Noncompositional

Take a snowclone like “A is the B of C,” examples of which can be found by, say, searching Google for “is the Tom Cruise of”. This sort of phrase is just asking for field-specific specialization. Take linguistics…

As everyone knows, thanks to the magical process of sound change, the modern French language, especially its spelling and phonology, are totally messed up and weird. And since this is so well known, it easily fills the B slot in the above construction, as in a comment by Bill Poser on Languagehat: Read more »

I was recently shopping for a good Chinese-English (and E-C) dictionary, and noticed a difference between character lookup methods between Chinese and Japanese. In all the Chinese dictionaries I looked at (not a lot, admittedly), there were a total of two methods: by radical, and by pronunciation. Japanese dictionaries add a third method: total number of strokes. Now, of course number of strokes is important for Chinese dictionaries as well: the radicals and the characters listed under them are organized by stroke count. But the Japanese dictionaries I have/had allow for total strokes in the character (presumably for cases where it’s unclear what the radical is — at least, that’s usually why I use that method). Maybe some non-foreign-language Chinese dictionaries also have such a list and I didn’t see it…but it would be interesting if they didn’t! (and just to point it out, Japanese has many options in the pronunciation-lookup method, thanks to the ridiculous numbers of pronunciations for characters: the electronic kanji dictionary that I have even allows me to look up the pronunciation of the radical! (which comes in handy if…uh…I don’t feel like inputting digits).

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The rules for combining initials and finals (rimes) in pinyin are not exactly simple, though the complications do sometimes end up being sort of intuitive (intuitive enough for a classrooms full of American schoolchildren to learn fairly quickly). But sometimes things are hidden. Things that people (like me) notice only very infrequently for periods of up to 10 years before finally figuring out.

Of course, if Wikipedia had existed back when I was in high school, I could have just consulted its table of Mandarin finals and noted that what is written ing in pinyin is pronounced [iɤŋ]. Or I could have looked at bopomofo and realized that there is no single symbol for the ing final (though there is one for ang and eng). Instead it is a combination of i and eng [ɤŋ].

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Given how much I’ve e-mailed about this in the past couple of days, this entry will be short. First, there are two major conceptions of the passage of time: ego-centered (moving-ego) and event-centered (moving-time). Many languages instantiate the former with metaphors like the future is in front and the past is in back. English is one such language. So is Chinese (I think perhaps 未來 ‘future’, lit. ‘not-yet come’ is a good example). Aymara does it the other way: their word for ‘last year’ is literally ‘eye/front year,’ and their word for ‘next year’ is literally ‘behind/back year.’ These are about relating times to ego, not to other times or events. In this way, Aymara is not like English, and is not like Chinese.

(Confused? Read these articles.)

Al Gore appeared on Larry King Live today and spread vicious lies about Chinese lexical semantics. In his book, he writes,

As many know, the Chinese expression for “crisis” consists of two characters side by side. The first is the symbol for “danger,” the second the symbol for “opportunity.” (taken from an npr interview, though he basically repeated it on the show)

He should know that the worldwide scientific consensus is that the Chinese word (”expression”) for ‘crisis’ absolutely does not have this meaning. Oy. Blog posts over the past few months covering his book and movie help perpetuate the myth (though untrue, using it probably has some rhetorical payoff), even getting wrong what Gore gets right: that the word consists of two characters. Ethan Zuckerman at WorldChanging says: “He quotes the old saw that the Chinese character for crisis includes signs for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity.’” Similarly, JD Lasica at New Media Musings wrote: the Chinese symbol for crisis [is] a symbol that epitomizes tragedy on one side but opportunity on the other. Of course, some blogs get it right, and some people replied to posts with the correct information. And of course Language Log has coverage.

This reminds me of people in grade and high school constantly misspelling my name, even while looking at a correct version and copying it onto a piece of paper

[inevitably this post will fall into line with Hartman's law...]

My apologies to anyone who’s had trouble accessing the site over the past few days - the server that is hosting it has been going off- and online several times per day. Hopefully it will be all over soon.

And for a small bit of actual content: I was reading through an introductory Mandarin Chinese textbook today (basically to review all that I learned in high school before I start summer classes — I’ll have some things to say about the textbook itself at a later date), and found something interesting. It seems that as of January 18, 2005, the (South) Korean “Committee on the New Chinese Name (’notation’) for Seoul” decided that the name of its capital city should be written 首爾 (Shǒu’ěr), rather than 漢城 (Hànchéng). This is of course old news in the blogging community, and I recommend this entry on Hunjangûi karûch’im for details and links to earlier progress reports on the matter, and a post on languagehat on a related matter involving the same committee.

I don’t want to comment directly on the political or ideological reasons behind the decision or any potential (or actual) controversy. However, I did find this line in the Japanese Wikipedia entry for Seoul intriguing:

一方、中国側では当初、「漢字表記は中国が決めるもの」として「首爾」の使用に消極的であったが

Which means, ‘On the other hand, China was initially negative regarding the use of 首爾, as “Chinese writing is to be determined by China.”‘ No reference is given to the quote, which may not even be a direct quotation. I’ve been trying to find a Japanese paper that actually has a line like this, or similar to it, but so far no luck. I’m not convinced that Chinese officials would actually say that all uses of Chinese characters must be approved by China, and the quote leaves open the possibility that it just refers to China-internal matters (which would not an unreasonable thing to say, I think).

Another point of interest: the Korean committee did not decide to do what Japan has been doing for a long time: invent kun-yomi for Chinese characters. As far as I know, the only way Chinese characters are/were used in Korean is to write actual Chinese loan words from. In contrast, Japanese makes use of characters for their meanings alone. Thus in Japanese a verb like ‘read’ is written 読む /yomu/, where the character is pronounced /yo/, with no connection to its Chinese-derived reading, /doku/. In Korean the verb for ‘read,’ /ilk-/, is always written with hangul, rather than using 読. That character does exist in borrowed words, though, and it is pronounced /du/. For more details see Hanja on everyone’s favorite site.

But getting back to the committee: it would have been interesting if they decided to take the meaning of “Seoul,” which is ‘capital city,’ and just chose characters that mean that, regardless of their Chinese pronunciations. I’m not sure what would happen if they asked China to start writing 首都 ‘capital city’ for Seoul. It could get confusing. On the other hand, as a (non-native, fluent) speaker of Chinese pointed out to me, if they wanted to go that route they could have chosen a nonexistent compound like 首城 or 首市, both of which clearly mean ‘capital city’ but don’t actually exist as words, AFAIK. It could have been a renaissance of hanja in Korea! Okay, probably not.

I’m no expert on forensic linguistics, but I think I’ll go ahead and comment on a recent case that has some relevence to language use.

The case involves Liz Seccuro, who says she was raped 21 years ago by then-college classmate William Beebe during a UVA fraternity party. At the time she communicated the crime to campus authorities (who had jurisdiction), but after Beebe dropped out she dropped the matter (or, depending on which source you listen to, the university dropped the ball by not notifying the police, or by being lax on rape cases).

Then, just last September, she received a snail-mail letter from Beebe apologizing for what he had done. This started a communication between them, via e-mail, in which Beebe admits to and apologizes for the crime. The letters later contributed to his arrest, as Virginia does not place a statute of limitations on felony charges, including rape.

When I was listening to the story on CNN, I thought, man, this is an open-and-shut case, especially considering some of the statements that Beebe makes in the e-mail. For instance,

Dear Liz, I want to make clear that I’m not intentionally minimizing the fact of having raped you. I did.

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A post by Geoff Pullum at LL a few days ago pointed readers to an article in the Boston Globe by Jan Freeman which itself was about a (negative) review of The Da Vinci Code in Newsweek by David Ansen (available here). In particular, Freeman and Pullum make fun of Ansen’s chosen headline, “Thou shalt not like it.”

The phrase thou shalt not blah is, I assume, mostly known via the popular rendering of the Ten Commandmants, and so it might seem to some an odd choice for a review headline. After all, reviews are about saying either what one personally thought, what one thinks others will think, or both. They are not about telling people what they must think (unless one is cynical). Regarding this, Pullum writes:

Thou shalt is of course a prohibition. They wanted to express a prediction about your reaction, not forbid a positive one. Surely they knew the difference.

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