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Language Log
China flavor
I’m still trying to figure out, in XJP rhetoric, when 中华 is used and when it’s 中国. How long has Zhongguo been used directly as an adjective this way, as opposed to 中国似的or 中国性？Is a 中国味different from a 中华味？Which smells better? pic.twitter.com/9CARnICZSu
— James Millward 米華健 (@JimMillward) September 4, 2024
For non-specialists to understand this tweet, a considerable amount of annotation and explication is necessary. Key terms
Zhōngguó 中國/国 — usually rendered as "China; Chinese", literally "central / middle kingdom"
Zhōnghuá 中華/华 — usually rendered as "China; Chinese", literally "central / middle florescence"
So named because the first ancient Chinese settlements were around the Yellow River, which was considered to be the center, and because the culture was considered to be magnificent and flourishing.
*
* In traditional East Asian thought, 華／华 (Huá) or 中華／中华 (Zhōnghuá), often translated as "Chinese", has a philosophical connotation of civilizedness and decorous behavior that transcends a strictly ethnic definition. This is in opposition to "foreigners" or "barbarians", 夷 (yí) or 夷狄 (yídí), whose cultures are uncivilized and lacking in proper morality. Therefore, in certain contexts, other nations of the East Asian cultural sphere could refer to themselves as 中華／中华 (Zhōnghuá) in the sense that they were civilized people following the classical traditions first established in Ancient China, without meaning that they saw themselves as Chinese in an ethnic sense.
* Although also used in the formal names of both the Republic and People's Republic of China, the term carries a somewhat broader sense than 中國／中国 (Zhōngguó, “state of China”) and connotes something like the "nation of the Chinese people" or "land of the Chinese culture".
(Wiktionary)
If we compare Zhōngguó 中國/国 and Zhōnghuá 中華/华, the former is more PRCish and the latter is more ROCish. However, both sides employ both designations at different times and for different purposes.
Other terms raised by James Millward are:
Zhōngguó shì de 中国似的 ("China-like")
Zhōngguó xìng 中国性 ("Chineseness; Chinese nature / character")
Zhōngguó wèi 中国味 ("Central Kingdom flavor")
Zhōnghuá wèi 中华味 ("Central Florescence flavor")
Here's the quotation from Xi Jinping printed against a blue background at the bottom of the tweet (with a few small modifications from online sources):
Wǒmen de jiàoyù… jué bùnéng péiyǎng chū yīxiē “zhǎngzhe Zhōngguó liǎn, bùshì Zhōngguó xīn, méiyǒu Zhòngguó qíng, quēshǎo “Zhōngguó wèi” de rén!
我们的教育…绝不能培养出一些“长着中国脸， 不是中国心，没有中国情，缺少中国味”的人！
"Our education… must not cultivate people who have "Chinese faces but not Chinese hearts, no Chinese feelings, and lack 'Chinese flavor'!"
Make of it what you will. For myself, I am savoring what Xi Jinping meant by his rather peculiar reference to a Chinese wèi 味 ("taste; flavor; smell; odor") as applied to people. Selected readings
* "Mee Tu flavor" (11/29/18)
* "Xi Jinping's faux classicism" (7/2/23) — with lengthy bibliography
P.S.: If you want to see the whole of Xi Jniping's smiling face, click on the X at the top right of the tweet.
[Thanks to Bruce Humes]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: bastion
This word has appeared in 214 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
get back (1)
to return to a place
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Language Log
German linguist Möllendorff and the earliest recordings of Chinese
"UCSB Library Acquires Rare Chinese Language Audio Cylinder Recordings", UCSB Library Newsletter (September, 2024)
The UC Santa Barbara Library is excited to announce the recent acquisition of the Paul Georg von Möllendorff Chinese Cylinders, a collection of wax cylinders widely considered to be the first audio recordings from China. The cylinders, recorded in the late 1800s by linguist Möllendorff, contain sixteen recitations of a popular, celebrated poem "Returning Home"' by Tao Yuanming. Möllendorff recorded the poem in various Chinese dialects to document the differences in regional languages at the time. Today, the cylinders provide a rare glimpse into the history of Chinese language and include dialects that are considered critically endangered or extinct.
Like many late 19th-century diplomats and Sinologists, Möllendorff was an extraordinary scholar. I will spend the remainder of this post describing his aims, abilities, and achievements. Möllendorff (1847–1901) was a German linguist and renowned diplomat in East Asia. While serving as Commissioner of Customs at Ningbo, China, in the 1890s, Möllendorff undertook an ambitious project to document and classify Chinese languages for the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. He asked speakers representing various Chinese languages to recite the same poem into a graphophone and then transcribed the results phonetically. Möllendorff sent the cylinders to Léon Azoulay, a prominent figure in the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, to feature at the exposition as part of a "phonographic museum" where visitors could take an audio tour of cultures around the world. After the exposition, Azoulay published a full catalog of the contents of the phonographic museum, including the donated Chinese cylinders, which were explicitly identified with Möllendorff. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/83/Paul_Georg_von_M%C3%B6llendorff_%281847-1901%29.jpg/220px-Paul_Georg_von_M%C3%B6llendorff_%281847-1901%29.jpg Möllendorff in official Korean dress
From Wikipedia:
Möllendorff is mostly known for his service as an adviser to the Korean king Gojong in the late nineteenth century and for his contributions to Sinology. In English-language publications, Möllendorff is often credited with having designed a system for romanizing the Manchu language, which was in fact the creation of his compatriot Hans Conon von der Gabelentz.
Since Wikipedia says that a citation is needed for that last sentence, and I've been hearing about this uncertainty for the last half-century, I'm hoping that some of the Manchu specialists who read Language Log will finally clarify the situation regarding the romanization of Manchu.
Half a century ago, I knew Möllendorff primarily as the author of A Manchu Grammar (Shanghai: Printed at the American Presbyterian mission press, 1892). In the course of preparation of this post, however, I've come to learn a great deal more about Möllendorff's accomplishments during the course of his life, such as learning Hebrew while still a young man, joining the Imperial Maritime Customs Service in Shanghai, becoming proficient in "Chinese", and joining the German consular service as interpreter and later vice-consul in Tianjin.
Something of great significance for me occurred during Möllendorff's service in the German consulate. Namely, he became a friend of the Qing scholar, Ma Jianzhong (1845-1900), who was an official in the secretariat of the powerful statesman, governor-general Li Hongzhang (1823-1901). What brought me to a standstill upon seeing the name of Ma Jianzhong was that he was the first Chinese to write a grammar of "Chinese", published in 1898.
Victor H. Mair (1997), "Ma Jianzhong and the Invention of Chinese Grammar", in Ch[...]
Word of the Day
hearth
Definition: (noun) The floor of a fireplace, usually extending into a room and paved with brick, flagstone, or cement.
Synonyms: fireside.
Usage: They sat on the hearth and warmed themselves before the fire.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: imminent
This word has appeared in 856 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
look into
If you look into something, you investigate it or you try to find out more about it.
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Word of the Day
doddering
Definition: (adjective) Infirm, feeble, and often senile.
Synonyms: gaga, senile.
Usage: His mother was doddering and frail, so he hired aides to care for her around the clock.
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Language Log
Body wash
The bottle of body wash affixed to the wall of the shower in the Cheyenne hotel where I'm staying is labeled in French as "Savon Liquide pour le Corps".
English "body wash" is two words consisting of eight letters. "Savon Liquide pour le Corps" is five words consisting of twenty-three letters.
We've discussed the phenomenon of French verbosity versus English brevity before. See "The genius and logic of French and English" 4/11/23) and "French vs. English" (8/2/15) — also about "soap".
Surely, I thought, the French do not have to be that loquacious just to say something so simple as "body wash".
So I looked up "body wash" on Google Translate, and what did it give me but "gel douche". Ahem! Whenever I see "douche", it always makes me think of something else. Bing yields "nettoyant pour le corps". "Nettoyant" doesn't seem right, because — at least to me — it sounds more like some sort of cleaner.
So far as I can tell, "gel douche" is the French equivalent of English "body wash". Both are two words, though French is one letter longer.
Selected readings
* "'Tis the Season: blooming in translation and in art" (4/11/17)
* "Blooming, embellishment, and bombs" (8/17/15)
* "The rise of douche" (11/15/09)
* "'Douchey uses of AI'" (8/16/19)
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
tight (3)
fairly drunk, moderately inebriated
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Idiom of the Day
l'esprit de l'escalier
A French phrase meaning "the wit of the staircase"; a perfect witty remark, retort, or rejoinder that occurs to one after the fact or too late to be used. (Also written as "l'esprit d'escalier.") Watch the video
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Language Log
Australian government assessment of AI vs. human performance
"AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds:
A test of AI for Australia's corporate regulator found that the technology might actually make more work for people, not less." Cam Wilson, Crikey (Sep 03, 2024)
Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work for people, a government trial of the technology has found.
Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia’s corporate regulator the Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) using submissions made to an inquiry. The outcome of the trial was revealed in an answer to a questions on notice at the Senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence.
The test involved testing generative AI models before selecting one to ingest five submissions from a parliamentary inquiry into audit and consultancy firms. The most promising model, Meta’s open source model Llama2-70B, was prompted to summarise the submissions with a focus on ASIC mentions, recommendations, references to more regulation, and to include the page references and context.
For the full government report, click on the link embedded on "answer" in the second paragraph of the Crikey article above. The remainder of the Crikey summary article itself may be found in its sister publication, Mandarin, here:
Ten ASIC staff, of varying levels of seniority, were also given the same task with similar prompts. Then, a group of reviewers blindly assessed the summaries produced by both humans and AI for coherency, length, ASIC references, regulation references and for identifying recommendations. They were unaware that this exercise involved AI at all.
These reviewers overwhelmingly found that the human summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and on every submission, scoring an 81% on an internal rubric compared with the machine’s 47%.
Human summaries ran up the score by significantly outperforming on identifying references to ASIC documents in the long document, a type of task that the report notes is a “notoriously hard task” for this type of AI. But humans still beat the technology across the board.
Reviewers told the report’s authors that AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information. Three of the five reviewers said they guessed that they were reviewing AI content.
The reviewers’ overall feedback was that they felt AI summaries may be counterproductive and create further work because of the need to fact-check and refer to original submissions which communicated the message better and more concisely.
The report mentions some limitations and context to this study: the model used has already been superseded by one with further capabilities that may improve its ability to summarise information, and that Amazon increased the model’s performance by refining its prompts and inputs, suggesting that there are further improvements that are possible. It includes optimism that this task may one day be competently undertaken by machines.
But until then, the trial showed that a human’s ability to parse and critically analyse information is unparalleled by AI, the report said.
“This finding also supports the view that GenAI should be positioned as a tool to augment and not replace human tasks,” the report concluded.
AI is not going away, but through careful appraisals such as this one from the Australian government, we are gaining a better perspective on its pluses and minuses. Selected readings
* "The AI threat: keep calm and carry on" (6/29/23)
* "ChatGPT has a sense of humor (sort of)" (6/10/23)
* "InternLM (6/10/23)" — with a long bibliography
[h.t. Kent McKeever]
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Language Log
Where weave is from
In a comment on "Trump's rhetorical 'weave'", J.R. Brewer wrote:
This thread has had the side effect of causing me to learn (at least taking wiktionary at face value and not digging deeper into other reference sources) that the "weave" of "bob and weave" etc. is a homophone etymologically unrelated to the "weave" meaning "create fabric from fibers" rather than the former being, as I had naively supposed, a metaphorical extension of the latter that had somehow drifted semantically to the point that it was no longer particularly obvious.
Below, some etymological backup from the Oxford English Dictionary…
For the transitive verb weave, glossed as "To form or fabricate (a stuff or material) by interlacing yarns or other filaments of a particular substance in a continuous web; to manufacture in a loom by crossing the threads or yarns called respectively the warp and the weft", the OED give this etymology:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/OED_Weave1.png
For the intransitive verb weave, glossed as "To move repeatedly from side to side; †to toss to and fro; to sway the body alternately to one side and the other; to pursue a devious course, thread one's way amid obstructions.", the OED indeed has a different source:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/OED_Weave2.png
For that (obsolete) intransitive verb weve, the OED give this etymology:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/OED_Weve.png
The full list of OED glosses for weve is
1. Of persons: To go from one place to another; to travel, wander, pass.
2. Of things: To go, pass, make way.
3. To move to and fro; to toss about.
4. To move or remove from one place to another; to convey or bring; to strike down.
5. To wave or brandish (a weapon). Also to beckon, make signals.
6. To toss about, trouble.
This cluster of concepts is arguably a better metaphor for Donald Trump's rhetorical "weave" than a weaver's loom is.
Beyond waive, there are also possible links to wave, whiff, waft, and waif — which associatively enrich the metaphor, even if the etymologies are uncertain.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
jerk
a stupid person
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aofen Sun, ed., Studies on the History of Chinese Syntax. Monograph Series Number 10 of Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 5-26.
I had always wondered why any Chinese — before the introduction of modern linguistics — would undertake the improbable task of writing a grammar of Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic, even though Westerners had previously written grammars of vernacular Sinitic languages. Naturally, I had several times attempted to read Ma Jianzhong's Mǎ shì wéntōng 馬氏文通 (Ma's Literary Expositor [ironically rendered as "Basic principles for writing clearly and coherently by Mister Ma" here), but I always found it unintelligible, and I have never met anyone, Chinese or foreigner, who could render it into comprehensible English, French, German, Russian, etc.
When explained rigorously and analytically, as Harold Shadick did for his A first course in literary Chinese, 3 vols. (Cornell University Press, 1968), which I still use for my introduction to Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic course, it is possible to write a useful "grammar" of the language.
Cf. Aṣṭādhyāyī by Pāṇini पाणिनि (between 7th c. and 4th c. BC), the world's first grammar. At the University of Washington, all graduate students in linguistics used to be required to take a special course on Paninian grammar. I don't know if that's still the case.
Knowing that Ma Jianzhong was a close associate of Möllendorff makes me wonder whether it was the latter who put a grammar bee in the bonnet of the former.
We started this post with the earliest recordings of Sinitic dialects / topolects and ended with the first grammar of Literary Sinitic by a Chinese scholar, and Paul Georg von Möllendorff was right there at the heart of both these pathbreaking enterprises, and much else of great consequence besides — such as helping the formidable Li Hongzhang obtain munitions and warships from the German industrial firms Vulkan and Krupp, and then going head to head with Li over his attempts to gain greater independence for Korea from China — a formidable intellect and redoubtable personality that belies the wonky-nerdy appearance we see in some of his photographs. Selected readings
* "'In Pāṇini We Trust;" (12/15/22)
* "Implementing Pāṇini's grammar" (12/1/23)
* "A new grammar of Mandarin" (10/18/15)
[Thanks to Martin Schwartz]
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Idiom of the Day
let down (one's) guard
To become less guarded or vigilant; to stop being cautious about potential trouble or danger. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
cheesy | cheesey
of very low quality; not stylish or tasteful
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Idiom of the Day
let down (one's) hair
To cease acting formally or conservatively; to let go of one's inhibitions or reservations. Watch the video
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
We can't believe JD said $#&@^ either. thank you @ATwinkandaRedhead for with us #creatorsforkamala
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Thigh Clapping, JD Vance and Panera: Grant and Ash (A Twink and a Red Head) Tell All At The DNC
Name a more iconic duo to speak to at the Democratic National Convention! Grant & Ash (@ATwinkandaRedhead) are breaking down their songwriting inspirations and shocking revelations in the Windy City. America's favorite couple are serving fun & games in the United Center.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: ensemble
This word has appeared in 609 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
muck up
If you muck something up, you do it badly and fail to achieve your goal.
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Word of the Day
ingenuous
Definition: (adjective) Lacking in cunning, guile, or worldliness.
Synonyms: artless.
Usage: His ingenuous delight in it was a delight to her, and a new and mutual love-thrill was theirs—because of a flower.
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