could be having fun with me

In the professors' letter, "too young" presumably modifies an understood third-person plural pronoun "… demands too much (of them) too young". For more on floating adjectives, see "Amid this vague uncertainty, who walks safe?", 2/23/2007.  In any case, the meaning is clear enough, and I wouldn't have noticed the structural issue if Gwynne hadn't brought it up.

Gwynne was also disturbed by the academics' statement: "Little account is taken of children's potential interests and capacities, or that young children need to relate abstract ideas to their experience, lives and activity."

"In the second clause, 'Little account is taken' is understood before the words 'that young children need'," he said. "But there is no such verb as 'to take account' but only 'to take account of' as in the first clause of that sentence. The second clause of the sentence is simply illiterate."

This is a fair criticism: the implied structure is "little account is taken of NP1 or NP2″, except that instead of a second noun phrase, the constituent after "or" is a that-clause. But "simple illiterate"? This is not the sort of thing that marginally-illiterate people do — it's something that tends to happen in complex writing when the sense dominates the structure, something characteristic of especially fluent readers.

For the judges' likely motivation, see Michael Moran, "The bad grammar award: a superior kind of prize", The Guardian 5/3/2013″:

It's no great surprise that the autodidact Nevile Gwynne was on the judging panel – the poor man has been the victim of myriad Restoration-themed spelling errors. However, you may have discerned a slight political subtext when you learned that the panel also included the free school evangelist Toby Young and the rightwing journalist Harry Mount.

I note in passing that The Idler's "About" page displays a nice back-formation, "art directed":

The Idler is an annual periodical that campaigns against the work ethic and promotes liberty, autonomy and responsibility. It is edited by Tom Hodgkinson. It was founded in 1993 by Tom and Gavin Pretor-Pinney. The Idler is now published as a high quality hardback book, which is typeset by Christian Brett and art directed by Alice Smith.

But the magazine's "Freedom Manifesto" makes me wonder why they're so eager to defend a government-mandated National Curriculum — and why they didn't recognize "Too Much Too Young":

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4605

David Craig sent in this photograph and asked "What does it really say and why doesn't it?":

The Chinese says xiánzhūshǒu 咸猪手 ("groper"), which is a noun derived from xiánzhū 咸猪 ("salted pork") + shǒu 手 ("hand") — adjective + adjective + noun. Thus, the literal meaning of xiánzhūshǒu 咸猪手 is "salted pig's knuckle / trotter" (cf. German Schweinshaxe; Stelze in Austria).

"Groper" is a derived meaning of the term xiánzhūshǒu 咸猪手 ("salted pig's knuckle / trotter"). As to how "salted pig's knuckle / trotter" acquired the extended meaning of "groper", there is considerable difference of opinion. I will give first the explanation that is most straightforward and is accepted by the majority of people, and then will go into some of the more arcane, recherché theories.

Before that, however, I'd like to mention that xiánzhūshǒu is the Mandarin pronunciation of what is really a Cantonese expression: haam4 zyu1 sau2 鹹猪手 ("salted pig's knuckle / trotter"). Note that xián 咸, which is the simplified version of xián 鹹 ("salty"), also stands for a completely different morpheme signifiying "all; whole; universal; general", which was the original meaning of the character before it was borrowed to stand for xián 鹹 ("salty") as well.

The connection between lechery and piggish behavior is not too hard to see, since there are a number of terms in Cantonese that attest to it (e.g., zyu1 gung1 猪公 ["lecher"]), and the association exists in many other societies as well:

In the sixteenth century the emblem books introduced a host of new symbolic animals into the company of the virtues. Thus Chastity riding an elephant fights with Lechery on the familiar pig in an engraving cited by Tervarent. (Helen F. North, "Temperance (Sōphrosynē) and the Canon of the Cardinal Virtues," Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. 4, 1973, ed. by Philip P. Wiener)

Of course, the pig is most often linked to Gluttony, but Gluttony and Lechery (usually connected with the goat) are often related (e.g., Chaucer, "Parson's Tale", 836-8: "After Glotonye thanne comth Lecherie, for thise two synnes been so ny cosyns that ofte tyme they wol nat departe.") Claudine Fabre-Vassas, The Singular Beast states: "The pig is a creature divided. It incarnates the sins of lechery and gluttony…."

We have accounted for the connection between "pig" and "lechery", now what about the "salty" part? Many Cantonese have told me that it has to do with the term haam4 sap1 鹹濕 ("salty-moist", i.e., "lecherous"). I'm sure that will ring a lot of alarm bells here at Language Log, since there have been several recent posts on this forum about word aversion with regard to "moist"; perhaps the same feelings carry over into a completely different language.

An example of a directly relevant Cantonese term based on haam4 sap1 鹹濕 is haam4 sap1 lou2 鹹濕佬 ("lecher", lit., "salty-moist guy") — there are lots of other words in Cantonese for such fellows, many of them beginning with haam4 sap1 鹹濕 ("salty-moist").

As to why haam4 sap1 鹹濕 ("salty-moist") comes to mean "lecherous", aside from the suggestions that I've already given, there are many other conjectures:

1. In the Qing dynasty, brothels were usually located near the sea, and the air was damp (湿) and smelled salty (咸).

2. The laborers and apprentices who went looking for fun in the brothels were sweaty (湿) and their sweat was salty (咸).

3. The lower-class prostitutes were called "haam4 seoi2 mui6 咸水妹” ("salt water maid") because they lived on the boats and the closeness in pronunciation of "haam4 seoi2 mui6″ to "handsome maid" could attract foreigners.

4. "咸" comes from haam4 gwaa3 / Mand. xián guà 咸卦 (Xian trigram) in the Classic of Changes / I ching, where it means "probe".

All of these speculations, especially the latter two, seem far-fetched to me, the last one exceedingly so, since the Xian hexagram (no. 31) actually signifies "influence (wooing)" (Wilhelm / Baynes), not "probing"; furthermore, this ancient usage of xián 咸 ("all; whole; universal; general") has nothing to do with xián 鹹 ("salty").

There is yet another, even more fantastic, idea about why haam4 sap1 鹹濕 ("salty-moist") indicates lechery. According to this article, it was originally a transcription of "hamshop". I suppose that "hamshop" means a shop that sells hams (though I have no idea when that would have been attested in Hong Kong English), but what that has to do with lechery is beyond me — unless it's supposed to evoke the piggishness discussed above.

All right, enough about haam4 sap1 鹹濕 ("salty-moist") in the sense of "lechery". No matter its actual etymology, everybody agrees that it does convey that meaning.

Now, how about "grilled"? I don't see how it can come from any of the three characters, 咸/鹹猪手, that constitute the expression we have been investigating. Rather, I suspect that it was added by the translator to indicate the actual method by means of which pork is commonly cooked in Cantonese speaking areas, namely, "grilling", as in haau1 zyu1 juk6 / Mand. kǎo zhūròu 烤豬肉

For those who wish a more detailed history of the term xiánzhūshǒu 咸猪手 < haam4 zyu1 sau2 鹹猪手 ("groper"), see this article.

To wrap all of this up, it seems that the Chinglish translation compress two meanings — the one figurative and the other literal — to become "Grilled Sexual Harrassment" (this sounds so insane…).

While I'm at it, I might as well also mention that there is another word for sexual harassment that involves a well-known item of food, namely, chī dòufu 吃豆腐 (literally, "eat beancurd"), which is a verb plus noun construction (it is applied thus: "eat [so-and-so's] tofu"). A less colorful verb plus noun construction is zhàn piányi 占便宜 ("take advantage [of so-and-so]").

I hope that I've done justice to David's short but pithy bipartite question with which this blog began.

[Thanks to Bob Bauer, Ranting Jiang, Fangyi Cheng, and Mandy Chan]

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4604

Matthew Kaminski, "Democracy may have had its day", WSJ 4/26/2013:

Donald Kagan is engaging in one last argument. For his "farewell lecture" here at Yale on Thursday afternoon, the 80-year-old scholar of ancient Greece—whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War inspired comparisons to Edward Gibbon's Roman history—uncorked a biting critique of American higher education.

Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values." He counseled schools to adopt "a common core of studies" in the history, literature and philosophy "of our culture." By "our" he means Western.

Seems like I've heard this before. For example, in Robert Maynard Hutchins' The Higher Learning in America (1936) — which argued for a return to education founded on Great Books, because

The most striking fact about the higher learning in American is the confusion that besets it. […] The college of liberal arts is partly high school, partly university, partly general, partly special. Frequently it looks like a teacher-training institution. Frequently it looks like nothing at all. The degree it offers seems to certify that the student has passed an uneventful period without violating any local, state, or federal law, and that he has a fair, if temporary, recollection of what his teachers have said to him.  As I shall show later, little pretense is made that many of the things said to him are of much importance.

And then there's Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 1987, where… oh, never mind. Still, talk about ignorance of the past. Each narcissist in succession thinks that he's the first to notice that Kids Today lack a moral core and don't share a common grounding in canonical texts and ideas, while Professors Today don't know what they're doing and are too uniform in their commitment to diversity.

For more on Donald Kagan's farewell, see Jim Shelton, "Yale's Donald Kagan, a lightning rod to the nation, retires", New Haven Register 4/25/2013; Jiwon Lee, "In last lecture, Kagan stresses the liberal arts", Yale Daily News 4/26/2013; Scott Johnson, "Donald Kagan Looks Back", Powerline 4/27/2013; "Kagan's Farewell Lecture", Powerline 5/4/2013.

Or watch the videos of the lecture yourself here (in five parts).

While I have your attention, I want to treat you to some more of Robert Hutchins' fine 1936 rant, this time about "the degeneracy of instruction in English grammar":

The degeneracy of instruction in English grammar should not blind us to the fact that only through grammatical study can written works be understood. Grammar is the scientific analysis of language through which we understand the meaning and force of what is written. Grammar disciplines the mind and develops the logical faculty. It is good in itself and as an aid to reading the classics. It has a place in general education in connection with the classics and independently of them. […]

I add to grammar, or the rules of reading, rhetoric and logic, or the rules of writing, speaking, and reasoning. The classics provide models of excellence; grammar, rhetoric, and logic are means of determining how excellence is achieved. We have forgotten that there are rules for speaking. And English composition, as it is commonly taught, is a feeble and debased imitation of the classical rules of writing, placing emphasis either on the most trivial details or on what is called self-expression.

For discussions of the "cultural void, […] [and] sense of rootlessness and aimlessness" among youth of even earlier eras, see "Kids today", 3/11/2010.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap130504.html

Last week, as the Sun set a Full Moon rose over