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Idiom of the Day
live the life of Riley
To lead a life of great ease, comfort, or luxury. The phrase is likely of early 20th-century Irish-American origin, but to whom Riley refers is uncertain. Watch the video
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Language Log
French Horn Church
Mark Swofford stumbled upon this church in Taipei:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/frenchhorn.jpg
The Chinese part of the sign reads:
fàguó hào língliáng táng
法國號靈糧堂
"French Horn Hall of Spiritual Food"
This may be a branch of Táiběi língliáng táng 台北靈糧堂, which calls itself "Bread of Life Christian Church in Taipei" and has a history that goes back to 1948-1958 in Shanghai. Another translation of "língliáng 靈糧" is "manna".
The next time I'm in Taipei I will go visit this church because the French horn has special meaning for me. I played it from the time I was in high school, including professionally in the Canton Orchestra and various bands. I even trekked it up into the mountains of Nepal where I was a Peace Corps volunteer for two years and people from valleys far away could hear me playing it.
The French horn is notorious for being the most difficult instrument to play since it is prone to burble (I think that's because of the tight, twisted acoustics of all that tubing), but I love the rich, smooth sound it produces when you control your embouchure perfectly. That takes a lot of practice, but when I was good at it, I could play melodies with my lips alone. I am grateful to my high school band director, Donald M. Kennedy, for guiding me to the French horn and helping get one of my own when I was a freshman.
By the way, you're no longer supposed to call the brass instrument under discussion a "French horn". It's supposed to be just a "horn". I don't know who decided that and why, but it's now the politically correct thing to do. It doesn't make sense to me, because there are so many other kinds of horns out there. Much as I am partial to it, why should this one alone be the horn? I still call it a French horn, but if someone made a good case (historical, musicological, or otherwise) for calling it a "German horn", I'd be open to such a proposal.
Selected readings
* "Les Baguettes à Pékin" (7/2/12)
* "Names and Systems of Naming" (4/18/08)
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Malcolm is out-bratting himself #CreatorsforKamala #DNC2024 #BratSummer
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Language Log
Is there a finite number of pronunciations for anything?
Below is a guest post by Corey Miller.
Azi Paybarah of the Washington Post quoted Trump as follows:
“There’s about 19 different ways of pronouncing it, right,” Trump said falsely, during a speech in Michigan on Thursday. “But Kamala is, at least it’s a name you sort of remember.”
The most interesting part of this to me is the assertion that it was a false claim. I suppose the intuition is that there are two common ways to stress Kamala, either initially/antepenultimately or medially/penultimately, so that Trump's "nineteen" is clearly hyperbolic.
What do we mean when we speak of a number of pronunciations for a word? One interpretation might be “how many ways can we represent the pronunciation of a word, as spoken by a fluent speaker interpreting the phonemes of a relevant variety of the language in question?”. Under this interpretation, three American English pronunciations of Kamala come to mind:
1. ˈkɑmələ
2. ˈkæmələ
3. kəˈmɑlə
Pronunciation 1 seems to be how the Vice President pronounces her own name and the preference of a majority of younger speakers at the Democratic National Convention. Pronunciation 2 is one I hadn’t considered, but noticed it was very popular among older speakers at the DNC; it seems to be on analogy with Pamela, which to my knowledge has only 1 pronunciation under the definition above. I assume Pronunciation 2 wouldn’t be considered an affront in the way Pronunciation 3 is, but this could be investigated further. As a final note on Prounciation 2, it is related to an interesting phenomenon I first read about in an article by Geoff Lindsey and that was further developed in my classmate Charles Boberg’s dissertation and discussed more recently by him here.
Pronunciation 3 seems to be the preferred pronunciation used by those seeking to needle the Vice President, but it seems like it can be used “innocently enough” given the predilection for penultimate stress in such words as suggested by the English Stress Rule as formulated in Liberman & Prince and elsewhere. For example, Malala (Yousufzai) seems to be a name that we hear uniquely with something like Pronunciation 3.
There is another pronunciation noted occasionally in the press for Kamala that is more “native” to the Sanskrit origins of the name, meaning “lotus flower”. Using standard American English phonemes and their IPA labels, this might be something like Pronunciation 4:
4. ˈkʌmələ
The first syllable could just as easily have been transcribed with a stressed schwa by those who admit such things. [ɐ] is used in the Sanskrit etymon for all vowels in the word in Wiktionary. This phenomenon of the “Indic short a” is also encountered in words like pundit and Punjab which are sometimes written as pandit and Panjab.
So, are there only four pronunciations? There are certainly other possibilities using IPA interpretations for various varieties of English, American and otherwise. The letter 'a' can also of course be pronounced as [ej], but perhaps using such a pronunciation in Kamala would be considered particularly outrageous. But maybe it could occur in the speech of someone less familiar with English, or someone learning to read?
Of course, there are indefinitely many pronunciations, if we consider "pronunciations" as the articulatory and acoustic signals implementing a word, rather than IPA-ish symbols. But I assume the lay view of what it means to be a pronunciation is more along the lines of the IPA alternatives I gave above, and this is reflected in a long line of pronunciation dictionaries like Kenyon & Knott or indeed the curious symbols used in American dictionaries.
In summary, I think Mr. Paybarah was right to call Mr. Trump’s claim of 19 pronunciations false; but I think it could be litigated…
Above is a guest post by Corey Miller.
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Language Log
"Bone Apple Tea"
The "ABOUT COMMUNITY" description from r/BoneAppleTea:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BoneAppleTea.png
There's also r/BoneAppleTypo, and the #boneappletea Discord channel.
[h/t M.O.S.T.]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: circumvent
This word has appeared in 169 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
let out (1)
to allow somebody or something to leave a place
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Still no luck on chord M #vmas2024 @johnmayer
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Learn English Through Football
Newspaper Headline: Snakes bite
In this football language post we explain the newspaper headline, 'Snakes bite' from the Guardian newspaper about England's win over Ireland in the Nations League.
The post Newspaper Headline: Snakes bite appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
on the level
honest, truthful
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Idiom of the Day
letters after (one's) name
A series of abbreviations indicating the various levels of higher education or military honors one has received, thereby denoting a presumed level of intelligence, wisdom, or respectability. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
cocksure
Definition: (adjective) Marked by excessive confidence.
Synonyms: overconfident, positive.
Usage: He was arrogant and cocksure but also sensitive and understanding, and I loved him dearly.
Discuss
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Language Log
Quantifying the debate
Following up on "Type-token plots in The Economist" (9/6/2024), I lost some sleep last night doing some analyses of the presidential debate, which I shared with writers at The Economist to be published as "An alternative look at the Trump-Harris debate, in five charts", 9/11/2024. They lead with a type-token graph:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Economist2024DebateTypeToken.png
One of their other "charts" is a table of each candidates most-used words. In some cases the explanation is obvious, like Harris using "former" 15 times while Trump uses it only once. But sometimes the difference may seem puzzling, like the fact that Trump used the word "they" 230 times, while Harris used it only 10 times. Why?
Scanning the contexts of use helps make the political content clear. Many of Trump's "they" referents are of two kinds, exemplified already in his opening turn — 5 references to the Biden administration, and 8 references to immigrants:
In fact, they never took the tariff off because it was so much money. They can't it would totally destroy everything that they've set out to do. They're taking in billions of dollars from China and other places they've left the tariffs on.
On top of that, we have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums. And they're coming in and they're taking jobs that are occupied right now by African-Americans and Hispanics. And also unions. Unions are going to be affected very soon. And you see what's happening. You see what's happening with towns throughout the United States. You look at Springfield, Ohio, you look at Aurora in Colorado, they are taking over the towns, They're taking over buildings. They're going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they're destroying our country. They're dangerous. They're at the highest level of criminality.
More later…
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d out, Fagin Davis combed through several letters written in the so-called "humanistic bookhand' commonly used by Petrarch and Boccaccio in 14th-century Italy, since the two Roman alphabet columns in the Voynich manuscript were also written in that style. She compared those handwriting samples with the columns in the Voynich manuscript.
One was a very close match: a September 12, 1640 letter to Athanasius Kircher written by Johannes Marcus Marci, a doctor in Prague who inherited the manuscript from his friend Georg Baresch when the alchemist died in 1662. Marci sent the manuscript to Kircher in Rome in 1665, hoping that the Jesuit scholar and polymath would be able to decipher it.
Fagin Davis identified several "strong markers" between the two handwriting samples that she thinks identify Marci as the would-be decoder. For instance, at this time in the 17th century, many people used prominent loops on the letters b, d, f, h, p, q, s, and y, but Marci did not. Not did the person who wrote the two Roman alphabet columns on that page of the Voynich manuscript. Marci also sometimes used an "open bowl" g, an m with a taller first stroke than the last, and a distinctive shape to his z's—all of which are consistent with the handwriting sample in the Voynich manuscript.
That said, anyone hoping this multispectral analysis of the scans will finally solve the mystery of the Voynich manuscript once and for all is bound to be disappointed, although any new textual evidence is significant for scholars.
"These alphabets will likely not help us actually decipher the manuscript," Fagin Davis wrote on her blog. "This is because linguists… and other researchers have established that the manuscript is almost certainly not encrypted using a simple substitution cipher, and the substitutions in these columns result in nonsense anyway. Even so, they do add an interesting and new chapter to the early history of the manuscript. I look forward to hearing from other researchers about this new evidence, especially from experts in cryptography who may have ideas about why Marci or any other early-modern decrypter would need three columns of alphabets to do their work."
Both articles have copious photographs demonstrating how the multispectral imaging brings out details that are not visible to the naked eye.
Despite the hard-won, hitherto unknown data about much earlier attempts to decode the VM provided by multispectral analysis, which tilts the balance in favor of the conclusion that this most vexing cultural artifact is not a forgery or a hoax, we still don't know what this elaborate, illustrated text is communicating. VM case not closed. Selected readings
* Voynich and midfix" (7/3/04)
* "Voynich code cracked?" (5/16/19)
* "The indecipherability of the Voynich manuscript" (9/11/19)
* "The Voynich Manuscript in the undergraduate curriculum" (10/10/19)
* "ChatGPT: Theme and Variations" (2/21/23) — CHAT 2
* "Once again the Voynich manuscript" (4/21/24)
* "Latin, Hebrew … proto-Romance? New theory on Voynich manuscript: Researcher claims to have solved mystery of 15th-century text but others are sceptical", Esther Addley, The Guardian (5/15/19)
* "Inscription decipherment with digital image enhancement" (12/1/20)
[Thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto}
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Word of the Day
laic
Definition: (adjective) Of or relating to the laity.
Synonyms: lay, secular.
Usage: He was a laic leader, but many of his followers believed him to be a prophet.
Discuss
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Points were made #StonedDebate #Politics #Debate #2024Election
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Pennsylvania State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta Does Not Approve of Outside Clothes On The Bed
Malcolm Kenyatta, the first LGBTQ+ person of color to be elected to General Assembly in Pennsylvania, chats with us about indefensible topics, no brainers, and how to be better at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2026 World Cup Qualifiers (September 2024)
In this football language podcast we look at some language from the recent 2026 World Cup qualifiers from both the South American and Asian regions.
The post Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2026 World Cup Qualifiers (September 2024) appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
dis | diss
to show disrespect to someone by saying or doing something insulting
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Idiom of the Day
a licence to print money
An activity, business model, or company that yields very high profits but requires little or no effort to do so. Primarily heard in UK, Australia. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
lore
Definition: (noun) Accumulated facts, traditions, or beliefs about a particular subject.
Synonyms: traditional knowledge.
Usage: He had taught the children something of the forest lore that he had himself learned from Tiger Lily and Tinker Bell, and knew that in their dire hour they were not likely to forget it.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: consternation
This word has appeared in 149 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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He's just your average John #VMAs2024 #WritersRoom @johnmayer
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He has concepts of a guy #2024Election #TrumpImpression
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Wayne & Mike are warming up for the @MTV VMAs tonight #EveryLittleStep
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r the text, hoping to crack the puzzle.
So much by way of introduction. Clearly, what the Voynich manuscript (VM [not VHM!]) is and what it means is still very much up in the air, but that doesn't prevent VM enthusiasts from throwing in their precious lot.
Among the most dubious is a 2017 claim by a history researcher and television writer named Nicholas Gibbs, who published a long article in the Times Literary Supplement about how he had cracked the code. Gibbs claimed that he had figured out that the Voynich Manuscript was a women's health manual whose odd script was actually just a bunch of Latin abbreviations describing medicinal recipes. He provided two lines of translation from the text to "prove" his point. Unfortunately, said the experts, his analysis was a mix of stuff we already knew and stuff he couldn't possibly prove.
Fagin Davis was among Gibbs' most vocal critics. She also did not mince words when critiquing the 2019 claims of Gerard Cheshire, an honorary research associate at the University of Bristol, when he announced his own solution. Cheshire claimed the mysterious writing was a "calligraphic proto-Romance" language, and he thought the manuscript was put together by a Dominican nun as a reference source on behalf of Maria of Castile, queen of Aragon. "Sorry, folks, 'proto-Romance language' is not a thing," Fagin Davis tweeted at the time. "This is just more aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense." Two days after the initial announcement of Cheshire's "breakthrough," the University of Bristol released a statement retracting its original press release.
Now we come to the nitty gritty of what Fagin Davis' blog post achieves. It is a good example of a responsible, resourceful, determined scholar resurrecting valuable data that had been collected a decade earlier but lain dormant during the interim.
Per Fagin Davis, in 2014, the Beinecke Library granted permission to the imaging team from The Lazarus Project to take multispectral images of ten pages from the Voynich manuscript with the intent of making them publicly available online. For various reasons, the images weren't posted. Fast forward to 2024, when Roger Easton of the Rochester Institute of Technology—who was a member of the original imaging team—noticed an article Fagin Davis had written and emailed asking if she would like to examine the images. She was interested so Easton spent the last three weeks reprocessing the multispectral images to produce the current image set.
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When the manuscript first came into Wilfrid Voynich's hands in 1912, he noted that the first page had an effaced inscription in the lower margin, applying a chemical reagent to the page around 1914 to make it more visible. He thought he could make out a signature: "Jacobi à Tepenecz," aka an alchemist in Prague named Jacobus Sinapius, who probably owned the manuscript in the late 16th or early 17th century.
Fagin Davis's analysis confirmed Voynich's discovery. She also noted that there was no evidence that the Voynich manuscript is a palimpsest, i.e., parchment that had been reused and thus showed evidence of underwriting. That would have helped refine the manuscript's date of origin. Carbon-14 testing puts the date as around 1425, which Fagin Davis thinks is likely since the illustrations are consistent with that period, but some scholars disagree. Nor is the manuscript likely to be a modern forgery.
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More recently, Voynich scholars had noted what seems to be a Roman alphabet written in the right-hand margin of that first page. Multispectral imaging clearly reveals the letters a, b, c, d, and e, according to Fagin Davis. In fact, there are actually three columns of lettering, not just one: the Roman alphabet, a series of Voynich characters, and another Roman alphabet, this time offset by one letter. Fagin Davis did her own preliminary transcription of those alphabets and concluded that this is mostly likely an early attempt to decode the manuscript. But who had made the attempt?
To fin[...]
