languagehat.com

Heather Knight and Amy Qin report for the NY Times (archived) on a problem that I wouldn’t have thought of but that’s obvious once pointed out:

In San Francisco, where more than a fifth of residents are of Chinese descent, politicians have long taken a second name in Chinese characters. And any serious candidate knows to order campaign materials in English and in Chinese.

But the city’s leniency for adopted names has frustrated some Chinese American candidates, who say that non-Chinese rivals have gone overboard by using flattering, flowery phrases that at first glance have little to do with their actual names. Some candidates have gained an advantage or engaged in cultural appropriation, the critics say.

No more. For the first time, San Francisco has rejected Chinese names submitted by 22 candidates, in most cases because they could not prove they had used the names for at least two years. The city has asked translators to furnish names that are transliterated, a process that more closely approximates English pronunciations.

That means Michael Isaku Begert, who is running to keep his local judgeship, cannot use 米高義, which means in part “high” and “justice,” a name that suggests he was destined to sit on the bench.

And Daniel Lurie, who is challenging Mayor London Breed, must scrap the name he had been campaigning with for months: 羅瑞德, which means “auspicious” and “virtue.” Mr. Lurie’s new name, 丹尼爾·羅偉, pronounced Daan-nei-ji Lo-wai, is a transliterated version that uses characters closer to the sound of his name in English but are meaningless when strung together. […]

The switch isn’t universally popular. It ends a San Francisco tradition, cherished in some circles, in which Chinese leaders have bestowed names upon their favorite candidates. And it has the potential of resulting in long monikers that are difficult to remember or even cringe-worthy, since the characters that sound like someone’s name may translate into odd phrases in Chinese.

More details at the link (and personally, I think the “cultural appropriation” thing is silly); there’s also a brief excursus into other languages (“Certain towns in Alaska must translate ballots into Yup’ik […] while some counties in Arizona must do so in Navajo and Apache”). Thanks, Dmitry!

Nicole Vulser has a horrifying piece in Le Monde (archived; en français) about what AI is doing to a valuable profession:

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has already claimed its first victims in the publishing world. Literary translators − the most fragile link and the most exposed to the AI tsunami − are witnessing their working conditions worsen by the day and their orders dwindle. As the use of automatic translation programs like DeepL becomes increasingly widespread, the job of a translator is increasingly reduced to post-editing contracts (using a text pre-translated by a machine).

According to Jörn Cambreleng, the director of Atlas, an organization promoting literary translation, this practice is still considered “shameful” among publishers, who never mention AI use on book covers, but also among translators, who accept this type of cheaper contract only due to a lack of other options.

The latest survey on machine translation and post-editing conducted by the French Literary Translators’ Association (ATLF) in December 2022 among 400 people already showed a “strong lack of transparency from publishers” on AI use and “lower compensation” (lower than average translation rates in 68% of cases). […]

ATLF secretary Peggy Rolland is concerned about the arrival of AI and fears a chain reaction of challenges, starting with legal ones. “Translators are authors and must receive royalties on each book sale (usually between 1% and 2%). “However, publishers who use AI want to pay us as self-employed contractors, which is not legal,” Rolland pointed out.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to fight this other than an unlikely multinational legal ban — translators are self-employed (as far as I know) and inherently hard to organize. But it’s a wretched development.

Bathrobe sent me the YouTube clip Vocal Fry: what it is, who does it, and why people hate it! by Dr Geoff Lindsey, saying:

What is fascinating is the way he looks back and finds that creaky voice was once a prominent feature of posh male RP accents, with clips from various people including Sean Connery. So it was acceptable for posh male speakers of RP but is not acceptable for young female North Americans.

The clips are wonderful (there’s a whole segment of them showing that vocal fry, aka creaky voice, is ubiquitous in Finnish, to the point that speaking the language without it sounds unnatural), and I join Bathrobe in finding the video both interesting and enlightening. It’s 27 minutes long, but I promise you won’t be bored. And it definitely sticks the ending!

The blogger nostalgicitalian (“just a guy who likes the classics”) has a 2021 post on things you can say when you don’t want to offend those offended by bad words:

I have mentioned the cartoon Bluey on here in the past. On the Bluey Facebook page a while back, they had a video of the dad (Bandit) using alternate expressions where swear words might be used. Exclamations like “Cheese and jam,” “Beans on toast,” and “Biscuits” are used in place of swear words.

“Biscuits!” is a favorite of mine right now, especially since Ella is starting to copy and say things we do. As much as I want to scream a dirty word when I step on a Lego, “Biscuits” works just as well.

And he has an image of a pleasing set of Alternative Cuss Words, from “Shucks” to “For cryin’ out loud,” with stops at “Geez,” “Nerts,” “Great googley moogley,” “Shut the front door,” and many others in between — “turd” and “bull snot” are about as vile as it gets.

A couple of comments in the recent Siksimiisii! thread linked to the blog Mii Dash Geget: “Ojibwe, Algonquian languages, historical linguistics, and randomness.” The About page says “Posts here generally use linguistics jargon without explanation” and provides a list of “some good introductions to basic linguistic concepts”; it ends with a story, in Ojibwa followed by English, from William Jones, Ojibwa Texts, whose last line is Mii dash geget/And it was true. Some recent posts are Squib #1: “Winter” in Algic (“the Yurok and Proto-Algonquian terms—Yurok kipun and PA *peponwi—are cognate with one another and can be traced back to a Proto-Algic etymon **pəpwən-, despite some complications to clear up”), A Few Modest Terminological and Notational Proposals (“I use the well-established label Algic to refer to the family encompassing Algonquian, Wiyot, and Yurok, and Proto-Algic for its protolanguage”), and Wikipedia Sucks (“I am concerned by how ubiquitous is the practice of practically everyone, including plenty of otherwise reasonable, intelligent people, quoting or citing or linking to Wikipedia” — check out the parade of horrors cited there and marvel at those who think Wikipedia is a reliable source). This is absolutely the kind of thing I love, and I am adding it to my RSS feed.

Last night we watched Yasujirō Ozu’s 1959 comedy Good Morning (お早よう, Ohayō); I had no expectation of making a post, but when I realized what it was about, I had no choice but to do so. That took almost half the movie, though. There are two plot lines, which seem to have nothing to do with each other: a group of elementary school students goof around and make fart jokes (apparently Japanese schoolkids make farts that sound like whistling), and a group of neighborhood housewives gossip with each other and wonder who stole the women’s club monthly dues. The turning point of the movie comes when two brothers, Minoru and Isamu, express their resentment at their father’s refusal to get a television set (they have to sneak over to the neighbors to watch sumo and baseball) by going on a silence strike. Being kids, they take it to extremes, refusing to talk even at school, which leads to a teacher visiting their home, or to their neighbor Mrs. Haraguchi, which leads to more gossip.

But before going silent, Minoru angrily tells his father that adults are always saying meaningless things like “good morning” and “nice weather,” so what’s the point of talking? And from there on, you can’t help but hear that in fact much of the dialogue does consist of “Ohayō” (good morning), “Konnichi wa” (good afternoon/day), “Ii o-tenki desu ne” (Nice weather we’re having, isn’t it?), and the like; I noticed particularly the frequency of naruhodo, about which my indispensable Rose-Innes Vocabulary of Common Japanese Words says:

An interj. that may indicate a mild form of surprise, wonder or admiration, but is chiefly used by a person who is listening to another’s narrative and shows by an narrative and shows by an occasional naruhodo that he is taking a polite interest in what is being said. It may be translated by: ‘really!’; ‘I see’; etc.

And when the kids finally (spoiler!) resume speaking, one of the first words out of their mouths is “Ohayō!” In other words, the movie is about (inter alia, ça va sans dire) phatic communication, and deserves a place among Movies Featuring Linguists, Linguistics and Languages.

Sophie Hardach writes for BBC Future about Spanglish, a topic that’s been featured here a number of times (e.g.); a lot of it is, of course, the inevitable background info (“according to Pew Research, Spanglish is widespread”), but there are some nice details which I will excerpt here:

“Vamos de punches punches punches”, Yamilet Muñoz texted her friends in Austin, Texas. It means “let’s go and party”, but it’s not a phrase you’ll find in any dictionary. It’s a remix of Spanish and English words seasoned with a in-joke about punching the air as you dance, and it’s just one example of the countless linguistic innovations happening every day as these two major American languages meet. […]

Meghann Peace, an associate professor of Spanish at St Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, defines Spanglish as “a dialect of Spanish that is influenced by English”. […] Eloy Cruz, a 22-year-old former student of Peace’s, describes Spanish as his first language and one he naturally prefers, though he is also fully comfortable in English. […] In his work at a public school in Texas, supporting young people as they go to university, Cruz effortlessly shifts between his languages. Many of the students’ parents, for example, come from different parts of Latin America, and many only speak Spanish. On the other hand, there are those who may want to learn more English, and then he responds accordingly: “If they start throwing in more English, I’ll also throw in more English, to help them out. I need to get a feeling for what they’re like, and then I’ll throw in more Spanish or English.”

He also enjoys trading words from different Spanish dialects: he learned “pana”, a Peruvian word for friend, from Peruvian students at his university. He in turn taught them the Mexican expression “nombre”, a contraction of “no, hombre!”, meaning something like, “no way, man!” Once, he found himself exclaiming: “Nombre, pana!” – “No way, man!”, with a Mexican-Peruvian twist.

One of his current favourite words is “eslei”, Spanglish for “slay” – as in, to do something extremely well. […]

Peace has analysed how Mexican Americans subtly change their Spanish when studying abroad in Spain. Research by her and others has shown that during such extended stays in Spain, Mexican Americans and other US Spanish speakers tend to pick up certain aspects of European Spanish, but not others. For example, they often adopt one particular European Spanish word with special enthusiasm, according to the research: “vale”, meaning, “right”, or “ok”.

“They love saying vale,” Peace says, even though equivalent words exist in their own US Spanish, such as “bueno”. What made the students adopt this word, but not others? The answer has to do with finely calibrated judgments around identity, research by Peace and others suggests. Sprinkling in “vale” allowed the speakers to add some global flavour to their speech, while still holding on to their own identity, Peace says: “It’s seen as cosmopolitan, and shows that you’re capable of adapting. It’s a way of saying, ‘I am an international person’,” she says. […]

Some expressions, [Muñoz] says, are also just satisfying to say, such as “no manches!”, which she translates as “dang!”, as in: “No manches, I forgot my pencil case!”

Thanks, Trevor!

Via Louis Maistros’ Facebook post, I found a great newspaper squib (which you can see at Reddit if you don’t have access to FB) called “Progress of Civilization or Wise-Cracking Thru the Ages” and listing snappy comebacks from 1895 (“What’s your name? Puddingtame, ask me again and I’ll tell you the same”) to 1930 (“Oh, yeah?”). I presume it was published in 1930 or shortly thereafter; if anyone can source it, that would be great. At any rate, what struck me was that though some were still familiar, if antiquated (“Go jump in a lake,” “So’s your old man”), others have been utterly forgotten. If you google “You’re the Candy Kid” (the entry for 1900), you get all sorts of examples, e.g.:

“Captain Joe,” whispered Alex, patting the dog on the head, “you’re the candy kid! That’s Clay, without the shadow of a doubt. Now you tell him that we want to come aboard.” (Harry Gordon, The River Motor Boat Boys on the Ohio, 1913)
“Dear Sweetheart: ‘Ive watched You for a long Time, and I have decided that you’re the Candy Kid for sure.’” (Mattoon [Illinois] Morning Star, April 18, 1907, p. 1)
“You’re the candy kid!” (line of dialogue from The laughing cure, a comedy in two acts [c. 1916])

But where did it come from? I checked Eric Partridge’s indispensable (if unreliable) A Dictionary of Catchphrases, but he didn’t have it, and the same is true for the others I’ll mention. 1909’s “go to and stay put” is short and memorable (cf. the recent “keep calm and carry on”) and was used for some time (Dorothy Speare’s Dancers in the Dark [1922], p. 117: “I told him to go to and stay put”; John Bernard Mannion, “Pointers on Business Letter-Writing,” Postage and the Mailbag, Sept. 1921, p. 341: “We’d really like to have told our reader to go to and stay put”), but who came up with it? The same goes for 1912’s “You know me, Steve”; a good example with a doubtless fictional origin story is in M. H. Hirst’s “A Study in Contrasts,” The Central Literary Magazine, Vol. 23, p. 646:

He never moves even now, without a loaded automatic; and there are certain phrases of his which have become current coin in the mess — such as, in quick staccato accents, “ Got yer covered ” ; or “ You know me, Steve ! ” in tones of quiet menace.

“So I took the fifty thousand” (1926) is presumably from the 1923 song (YouTube); “Faw down and go boom” (1929) is from the Eddie Cantor song “I Faw Down an’ Go Boom!” (1928). Somebody should really do a proper historical catalogue, comparable to Green’s Dictionary of Slang; catchphrases are just as interesting as slang words!

I shared Zaria Gorvett’s BBC story with my wife, telling her it was “everything you ever wanted to know about codpieces,” and she had a question for me: was the cod of codpiece related to the name of the fish? I said I wasn’t sure and headed to the OED, where I found that the answer was “Maybe.” The OED entry (revised 2020) for the fish name said “Origin uncertain. Perhaps shortened from codling n.¹, and hence perhaps ultimately related to cod n.¹ [A bag or pouch; A purse or wallet; A pod of a pea, bean, or other leguminous plant; The scrotum] (see discussion at codling n.¹).” Under codling ‘cod(fish)’ (also revised 2020) we find:

Origin uncertain. Perhaps < cod n.¹ + ‑ling suffix¹.

Compare cod n.² and codfish n., which may both derive ultimately from this word.

Notes
The original sense was perhaps ‘fish found in the cod end of a trawl net’: compare cod n.¹ 5a and cod net n. As a demersal fish, cod was made more accessible by the development of the trawling technology, and would have been found often in the cod ends of trawl nets. (Perhaps compare similarly dogdrave n. [A marine fish used for food … Sometimes identified with the cod])

Earlier currency is implied by the following example, showing a Latin borrowing of the English word:

  1289 In .v..xx. x. codling’ empt’ Glouc’ xvij.s.
     in J. Webb, Household Expenses R. de Swinfield (1853) 31

Perhaps attested earlier as a surname: Robert Codling (1275, Lincolnshire).

And for cod n.¹ ‘bag; purse; pod; scrotum’ we have:
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Kamala Thiagarajan writes for BBC Travel about a very interesting form of Tamil, starting with a dramatic anecdote:

One warm summer evening in 2008, when Mohamed Sultan Baqavi was a 26-year-old student at Arabic College in the South Indian town of Vellore, he made a remarkable discovery. After offering prayers in the city’s Labaabeen Qabrusthan mosque, where generations of his spiritual gurus were laid to rest, he caught sight of a man sweeping the courtyard.

The man gathered the debris – scraps of paper, rubble and leaves – and piled them up beside a dried-up well near the mosque’s entrance to set alight. As Baqavi was preparing to leave, a gentle breeze blew his way, carrying with it a page from the rubbish heap. When he pried it from his face, Baqavi was startled to find that the scrap of paper was a part of a book. He knew that some mosques used their dried-out wells as storage for rare manuscripts, and stray pages from these often littered courtyards. Could this be one of them, he wondered?

Baqavi took a closer look at the now-burning heap of rubbish and hurriedly fished out an entire book from the bonfire. After dousing the flames, he opened it to find pages of rare script that he immediately recognised. It was written in the long-lost language of Arwi.

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