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If you follow Language Log at all, you’ll be aware of the endless ingenuity of the citizens of the PRC in getting around censorship by means of puns, allusions, etc.; this story by Courtney Donovan Smith (石東文) of Taiwan News shows that the citizens of Taiwan are equally creative, even in the absence of such censorship:

One of the fun aspects of following Taiwanese politics is the unique and colorful vocabulary. Some of it is practical, some profound, and others downright funny. Much of it is distinct to Taiwan. All of it reflects the passionate interest in Taiwanese elections. […] When more than one person is vying to be the party’s candidate, they may “knead tang yuan,” (搓圓仔湯/搓湯圓/挲圓仔湯/煮圓仔湯) or try offer up something to get a candidate to drop out. […] Sometimes politicians look to a “barrel hoop,” (桶箍) which is a neutral or mutually respected person working to bring candidates together as a team. […] Sometimes a barrel hoop will negotiate with another party to get one party’s candidate to not run to avoid splitting the ticket against the opposition, and “politely yield” (禮讓). […]

It is fairly common in Taiwan for politicians to express public disinterest in running for a post, sometimes for genuine reasons but often it is a song and dance show. If a politician already holds a post it would look bad to step down to run for something else, or if a friend or ally is vying for the same position and it would look like betrayal, or even just to look humble, if the party wants the candidate to run they will “make three humble visits to the thatched cottage” (三顧茅廬). […] Once the candidates are chosen, it is time to use my favorite terms, “hen” (母雞) and “chicks” (小雞). The hen is a candidate at the top of the ticket and chicks are the downstream ones, for example, a presidential candidate is a hen, and legislative candidates are chicks, or a mayoral candidate and city council candidates. […] What the hen is providing the chicks is a “watermelon nestle to the big side (西瓜偎大邊), which means to ride on the hen’s coattails.

Great stuff, and there’s much more of it at the link. (See this 2002 post for an illustration of how proverbs and “four-character expressions” can be used to make conversation livelier and less intelligible.)

My wife and I are about halfway through our reading of Shirley Hazzard’s best-known novel, The Transit of Venus, and I thought I’d provide a sample of her splendid way with language and her raptor-like view of human interaction. This is a good chunk of chapter 17 (set sometime around the early 1960s by my guess):

In the government office where Caroline Bell worked there was a young woman called Valda. That she was called Valda was to the point, for she objected to this. None of the other women there objected to being Milly, Pam, or Miranda with their appointed Mr. Smedleys and Mr. Renshaw-Browns. None of the other women objected, for that matter, to being girls.

By that epoch the men themselves were no longer Bates or Barkham to one another, but instant Sam or Jim. Those who had irreducibly formal names, such as Giles or Julian, even seemed to be lagging dangerously and doomed to obscurity. There was one older man in Planning who would say Mister to his subordinates—”Mister Haynes,” “Mister Dandridge”—like the skipper of an old ship with his first mate or boatswain. But he too, among the women, permitted himself an occasional Marge or Marigold; although at home calling his charwoman Mrs. Dodds.

When Caro asked, “If they make a true friend, what will they call him?” Valda told her: “They’re hoping to put true friendship out of business.” […]

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Late last year Dagmar Divjak, Hui Sun, and Petar Milin released a Journal of Neurolinguistics paper “Physiological responses and cognitive behaviours: Measures of heart rate variability index language knowledge” whose abstract says:

Building on the relation between language cognition and the nervous system, we examine whether Heart Rate Variability (HRV), a cardiovascular measure that indexes Autonomic Nervous System activity, can be used to assess implicit language knowledge. We test the potential of HRV to detect whether individuals possess grammatical knowledge and explore how sensitive the cardiovascular response is.

41 healthy, British English-speaking adults listened to 40 English speech samples, half of which contained grammatical errors. Thought Technology’s 5-channel ProComp 5 encoder tracked heart rate via a BVP-Flex/Pro sensor attached to the middle finger of the non-dominant hand, at a rate of 2048 samples per second. A Generalised Additive Mixed Effects Model confirmed a cardiovascular response to grammatical violations: there is a statistically significant reduction in HRV as indexed by NN50 in response to stimuli that contain errors. The cardiovascular response reflects the extent of the linguistic violations, and NN50 decreases linearly with an increase in the number of errors, up to a certain level, after which HRV remains constant.

Now see what Nick Morgan Ph.D. did with it in the pages of Psychology Today:
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Over at the Log, Victor Mair posted a video by Stuart Jay Raj, a Thai-based Australian polyglot, about how tones work in Chinese, Thai, Burmese, and Vietnamese; it’s almost half an hour long, which would normally put me off, but he’s so enthusiastic and informative that I kept watching till the end. His overall point is “Don’t be afraid of tones!”; Mair says:

Raj makes a sharp distinction between pitch and tone, something that many people get all mixed up about. […] It’s long and technical, but if you’re truly interested in tones and tonal languages, I would urge you to have a good look and listen to what Stuart Jay Raj has to say about them. He knows his stuff, so even if you’re not specifically interested in mastering tones and tonal language, but are simply interested in the phonological and phonetic principles behind them, you might well learn something useful from this presentation. For example, he has ideas about how creaky voice interacts with the production of tones.

Mair is impressed by “the accuracy of his tones” and “the precision of his pronunciation”; not knowing the languages, I have to take his word for it, but it sounds convincing. His presentation is sometimes odd, and Mair suggests he’s “pretty much of an autodidact,” so you’ll want to read the comments for corrections, but I think it’s worthwhile viewing. Some bits I jotted down: Burmese today is in the tonal evolutionary stage that Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese were in thousands of years ago (18:09); Burmese writing is “round and bubbly” vs. Khmer because the latter was etched in stone, while Burmese was written on palm leaves; “It’s all about the mechanics of the voice”; “If you want to have your mind blown, go and learn Burmese”; “All of these languages are running on the same tonal engine.” If any of that sounds intriguing, check it out.

Stephen Goranson sent me a link to the new online journal Hieroglyphs:

Hieroglyphs is an internationally peer-reviewed open access e-journal aiming to promote the academic study of hieroglyphs in all their dimensions in Egyptology and with a comparative angle extending to other hieroglyphic traditions and writing systems with a strongly iconic component. The journal provides a dedicated home for studies of hieroglyphs in all their semiotic, linguistic, cognitive, aesthetic, cultural, and material aspects.

The first issue, published at the end of December, includes articles ranging from the general (Dimitri Meeks, “An Egypto-Grammatology: Why and How”) to the very specific (Ben Haring, “The Scribe’s Outfit 𓏟 in the Deir el-Medina Pseudo-script: Shapes and Uses”; Philipp Seyr, “Graphetic Compounding in the First Intermediate Period: The Micro-history of [hiero] ḥtr.wy ‘span’ and the Process of Sign Decomposition”). Thanks, SG!

Joel Christensen of Brandeis has a post Where Did Homeric Book Divisions Come From? that discusses “questions about design and the relationship between the parts of the Iliad and the whole”; I’m just going to reproduce a chunk of the conclusion (follow the link for the bulk of the post). He quotes Bruce Heiden as follows:

The analysis will first consider the placement of the twenty-three ‘book divisions’. It will show that all the scenes that immediately precede a ‘book division’ manifest a common feature, namely that they scarcely affect forthcoming events in the story. All the scenes that follow a book division’ likewise display a common characteristic: these scenes have consequences that are immediately felt and continue to be felt at least 400 lines further into the story. Therefore, all of the twenty-three ‘book divisions’ occur at junctures of low-consequence and high consequence scenes. Moreover, every such juncture in the epic is the site of a ‘book division’.

The second stage of the analysis will examine the textual segments that lie between ‘book divisions’, i.e., the ‘books’ of the Iliad. It will show that in each ‘book’ the last event narrated is caused by the first, as are most of the events narrated in between. But the last event seldom completes a program implied by the first. Thus the ‘books’ of the Iliad display internal coherence, but only up to a point. They do not furnish a strong sense of closure. Instead their outline is marked by a sense of diversion in the narrative at the beginning of each.

Then comes this, from Steve Reece:
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TR, who sent me the link, wrote:

This doesn’t seem to have been mentioned on the blog, but the Linguistics Department at the University of Göttingen has put together what looks like a veritable treasure trove of online lectures digging deep into the grammars and histories of twelve early IE languages, presented by an all-star team of scholars including at least one occasional commenter at the Hattery. I have yet to dive in, but it looks very much worth exploring.

It sure does! Their About section reads:

Indo-European Linguistics has produced a wealth of knowledge about the grammars of Ancient Indo-European languages, which has substantially advanced our understanding of the history of language and the human past in general. Since this knowledge is scattered over thousands of scientific publications of the past two centuries (and ongoing), access to these languages and their fascinating features and histories is reserved to specialists. The aim of this project is to help unearth this treasure and to present it to a wider audience in an easily accessible and up-to-date form. In line with this vision, a team of experts on Indo-European languages from all over the world offers courses introducing twelve of the most important Indo-European languages and their grammars.

The list of topics and lecturers is at the link; Old Albanian, for instance, is presented by Michiel de Vaan and Brian Joseph. Thanks, TR!

Ben Yagoda at Not One-Off Britishisms has an investigation into the word “wee”:

Someone I know has taken to using the word “wee” meaning to urinate, e.g., “Pretty soon I will need to to wee.” I recognized this as a British replacement for “pee,” along the same lines as “poo” substituting for American “poop,” and I thought it would make for a pretty easy post for this blog.

Well, similar to Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca, I misinformed myself. To be sure, “wee” in both the verb form and the noun (“He had a wee”) is indeed British, as well as Irish and Australian. The OED’s first citation for the verb is a 1934 letter from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas: “Wee on the sun that he bloody well shines not.” The first noun form is in Richard Clapperton’s 1968 book No News on Monday, with the line, “Wanda is downstairs having a wee.”

The problem was establishing that any American other than my one informant uses it. None of the citations in the OED or in Green’s Dictionary of Slang is American. Nor, as far as I can tell, has “wee” has ever been used to mean urinate in the New York Times.

He goes into more detail about his fruitless search, then continues:

But that still left me with no other American instances of “wee.” Desperate, I turned to Facebook and asked my friends if they had ever encountered it. I got more than a few negative responses, but also some positive ones […] And the distinguished novelist Richard Bausch wrote:

Bobby and I were five or six and our step grandfather Dick Underwood came by in a shiny new Packard convertible, and took us for a ride. We were riding past an army post—Korean War still going on across the world (I remember wondering why we couldn’t hear it). Dick Underwood looked over at us and said, “I’ve gotta wee.” Bobby and I had never heard an adult say anything like that. We laughed like hell, and we never forgot it.

And they say Facebook is a waste of time.

I myself don’t think I’ve ever heard an American use the word.
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Mark Liberman has a Log post about a Nigerian slogan, quoting Toyin Falola, “No Gree for Anybody!” (HeartOfArts 1/12/2024):

I am writing this piece from Lagos. “No Gree” is what you now hear at every moment, every corner. […]

No Gree for Anybody seems to be a personal avowal to not compromise or concede and to maintain unwavering determination against factors and people that could impede one’s aspirations or thwart the pursuit of one’s desires.

He has various relevant links and a video, but what I want to highlight is this excellent comment by JPL:

“No gri foh [“person”]NP”, here an expression from Nigerian Pidgin, is indeed a participant in the West African Creole English continuum, where ‘gri’ is indeed based on the English lexeme ‘agree’, but the sense of “gri foh”, as opposed to “gri” or “gri wit” (where “gri” is a stative verb with the sense of “be in agreement (with)”, e.g., in the context of argumentation), is more like that of the English expressions “go along with”, or “give in to”, and is used to refer to an addressee’s response to coercive pressure to adopt or conform to a course of action that benefits the speaker, and is not necessarily in the best interests of the addressee. So “gri foh” is a dynamic use of this verb, in the same way as the use of the English verb ‘agree’ in, e.g., “I agreed to do it”; but the pattern with a nominal oblique object, as opposed to an infinitival complement, has no English counterpart. (‘foh’ in the English creoles often functions like the infinitival complementizer ‘to’, so this usage is probably extended from that use.)

A typical established use of “gri foh [person]” would be in the context where a man is trying to win a woman’s love (or mainly for sex) by making importunate pleadings or “game-runnings”: if the woman gives in, someone might say, disapprovingly, “i gri for am”.

In the political context this idea has an important role in pushing back at, e.g., attempts by government or social convention to make people/citizens give up expectations that rights will be respected or aspirations acknowledged.

I love that kind of careful analysis of both morphology and semantics. (I have incorporated a minor correction made in a follow-up comment.) A later comment clarified:

In case it’s not evident from context (upon looking at the comment today, it occurred to me that it might not be evident), in the example in the next to last paragraph (“i gri for am”), “i” is a third person singular subj, pronoun, “am” a third person singular obj. pronoun, and “gri” is perfective aspect with past time reference.

Alex Shams at Ajam Media Collective writes about a fascinating bit of cultural history:

In markets across Iran, Tanakura Bazaars can be found dedicated to second-hand clothes, knock-off brand name shoes, and Iranian-made shirts at cut-rate prices. They attract a constant stream of bargain hunters looking for vintage clothes, which are referred to in Persian generally as Tanakura.

If you’re looking for a Persian (or Azeri or Kurdish…) etymology for Tanakura, you’ll come up empty handed. Despite its ubiquity in Iran, Tanakura is originally Japanese. But in Japan, the word is a relatively uncommon family name and the Persian meaning of second-hand clothes is nowhere to be found. So how and why did Tanakura become common in Iran?

The answer lies in a popular Japanese TV show broadcast on Iranian state TV in the 1980s. Oshin tells the story of a girl from rural Japan named Shin Tanokura whose life spans the Meiji period, Japan’s imperial expansion and military defeat during World War II, and the reconstruction and eventual prosperity that followed. The series offers an unflinching depiction of the tragedies and struggles of a working-class woman in Japan. Its harsh realism almost led to the show being passed up before it was broadcast by Japan Broadcasting Corporation in Japan in 1984. […]

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