Comments(0) I think the title says it all: He’s a professional figurer outerer for this type of problem. Hey, as long as we’re showing parallelism by duplicating agenting -er, we may as well have paralellism in number of syllables and qualities of rimes.
On a side note, I think it’s almost a truism that searches that get fewer ghit are more interesting.
Comments(0) The recent news that the national language-monitoring agency of Iran has put forth a long list of loan words that are to be replaced by native words or (sometimes newly-coined?) compounds. Posts from Language Log, Gwynn Dujardin, and Language Hat cover the issue, mostly amused at the attempt of a central regulatory agency to control the uncontrollable.
Back when I was in Japan in 2003-4, the National Institute for Japanese Langauge (国立国語研究所, or 国研 Kokken) released its second list of suggested rewordings of gairai-go (外来語言い換え提案), or loan words mostly from western languages. However, unlike the efforts of some other national bodies, Kokken (or rather, the Gairaigo committee) does not wish to purge the Japanese language of evil foreign influences (yet! mwa ha ha), but instead encourage understanding and discourage evasive language. They point out that often the use of gairaigo is more about increasing ease for the writer or speaker (who can just import a foreign concept without explaining it), as opposed to increasing understanding for the reader or listener. Their suggestions are also, well, suggestions, rather than written-in-stone law. Their documents in particular single out government-issued documents, newspapers, and other texts with a high level of exposure to the public. They don’t really care what people use in their own homes, but if people don’t understand what their government is saying, maybe something isn’t going right.
Comments(2) A rare entry in the “grammar police” category, though it’s really more a case of frustration than disdain over “creative” langauge use.
The noun and verb regard and the preposition (say) regarding all have to do with topicality, i.e., having-to-do-with-something-ness. They like to appear with prepositions like as, in, and with For instance,
Comments(0) On a recent trip to Chinatown in San Francisco, I noticed that although most American banks have transparent names in Chinese (e.g., Bank of America is 美洲銀行 ‘America(n continent) Bank’, WaMu is 華盛頓互惠銀行 ‘Washington Reciprocate Bank’). However, Citibank is called 花旗銀行, literally ‘flower flag bank.’ Could it be an attempt to approximate the sound of citi? In Mandarin it would be hua1 qi2, and in Cantonese faa1 kei4. Okay, so it’s not the sound. Maybe some previous name of Citibank had something to do with flags or flowers, or had a name that sounded more like the Chinese characters? Well, no. So what is the answer?
Comments(0) The street name Broadway is often rendered 百老匯 in Chinese. In particular, Broadway in NYC is so-named, and street signs in Oakland near the Chinatown area have signs with this name (as I recall). I like this name, for several reasons. First, the first two characters (bai3 lao3 in Mandarin) are reminiscent of the word 老百姓 (lao3 bai3 xing4), which means ‘commoners,’ (though it literally means ‘old hundred names’); this fits with (the sorts of streets that are named) Broadway as a sort of common place for normal people to gather or travel on. The third character, hui4, has a meaning of ‘converge’, ‘flow,’ or ‘gather together’. Again, all broadly fitting with Broadway.
Of course, in order to be a good rendition the pronunciation has to fit reasonably well. Now, [bai laʊ xueɪ] is really only acceptable if you’re aware of the limitations of Mandarin phonology, as well as the fact that most famous place names (at least in America) were not given Chinese names by speakers of Mandarin, but by speakers of other Chinese languages that preserved useful things like syllable-final oral stops. I suspected that it was a speaker or group of speakers of a southern Chinese language like Cantonese that first used words like 百老匯, but the Chinese Wikipedia article says that it was likely a speaker of Shanghainese or Ningpo that first coined the term, along with the word for Washington, 華盛頓 (Mandarin hua2 sheng4 dun4 [xwa ʂɣŋ duən]). According to the indices on a Wu Dictionary website, Broadway is pronounced (sans tone) [paʔ lɔ uɛ], and Washington is [uo zã təŋ]. For the curious, the standard Cantonese would be [baak lou (w)ui] and [wa siŋ dœn] (hopefully I didn’t mangle that; I just started trying to learn Cantonese).
It definitely seems that (modern) Cantonese sounds much closer than either Mandarin or Shanghainese for Washington, but the coda k makes its Broadway a bit anomalous. The more source-language-loyal conventions currently used(*) in Mandarin for foreign names might get something closer, like bu luo de wei, but it would create a rather long name, which (IMO) looks and sounds rather ungraceful, and doesn’t have the punch of something like 百老匯.
(*) I actually have only a very limited grasp of how sounds (in English) are usually written out with characters in Mandarin, and have only intuited that there is some sort of standard that may in truth only be limited to official discourse.
Comments(0) The word nuclear has already undergone a process of extended metonymy (or you could just say “specification”), from pertaining to the core of some object (nuclear region of a star, first OED cite 1833), to the core of an atom (nuclear scattering/bombardment, 1914), to the fission or fusion of such nuclei, and especially the energy produced thereby (nuclear power, 1945, nuclear submarine, 1957), and especially weapons using such energy (nuclear bomb, 1945, nuclear warhead, 1957), and then to basically anything having to do with weapons, including creating them (nuclear industry), storing/possessing them (nuclear nation), centrally involving them (nuclear war/stalemate), or resulting from them (nuclear annihilation).
Comments(0) It’s lexicography time! First, a follow-up to the responsible topic I raised in the last post, along with some other words of interest.
Next, two lexicographic/lexical semantic items that came up during my day-to-day work. First, there are two main senses of transitive boil: to bring some liquid to the boiling point (boil water), and to cook or heat by placing in a boiling liquid (boil potatoes (in water/broth)). Consider the second use, which is often about cooking. Since it involves cooking, you can use domain-specific phrases like over high heat or on medium flame, as in boil the beans over high heat. (note the incongruity of *I burned my hand over high heat, unless you’re planning on doing some self-consumption)
Comments(0) Part of my Chinese class involves translation of short paragraphs from English into Chinese. The paragraphs are in the workbook that accompanies this textbook). Normally they are very good exercises, and the paragraphs are written in a way to make you think about how to use your relatively limited skills in Chinese to render a good translation. But sometimes they do something that’s…well, a little wrong. Below is one of the paragraphs that we translated in class today:
Recently, there has been more news on students bringing guns to school and threatening their teachers and classmates. Parents not only blame the school for not being able to educate children well, but also blame the media for having a bad influence on their children. However, many parents have never thought that they themselves are mostly responsible for their children’s behavior.
The interesting part is the last clause, that they themselves are mostly responsible for their children’s behavior. A student might have at least two problems at this point. One is that the book has not introduced a way to express the idea of being responsible. Instead there is a way to express take responsibility (for X). Unfortunately, the student might not be sure that there was any clear way to modify “responsibility” except for perhaps 負最大的責任 ‘bear the biggest responsibility’ (note: I’m not sure if this means the right thing, though it’s commonly attested on Google).