28487
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Tam's Mom Has A Side Hustle (Bless These Braces)
Tam talks about her mom's unique side hustle on this week's Bless These Braces with guest Dylan Adler.
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Word of the Day
amulet
Definition: (noun) An object worn, especially around the neck, as a charm against evil or injury.
Synonyms: talisman.
Usage: It was sorcery, magic of the worst kind, thought Buldeo, and he wondered whether the amulet round his neck would protect him.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: hardscrabble
This word has appeared in 31 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
gross
disgusting, very unpleasant
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Language Log
Korean oralization of Literary Sinitic
Si Nae Park came to Penn last Thursday (4/18/24) to talk about kugyŏl / gugyeol / kwukyel 구결 口訣 ("oral glossing"). Gugyeol, or kwukyel, is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. It was used chiefly during the Joseon dynasty, when readings of the Chinese classics were of paramount social importance. Thus, in gugyeol, the original text in Classical Chinese was not modified, and the additional markers were simply inserted between phrases.
The parts of the Chinese sentence would then be read in Korean out of sequence to approximate Korean (SOV) rather than Chinese (SVO) word order. A similar system for reading Classical Chinese is still used in Japan and is known as kanbun kundoku.
(Wikipedia)
Park's analyses and explanations were like a revelation to me for a number of reasons. First of all, I was already familiar with the analogous Japanese method for reading Literary Sinitic, called kundoku, which involves a lot of rearrangement, modification, and annotation of the text to make it more like Japanese, whereas it seems that kugyŏl tries to stay closer to the Literary Sinitic.
I was also long aware of the Sinitic expression kǒujué 口訣, but in Chinese it means something quite different than it does in Korean:
* (religion) orally transmitted esoteric teachings in Buddhism and Taoism
* mnemonic chant; formula; rhyme for remembering (arithmetic tables, character stroke order, etc.)
(Wiktionary)
This is not to say that premodern Chinese did not see a need for making the content of Literary Sinitic available for those who were unable to read it. For this purpose, socially sensitive individuals resorted to a variety of devices, including oral and written translations into the vernacular, as I demonstrated in "Language and Ideology in the Written Popularizations of the Sacred Edict", in David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 325-359.
Chinese referred to these devices as zhíjiě 直解 ("direct explanation"), zhíshuō yàolüè 直說要略 ("directly expounded essentials"), yǎnyì 演義 ("elaboration"), tújiě 圖解 ("illustrated explanation"), and many others, which shows that there was a need for making literary texts available to the broader, uneducated populace, and that it was being met by various means.
Nowadays, almost all the major literary and classical Chinese texts have been rendered into Mandarin, and these are called 白話翻譯 ("vernacular translations").
The Koreans during the middle of the second millennium AD also had textbooks for learning vernacular Sinitic. Bak Tongsa (Chinese: 朴通事; lit. 'Pak the interpreter') was a textbook of colloquial northern Chinese published by the Bureau of Interpreters in Korea in various editions between the 14th and 18th centuries. Like the contemporaneous Nogeoldae ('Old Cathayan'), it is an important source on both Late Middle Korean and the history of Mandarin Chinese. Whereas the Nogeoldae consists of dialogues and focusses on travelling merchants, Bak Tongsa is a narrative text covering society and culture.
(source)
Lest I overlook another significant Korean means for annotating Chinese-language texts, I should mention eonhae 언해 諺解, which the Japanese also had, genkai げんかい 諺解 (lit., "aphoristic explanation").
In sum, I will make two main points: 1.there's a sharp difference between oralization and vernacularization, 2. kugyŏl belongs to the former, beon-yeog 번역 / hon'yaku 翻訳 / fānyì 翻譯 to the latter. Selected readings
* "The many meanings and faces of 'vernacular'" (7/26/23)
* "Vulgar village vernacular" (8/21/21)
* "Mixed literary and vernacular grammar"[...]
Learn English Through Football: (to) Claw
Читать полностью…
Word of the Day
connoisseur
Definition: (noun) A person with expert knowledge or training, especially in the fine arts.
Synonyms: cognoscente.
Usage: I brought the painting to the world's best art connoisseurs, and they all agreed that it was an authentic Picasso and would fetch millions at auction.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: blithely
This word has appeared in 72 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
smart-arse
a person who's annoying because they try to show how clever and knowledgeable they are (n.) | having an annoying way of trying to seem clever (adj.)
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Language Log
Hendiadys and sleeping in parks
Samuel Bray, "Cruel AND Unusual?", Reason 4/21/2024:
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear argument in an Eighth Amendment case, City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson. One thing I will be watching for is whether the justices in their questions treat "cruel and unusual" as two separate requirements, or as one.
The Eighth Amendment (to the U.S. Consitution) says that "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
And the issue in the cited Supreme Court case is "Whether the enforcement of generally applicable laws regulating camping on public property constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment." (More here, here, and elsewhere…)
Samuel Bray's interest in the interpretation of "cruel and unusual" follows up on his 2016 Virginia Law Review article, "'Necessary and Proper' and 'Cruel and Unusual': Hendiadys in the Constitution", Va. L. Rev. (2016):
This Article attempts to shed new light on the original meaning of the Necessary and Proper Clause, and also on another Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause. The phrases “necessary and proper” and “cruel and unusual” can be read as instances of an old but now largely forgotten figure of speech. That figure is hendiadys, in which two terms separated by a conjunction work together as a single complex expression.
A bit more of that article's argument:
First consider “cruel and unusual.” These are often understood as two separate requirements: punishments are prohibited only if they are cruel and unusual. Yet this phrase can easily be read as a hendiadys in which the second term in effect modifies the first: “cruel and unusual” would mean “unusually cruel.” When this reading is combined with the work of Professor John Stinneford, which shows that “unusual” was used at the Founding as a term of art for “contrary to long usage,” it suggests that the Clause prohibits punishments that are innovatively cruel. In other words, the Clause is not a prohibition on punishments that merely happen to be both cruel and innovative. It is a prohibition on punishments that are innovative in their cruelty.
You can read the rest for yourself…
The Wikipedia page explains that the origin of the word hendiadys is the Greek phrase ἓν διὰ δυοῖν "one through two".
One of the OED's earliest citations is to Angell Day's 1592 English Secretorie (revised edition) — the first edition was printed in 1586, which would make it the earliest citation.
Project Gutenberg has a transcription of the 1599 edition, in which the relevant definition reads Hendiadis, when one thing of it selfe intire, is diuersly layde open, as to saie, On iron and bit he champt, for on the iron bitte hee champt: And part and pray we got, for part of the pray: Also by surge and sea we past, for by surging sea we past. This also is rather Poeticall then other wise in vse.
I'm not familiar with the literature on the wording of the Bill of Rights, so maybe this is common knowledge — but a quick Google Books search reveals that the section on "Rights and Liberties" in this 1696 book lists a 1688 act of Parliament that contains (along with many other principles) almost exactly the wording of the Eighth Amendment:
Whereas the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons assembled at Westminster, lawfully, fully and freely representing all the Estates of the People of this Realm, did upon the 13th day of February in the year of our Lord One thousand six hundred eighty eight, present unto their Majesties, then called and known by the Names and Stile of William and Mary, Prince and Princess of Orange, being present in their proper Persons, a certain Declaration in Writing, made by the said Lords and Commons in the Words following, viz.
[...]
Word of the Day
foundling
Definition: (noun) A deserted or abandoned child of unknown parentage.
Synonyms: abandoned infant.
Usage: No one knew why an envelope containing images of a mountainous landscape had been tucked in the folds of the foundling's blanket.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: regale
This word has appeared in 10 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
limey
a derogatory word meaning a British person (n.) | British (adj.)
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Language Log
The future Sinitic languages of East Asia
Is monolingualism a normal, natural, necessary state of affairs for human beings?
Can you imagine a world in which there were only one language? How is that even possible?
These are questions that come to mind after reading Gina Anne Tam's deeply thought provoking "Mandarin Hegemony: The Past and Future of Linguistic Hierarchies in China", pulse (4/18/24).
Tam begins with a gripping, hard-hitting scene that we at Language Log were already well aware of last fall: "Speak Mandarin, not Cantonese, even in Macau" (10/31/23). Here are the opening paragraphs of her article:
At a concert in Macau in the autumn of 2023, Cantopop superstar Eason Chan used an interlude to talk about his songwriting process. Suddenly, shouts from the audience interrupted his soliloquy, as a few fans demanded that he shift from speaking in his native Cantonese, the majority language in Macau, to Mandarin, the Chinese national language. Chan stopped and quickly launched into a multilingual lecture, reprimanding those who deigned to tell him what to speak. In English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Thai, he defended multilingualism for the freedom it grants: ‘I love speaking in whatever way and language I want’ (Huang 2023).
Chan noted that these demands dripped with a sense of entitlement. ‘You can ask nicely,’ he quipped. ‘Would you ask David Bowie to speak Mandarin or Cantonese?’ This entitlement, Chan implies, is emboldened by presumptions of power. Instinctively, both he and his audience know that most of them would not feel entitled to shout at a native English-speaking performer for the language they chose to speak. But to these members of Chan’s audience, Cantonese speakers should speak the common and official Chinese language. Cantonese, in their world view, is a lesser, local variant of Chinese, whereas the official language should be the presumptive language of communication in Chinese-speaking spaces.
Tam goes on to address a number of vital language issues in China today, sensitively probing the meaning and implications of "hegemony", comparing the position of Mandarin in China with that of English in the world, analyzing the situation regarding the non-Mandarin topolects vis-à-vis the place of non-Sinitic languages like Uyghur, Tibetan, and Mongolian of the PRC, which shows how racialized Mandarin hegemony is in China, and so forth.
Unsurprisingly, Mandarin hegemony does not go unchallenged, particularly in a place like Hong Kong, where Cantonese speakers resist with all the resources at their disposal, including fighting for mother tongue education in the schools.
In the final section of her article, Tam shows clearly whose side she is on: De-Normalising Linguistic Hegemony
Nonetheless, Mandarin hegemony remains pervasive. And with a powerful government as invested in its maintenance as is the Chinese Communist Party, it remains difficult to challenge. Yet, it is important to recognise that while hegemony is structural, it is not outside our control. Humans create structures. We all have agency, big or small, in how we respond to hegemonic structures, linguistic hegemony included. As Mikanowski (2018) reminds us, linguistic hegemony is normalised by one dangerous idea: ‘[T]hat a single language should suit every purpose, and that being monolingual is therefore somehow “normal”.’ We all have a role to play in ensuring that this is a normal that we will not accept.
I like the idea of "de-normalizing" an odious government policy. Worth a try, isn't it?
One of the first future languages of East Asia will be Cantonese. It will no longer pejoratively be thought of as a mere dialect of a hierarchically superior Mandarin. It will be followed by languages like Hokkien (also spoken widely throughout Southeast Asia), Wu (includes the topolects of Shanghai, [...]
Language Log
Ask Dalí
A new feature at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg FL:
According to an NPR story (Chloe Veltman, "An AI Salvador Dalí will answer any question when called on his famous 'lobster phone'"),
The underlying model is OpenAI's GPT-4. Because GPT-4 is trained on almost all publicly available text, this model includes extensive information about Dalí — an artist with a vast presence on the internet. The Dalí Museum also selected English translations of Dalí's writings in other languages, including his Mystical Manifesto, Diary of a Genius and The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí.
The article offers this scholarly opinion:
Dalí scholar Elliott King, an associate professor of art history at Washington and Lee University who was not involved with the museum's exhibit, said he thought Dalí would have liked this AI-based interpretation of his voice and work, noting that the popular AI image generator DALL-E is in part inspired by the artist's name. "He was so interested in scientific advancements," King said. "I think that he would have been really tickled by people talking into this lobster phone."
Interestingly, Prof. King endorses the voice:
King said he thought the AI-generated voice worked well compared to the museum's previous efforts. "It does sound much more like Dalí than anything that I've heard up until now," King said. "His voice is so unusual. He had a very particular way of speaking where he would exaggerate certain words."
But the words, maybe not so much:
King said some of the AI answers did not sound authentic to Dalí's creative language. "Picture them as a vast dream," as an example. "That's a little bit vague," King said. "He's never just going to say something nearly so mundane.[..]"
King also said Dalí would never use the word "hi" when introducing himself, which is what the AI model does when the museum-goer picks up the lobster phone to speak to the AI surrealist. "That word sounds so odd coming out of his voice," King said. "He always said, "Bonjour!" — always the French — even to say goodbye."
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Language Log
AI and real-time translation in Korea
Speaking of Korean translation and AI, as we did in recent posts (see "Selected readings"), let us take a look at the latest developments in Korea:
New AI-based translation tools make their way into everyday life in Korea
AI equipped with natural language processing software, which allows it to interpret human language in various contexts, is gaining the most attraction among mainstream users among all AI services
Jung Yu-gyung, Hankyoreh (2024-04-23)
More and more, AI is becoming a part of daily life:
On Monday, SK Telecom unveiled its AI-based translation program “TransTalker,” which offers real-time interpretation for 13 languages, including Arabic, Russian, Vietnamese and Indonesian. Lotte began testing the translation service on Friday through its information desks on the first floor of Lotte Department Store's Avenuel Jamsil and on the first floor of Lotte World Mall. Both locations receive over a thousand visits from foreign tourists every day. Lotte has reported that the majority of users are surprised at the effectiveness and clarity of the interpretative service.
Users simply speak into a microphone installed onto a clear screen at the information desk. The AI interpretation service then translates the user’s question into Korean, which is displayed on a monitor on the other side for an employee. The Korean employee then replies in Korean, which is then interpreted back into the user’s native language on a screen. The program can interpret between English, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian, French, German and Russian.
The program is equipped with software designed for speech recognition, natural language processing, translation engines, and large language models (LLM). Lotte Department Store plans on increasing the number of locations that utilize the service.
Meanwhile, faculty in colleges and universities are worried that AI devices will make things so easy for students that they will not undertake the nitty gritty of writing and translating by themselves.
Selected readings
* "Korean oralization of Literary Sinitic" (4/23/24)
* "Macroeconomics of AI?" (4/23/24)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
rub out (2)
to kill somebody
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Idiom of the Day
be in with a chance
To have a good chance or high probability of doing or accomplishing something. Primarily heard in UK. Watch the video
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(9/3/16)
* "Annals of literary vs. vernacular, part 2" (9/4/16)
* "Shandong vernacular, then and now" (8/1/21)
* "Missionary Linguistics; the joys of interpreting" (12/25/21)
* "Buddhism and languages" (2/28/17)
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 5" (8/20/22)
* Si Nae Park, The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
* Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages", Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 (August, 1994), 707-751 — for me personally, the most important linguistic impact of Buddhism was its legitimization of the written vernacular in China
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Language Log
Macroeconomics of AI?
Daron Acemoglu, "The Simple Macroeconomics of AI":
ABSTRACT: This paper evaluates claims about the large macroeconomic implications of new advances in AI. It starts from a task-based model of AI’s effects, working through automation and task complementarities. It establishes that, so long as AI’s microeconomic effects are driven by cost savings/productivity improvements at the task level, its macroeconomic consequences will be given by a version of Hulten’s theorem: GDP and aggregate productivity gains can be estimated by what fraction of tasks are impacted and average task-level cost savings. Using existing estimates on exposure to AI and productivity improvements at the task level, these macroeconomic effects appear nontrivial but modest—no more than a 0.71% increase in total factor productivity over 10 years. The paper then argues that even these estimates could be exaggerated, because early evidence is from easy-to-learn tasks, whereas some of the future effects will come from hard-to-learn tasks, where there are many context-dependent factors affecting decision-making and no objective outcome measures from which to learn successful performance. Consequently, predicted TFP gains over the next 10 years are even more modest and are predicted to be less than 0.55%. I also explore AI’s wage and inequality effects. I show theoretically that even when AI improves the productivity of low-skill workers in certain tasks (without creating new tasks for them), this may increase rather than reduce inequality. Empirically, I find that AI advances are unlikely to increase inequality as much as previous automation technologies because their impact is more equally distributed across demographic groups, but there is also no evidence that AI will reduce labor income inequality. AI is also predicted to widen the gap between capital and labor income. Finally, some of the new tasks created by AI may have negative social value (such as design of algorithms for online manipulation), and I discuss how to incorporate the macroeconomic effects of new tasks that may have negative social value.
A contrary view, or at least some objections, from Tyler Cowan — including this:
[A]s with international trade, a lot of the benefits of AI will come from “new goods,” Since the prices of those new goods previously were infinity (do note the degree of substability matters), those gains can be much higher than what we get from incremental productivity improvements. The very popular Character.ai is already one such new good, not to mention I and many others enjoy playing around with LLMs just about every day.
But there's another thing that neither Acemoglu nor Cowan considers, which is that administrative automation may be different, at least in some settings. I predict that applications of "AI" to administrative functions will decrease productivity more than they increase it — though I'll skip the supporting details to protect the innocent (as well as the guilty…).
[h/t Bob Shackleton]
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Soy Vey with Dylan Adler (Bless These Braces: Episode 9)
Comedian Dylan Adler (The Late Late Show) goes deep with Tam Yajia on breakdancing at Bar Mitzvahs, his identical twin brother, and a memorable first kiss.
Get all 10 episodes of season 1 now, and stay in touch for new episodes, news, and show extras: https://norby.link/ceiRm2
Key Moments
02:00 - Breakdancing at Bar Mitzvahs
03:25 - Gay twin brother
05:18 - Coming out
11:45 - Half Jewish/Half Japanese
12:35 - A Wicked-themed Bar Mitzvah
15:13 - Becoming an adult, your first kiss
18:02 - Dylan discovers that Tam has never seen Hamilton
20:00 - Tam's childhood lies
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
act on
If you act on somebody's advice, you do as they suggest.
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Idiom of the Day
in virtue of (something)
Due to something; because of something; by reason of something. Watch the video
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[… lots of stuff omitted …]
That excessive Bail ought not to be required, nor excessive Fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual Punishments inflicted. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/1969CruelAndUnusual0.png ➖ @EngSkills ➖
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Language Log
Yay Newfriend again
I got an echo of Saturday's post about chatbot pals, from an article yesterday in Intelligencer — John Herrman, "Meta’s AI Needs to Speak With You" ("The company is putting chatbots everywhere so you don’t go anywhere"):
Meta has an idea: Instead of ever leaving its apps, why not stay and chat with a bot? This past week, Mark Zuckerberg announced an update to Meta’s AI models, claiming that, in some respects, they were now among the most capable in the industry. He outlined his company’s plans to pursue AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, and made some more specific predictions: “By the end of the decade, I think lots of people will talk to AIs frequently throughout the day, using smart glasses like what we’re building with Ray-Ban Meta.”
Most of Herrman's examples are the standard ones about (practical or curiosity-driven) search, semi-whimsical image generation, and so on. But there are also suggestions about more personal kinds of advice:
Elsewhere, Meta’s AI is giving parenting advice on Facebook — claiming it’s the parent of a both gifted and disabled child who’s attending a New York City public school.
That's a reference to this Facebook exchange:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MetasChild.jpeg
(See here for Meta's Help Center on "answers to Facebook group posts and comments".)
It's obviously a mistake for Meta AI to pretend to have a child. But I expect we're going to see it more frequently offering explicitly-authored advice in public forums like Facebook — and maybe also offering private advice to users, based on its deep knowledge of their specific social and personal world. That's a domain where Meta has a big advantage, its only real competitors being Google and Apple, with Microsoft trying to catch up, and maybe X claiming that such things will be part of its Everything aspiration.
The authors of these interventions might be generic bots like "Meta AI", but it seems more likely that there will be a range of personalities with special names and images, focused on things like helping you to plan a trip, or interpret social interactions, or deal with a difficult acquaintance, or just provide a Rogerian venting channel.
As everyone knows, marketing bots of various kinds have been intervening for a long time in social media and individuals' email, texts, and phone calls. But this will be a different kind of intervention.
Still basically spam, I guess, but generated by the platform itself, and maybe more effective in reaching (at least some) users.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
fall over
If someone falls over, they fall to the ground.
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Idiom of the Day
(in) up to (one's) eye(ball)s
Extremely busy; deeply involved or engrossed (in or with something). Watch the video
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Suzhou, Wenzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo, etc. and is spoken widely in Han emigré communities in Europe), and I dare say even topolects of regions like Sichuanese / Szechwanese (remember Der gute Mensch von Sezuan?) — with its hip-hop and rap pop culture and tongue-rocking cuisine — and Northeast / Dongbei / Manchuria with its ultra-talented entertainers.
It will be much easier for these languages to emerge in their full glory if people stop referring to the totality of Han languages as Chinese, which is a political construct, and think of it rather as Sinitic, which is a linguistic concept. As soon as you buy into the dogma / doctrine that Mandarin is the sole, unique, superior brand of ethnic Han language, then you allow the Mandarins of Beijing / Peking to relegate all the other forms of Sinitic speech to the status of lowly "dialect" — including Cantonese, which in actuality is a mighty language with nearly a hundred million (!) speakers. A note on Wu
Intellectually, economically, and in other ways, this group of Sinitic languages was remarkably consequential and powerful already from the middle period of Chinese history. Its dramatic downturn in recent decades is the result of purely political machinations:
=====
The decline of Wu began from around 1986, when students were banned from speaking "uncivilized dialects" during class, a term used by the State Language Commission to refer to all Chinese languages other than Standard Chinese. In 1992, students in Shanghai were banned from speaking Wu at all times on campuses. Since the late 2000s, Wu mostly survived in kitchens and theatres, as a "kitchen language" among the elderly housewives and as a theatrical language in folk Yue opera, Shanghai opera and Pingtan. As of now, Wu has no official status, no legal protection and there is no officially sanctioned romanization.
(Wikipedia)
===== Selected readings
* "Language, topolect, dialect, idiolect" (10/3/23) — with extensive bibliography (during the last two decades, the Language Log posts on the classification of Sinitic and its lects, large and small, are countless)
* "Topolect was specifically invented in 1991 by Victor Mair as a translation of 方言 (fangyan) to get around the whole language/dialect bombshell when it comes to Chinese", Hacker News (7/4/21) — with minimal, yet essential, bibliography
[h.t. Geoff Wade]
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Language Log
That talkative pandemic…
David Deutsch wrote:
I had to read this headline a couple of times.
"The pandemic cost 7 million lives, but talks to prevent a repeat stall"
Is the pandemic talking? Is it trying to prevent a repeat stall?
That garden path failed to tempt me, perhaps because of the fact that the word "talks" in headlinese is almost always a noun rather than a verb. But once you take that first step, it can be hard to get back…
The obligatory screenshot:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PandemicsTalking.png
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Language Log
Once again the Voynich manuscript
This is one of the most novel theories on the Voynich manuscript (Beinecke MS408; early 15th c.) that I've ever encountered, and there are many.
The Voynich Manuscript, Dr Johannes Hartlieb and the Encipherment of Women’s Secrets, by Keagan Brewer and Michelle L Lewis, Social History of Medicine, hkad099 (22 March 2024)
https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkad099
Keywords: Voynich manuscript, Dr Johannes Hartlieb, women’s secrets, sex, gynaecology
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/93/Voynich_Manuscript_%2832%29.jpg/250px-Voynich_Manuscript_%2832%29.jpg
A floral illustration on page 32
Summary
The Voynich manuscript is a famous European enciphered manuscript of the early fifteenth century featuring herbal, pharmaceutical, astrological and anatomical illustrations, including hundreds of naked women. Some hold objects adjacent to or unambiguously pointed towards their genitalia. This paper therefore investigates the culture of self-censorship, erasure and encipherment of women’s secrets, with a focus on Dr Johannes Hartlieb (c. 1410–68). Hartlieb had enduring apprehensions about the propagation of women’s secrets in vernacular Bavarian, which culminated in a call for ‘secret letters’ to hide recipes for abortifacients and contraceptives. Other cases of encipherment relating to sexual intercourse and genitalia will be described. On the basis of this evidence, we propose that the Rosettes, the largest and most complex illustration in the Voynich manuscript, represents coitus and conception. This hypothesis explains many of the illustration’s features and establishes a variety of future research possibilities.
Yet another theory on the fabled Voynich MS, but one that to me makes a lot of sense.
Selected readings
* "Voynich and midfix" (7/3/04)
* "Voynich code cracked?" (5/16/19)
* "The indecipherability of the Voynich manuscript" (9/11/19)
* "The Voynich Manuscript in the undergraduate curriculum" (10/10/19)
* "ChatGPT: Theme and Variations" (2/21/23) — CHAT 2
* "Latin, Hebrew … proto-Romance? New theory on Voynich manuscript: Researcher claims to have solved mystery of 15th-century text but others are sceptical", Esther Addley, The Guardian (5/15/19)
[Thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto]
➖ @EngSkills ➖
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