28487
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
e region.
Their success stemmed in part from Wang’s years of experience searching for traces of the Yuezhi in China, and his skill in using rock paintings to identify possible excavation sites.
There were many different nomadic cultures represented in the sites that Wang Jianxin and his colleagues have been uncovering — Iranian, Greek / Hellenic, Tocharian, Turkic, etc. — from different time periods. They certainly cannot all be lumped together as Yuezhi.
Though Wang himself is immersed in the ancient past, his discoveries in Uzbekistan align well with Beijing’s present-day efforts to portray China as a benevolent player in the region.
The Chinortepa site sits around 30 miles west of a mountain pass through which, roughly 2,000 years ago, the Yuezhi are believed to have arrived on the northern banks of the Oxus River, nowadays known as Amu Darya.
At the time, the land was part of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, a far-flung eastern outpost of ancient Western civilization known for its Greek-style art and cities. According to the most commonly accepted version, a Yuezhi army of tens of thousands of horse-mounted archers easily defeated the fading kingdom, and eventually established the Kushan Empire, which grew powerful and wealthy by facilitating trade along the Silk Road between the Roman Empire to the west and the Chinese Han Empire to the east.
Wang and his team believe that the idea that the Yuezhi simply overran the land, and subjugated the local population and were the forefathers of the Kushans, is wrong.
The proof, Wang says, is in the ground.
Tombs previously discovered near Kushan fortresses, cities and shrines were often aboveground vaults filled with disorderly piles of bones. Archaeologists say that suggests that the Kushans—like the local population before the arrival of the Yuezhi—practiced, as one of their burial forms, defleshing of the dead, whereby bodies of the deceased were left to rot or be devoured by animals before the bones were swept away or stored in mausoleums.
Those tombs are nothing like the Yuezhi graves around Chinortepa, where corpses were buried in underground pits with little chambers to their side.
Wang takes that as evidence that the Yuezhi and the founders of the Kushan Empire weren’t the same people. Rather, he argued, the Kushans were descendants of the local population.
After being defeated by another nomadic group called the Xiongnu in 176 B.C., the Yuezhi fled west. In 126 B.C., a Chinese emissary recorded encountering the Yuezhi in Bactria, southwest of the Ferghana Valley. He tried to persuade them to join an alliance against the Xiongnu but they declined.
The Kushan Empire (~ 30 A.D. to 375 A.D.), which the Yuezhi were thought to have established after a conquest of Bactria, was renowned for its wealth, flourishing urban life and extensive mercantile activities facilitating trade on the Eurasian continent. It also helped spread Buddhism from India to Central Asia and China.
The site where Wang Jianxin’s team is digging is located near the Iron Gates of Sogdiana, a mountain pass the Yuezhi traveled through on the journey to Bactria. The graves he discovered there suggest the Yuezhi may not have founded the Kushan Empire after all.
The graves challenge conventional wisdom in other ways. Where the Yuezhi preferred to bury their people at the foot of mountains, the graves near Chinor were on the plain. The offerings discovered inside were also fewer and smaller than those typically found in Yuezhi burial sites.
Based on those differences, Wang’s team concluded that graves belonged to either local farmers who had been influenced by Yuezhi nomads or Yuezhi who had begun to integrate into farm life.
According to Wang, that suggests the Yuezhi weren’t bloodthirsty colonizers but rather coexisted peacefully with the local population.
Not everybody subscribes to the narrative [...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
yob | yobbo
an aggressive, impolite, crude person
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Idiom of the Day
land-poor
Owning a large amount of land that is unprofitable and being without the means to maintain it or capitalize on its fertility. Watch the video
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Learn English Through Football
Football Language: Grudge Match (2024 Olympics)
In this football language post we look at the phrase 'grudge match' as France take on Argentina in the quarter-finals of the 2024 Olympics
The post Football Language: Grudge Match (2024 Olympics) appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
funky (2)
having strong dance rhythms
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Idiom of the Day
the lady of the house
A woman who looks after and runs the house; the matriarch of a family or household. Watch the video
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l? Certainly not. In fact, there are numerous ongoing citizenship practices and acts in China that do not explicitly invoke the term “citizen.” We acknowledge that the ordinary language of citizenship means that citizens do not necessarily directly use the concept in their actions and speech, but in the contemporary Chinese context, citizenship faces distinct, profound challenges. There are two observations about this challenge.
First, practices and actions of citizenship have increasingly adopted non-citizenship concepts, terms, and vocabularies to re-express themselves. A typical example is the emergence of numerous homonyms, neologisms, pinyin abbreviations, metaphors, symbols, and mixed signals online to obscurely express politically sensitive views, breaking through sophisticated and stringent speech censorship (King, Pan, and Roberts 2013; Nordin 2013). Additionally, recent discussions in China on food safety (Yan 2012), digital labor and the platform economy (McDonald 2019), educational involution (neijuan) (Mulvey and Wright 2022), and the 996-work regime as modern slavery (J. Wang 2020) have used everyday languages of social well-being, health, technological control, and inequality to replace the official language of citizenship. However, this replacement must occur within the boundaries allowed by socialist state power and ideology. Once these discussions cross the line or are perceived to cross it, they face the risk of being controlled, co-opted, or even blocked and eliminated.
Second, along with the diminishing voice of citizens, the official discourse of citizenship has begun to monopolistically emphasize the responsibility/obligation elements of citizenship while downplaying the equally core elements of rights and public participation. This dominant, biased, and unilateral emphasis may result in the rich connotation of citizenship being oversimplified, potentially reinforcing the instrumental nature of citizenship as a tool to build up a powerful state in modern China (Zhao and Wang 2023; C. Wang 2023a).
We emphasize that the above phenomena represent a special case of citizenship studies in China, which we call the “linguistic dilemma” of Chinese citizenship. This term refers to the reluctance of directly using citizenship terms in everyday social and political struggles over citizenship due to political control and ideological dominance, revealing the gaps between discourse and practice, and between words and actions, in Chinese citizenship.
Furthermore, this judgment is based on three reasons.
1. Politically, over the past decade, China’s socialist regime has intensified control over society and citizens, especially with the aid of artificial intelligence and big data technologies, strengthening an increasingly stringent surveillance society (Xiao 2019). In this context,
citizenship discourse and actions are more rigorously regulated, controlled, and even suppressed by state power due to their emancipatory and creative potential to escape and challenge dominance.
2. Culturally, Chinese political and social life is deeply influenced by Confucian cultural values, which are widely perceived to emphasize responsibility and obligation over rights and to stress obedience to authority over public participation (C. Wang 2023b, 2021). This potentially influences the absence of citizenship language use in contemporary China.
3. Historically, since the concept of citizenship was introduced to China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it has been treated as a tool for building a strong modern nation-state, preventing the development of liberal citizenship (Guo 2014; Zhao, Wang, and Guo 2023). Under the socialist regime, citizens continue to play an instrumental role in achieving Chinese-style modernization, with socialist collective values prioritized over individualistic values, leading to citizens being constantly dominated by power in their speech and actions.
Despite the lack of attention from Chinese citizenship researchers to the “l[...]
Word of the Day
exiguity
Definition: (noun) The quality or condition of being scanty or meager.
Synonyms: leanness, meagerness, poorness, scantiness.
Usage: With an exiguity of cloth that would allow only one dress to be made, she selflessly offered that her sister go to the ball in her stead.
Discuss
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gs to fund renovations of freshman dormitories. […]
The museum’s former director, Richard Brauer, and former VU law professor and museum donor Philipp Brockington delayed the sale by filing suit against the university. They claimed it would violate the terms of the original gift agreement between Percy H. Sloan and VU. Sloan donated the Church landscape and established an acquisition fund with which Richard Brauer bought the Hassam and O’Keeffe in the early 1960s. Ultimately, the Court denied Brauer and Brockington standing. Indiana State Attorney General Todd Rokita stepped in to review the case, but recently opted not to oppose a sale. […]
In its May petition to Porter County Superior Court, the University claims that the three paintings have become too valuable for it to keep them safe. The petition cites an example of European environmentalists throwing paint at the Mona Lisa. VU estimates that security upgrades would cost between \$50,000 and \$100,000, and professional guards, as opposed to students, would add an additional \$150,000 to the museum’s annual staffing costs. It also argues storage fees at the undisclosed secure location, to which the paintings were transferred last Fall, are wasteful given its financial predicament. […]
VU also argues that the Hassam and O’Keeffe paintings should not have been bought with Sloan’s funds because of a stipulation that they be used to acquire only “conservative” paintings. Claiming that Richard Brauer first broke these terms, VU appeals to be released from all other restrictions, especially the requirement that revenue from sold paintings be deposited into the Sloan Purchase Fund. In response, Brauer has appealed to be heard by the Court, asserting that the University has misinterpreted his actions and overlooked the fact that Sloan’s executor, given full discretionary authority under the gift agreement, authorized both purchases.
Whether the judge engages in the art historical debate, he must determine if the enlargement of the student body, attracted by upgraded dormitories, cleaves closely enough to Sloan’s stated desire to educate students in the appreciation of art to allow the sale. As part of the dormitory renovations, the university will construct a gallery in which freshmen can examine examples of “conservative” art from the Sloan Collection.
In related news, "Valparaiso University considers cutting academic programs", NWI Times 3/4/2024 :
Valparaiso University is considering cutting nearly 30 undergraduate and graduateprograms due to low student enrollment, according to a memo sent to faculty members Friday.
The academic programs being considered for possible discontinuance include a number ofscience and medical studies, some foreign language majors, theology, music and cybersecurity,among other subject areas.
"We have too many majors, minors and graduate programs for the number of students andfaculty we have," Eric Johnson, the university's provost and executive vice president foracademic affairs, said in the memo.
And according to Justin Weinberg, "Valparaiso to Eliminate Philosophy Program", Daily Nous 7/30/2024:
Students at Valparaiso University will no longer be able to choose philosophy as a major or minor, according to a plan announced by the school’s president, José Padilla. […]
The philosophy programs at Valparaiso are currently housed in the Philosophy and Theology Department.
Meanwhile, according to the Chicago Tribune, “over the next year, the faculty and the provost’s office will develop a new major and required courses in the field of religion.”
The university says that “the freedom to pursue truth wherever it leads is at the heart of Valpo’s sense of community” and that “the university aims to foster in its students a lifelong commitment to this search for truth, encouraging the development of a sense of personal vocation as well as the intellectual and professional skills needed to pursue it.” How that aim is better achieved by the elimination of the very progr[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: defamatory
This word has appeared in 73 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
throw out (1)
to discard something you don't want, usually by putting it in a rubbish bin or a garbage can
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Word of the Day
elfin
Definition: (adjective) Having a magical quality or charm; fairylike.
Synonyms: fey.
Usage: The ballerina moved across the dimly lit stage with elfin grace.
Discuss
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Language Log
Streets named after idioms
The Paper (simplified Chinese: 澎湃新闻; traditional Chinese: 澎湃新聞; pinyin: Péngpài Xīnwén; lit. 'Surging News'), a Shanghai-based, state-owned online newspaper, has an article in Chinese reporting that the city of Handan in Hebei province is changing the names of more than a dozen of its roads that are named after chéngyǔ 成语 ("idioms; set phrases"). The reason given for changing these road names is "bùyì shíjì dàolù 不易识记道路" ("it's not easy to remember the streets").
yīyánjiǔdǐng Jiē
一言九鼎街
"'one word is worth nine sacred tripods' street; 'words of enormous weight' street; 'solemn promise' street" origins of the expression in the 4th c. BC, annotations, commentary, explanation, occurrences throughout history, contemporary usage zhìzàisìfāng Jiē
志在四方街
"'aspire to travel far and make one's mark' street" source in a late Ming dynasty historical novel by Feng Menglong (1574–1646)
The irony of all this is that Handan is the city of idioms par excellence:
Handan is hailed as the capital of Chinese idioms. As a prosperous city and cultural center during the Warring States period, Handan attracted many scholars. Over 1,500 idioms and proverbs are attributed to the city. The following are some of the most well known idioms.
*
* 邯鄲學步 (literally: "to study the walking method of Handan"), meaning to badly imitate others, and lose one's individuality in the process.
* 黃粱一夢 (literally: "millet dream"), meaning a pipe dream.
* 頂天立地 (literally: "stand upright on one's two legs between heaven and earth"), meaning to be fiercely independent.
* 圍魏救趙 (literally: "to besiege the State of Wei to rescue the State of Zhao"), meaning to relieve a besieged ally by attacking the besiegers.
* 不可同日而語 (literally: "musn't speak of the two things on the same day"), meaning incomparable.
* 驚弓之鳥 (literally: "a bird frightened by the mere sound of shooting arrows"), a panic-stricken person.
* 鷸蚌相爭，漁翁得利 (literally: "when the snipe and the oyster fight, it is the fisherman that wins"), when two parties fight, it is always the third one who wins. King of Yan sent a representative to King Hui of Zhao to relay this message in order for him to rethink his plans of war.
* 曠日持久 (literally: "drawn out and protracted"), meaning to be protracted.
* 完璧歸趙 (literally: "returning the Jade to Zhao"), meaning to return something to its owner in good condition.
* 价值连城 (literally: "to be worth numerous contiguous cities"), meaning priceless.
* 怒髮衝冠 (literally: "one's hair raised to the hat in anger"), meaning to be furious.
* 負荊請罪 (literally: "carrying thorned grass and pleading guilt"), meaning to offer someone a humble apology.
* 紙上談兵 (literally: "to discuss military tactics on paper"), meaning to be an armchair strategist.
* 青出於藍，而勝於藍 (literally: "green is born of blue, but beats blue"), meaning to outmaster the teacher.
Handan is also the hometown of many notable Chinese people throughout history, some of whom were featured in idioms:
*
* Lian Po, a military general of Zhao. Regarded one of the four greatest generals of the Warring States period.
* Lin Xiangru, politician of the Warring States period. He's featured in two idioms, "Returning the Jade to Zhao" and "Carrying Thorned Grass and Pleading Guilt".
* Xun Kuang, Confucianism philosopher.
* Xu Huaizhong, novelist.
* Qin Shi Huang, founder of the Qin dynasty and was the first Emperor of China.
* Cao Cao, Han chancellor, poet, and warlord. One of the central figures of the Three Kingdoms period.
* Huang Hua, senior Communist Chinese revolutionary. The county-level city of Huanghua, Cangzhou, was named after him.
* Feng Jianming, literature scholar.
* Fang Lijun, an artist based in Beijing.
* Yang Luchan, martial arts teacher.
* Deng Shu, father of Teresa Teng. He was a soldier of the Republic of China Armed Forces.
* Sun Qingmei, football playe[...]
Language Log
"Asylum"
Like me, you may have been puzzled by Donald Trump's repeated references to Hannibal Lecter in his rally speeches. Given the contexts, I figured it was a connection between "political asylum" and "insane asylum" — and Miles Klee has the receipts ("Why Is Trump So Obsessed With Hannibal Lecter?: A Complete Timeline", Rolling Stone 7/30/2024):
How an off-script moment from early in the election cycle led to a bizarre MAGA ritual celebrating a fictional cannibal
[…] How did Trump end up name-checking Lecter as part of his pitch to the MAGA base? Responding to a request for comment on the matter, campaign communications director Steven Cheung replied, “President Trump is an inspiring and gifted storyteller and referencing pop culture is one of many reasons why he can successfully connect with the audience and voters. Whereas, Kamala [Harris] is as relatable as a worn-out couch.”
Absent any further explanation, a forensic review of the former president’s speeches over the past year is in order. What’s clear is that this all began with a simple misunderstanding — or several.
You can read the whole article for the detailed timeline, Trump's non-canonical Hannibal Lecter descriptions, and a final speculation about the connection:
Political observers outside the MAGA faithful still want to understand the connection Trump keeps making between the border issue and The Silence of the Lambs. Some have wondered on social media whether Trump initially conflated the term “insane asylums” with the concept of “asylum seekers” — that is, migrants fleeing persecution and human rights abuses in their own countries. The Trump campaign’s description of the GOP nominee as “an inspiring and gifted storyteller” neither confirms nor dispels this theory.
I have no idea whether Trump is confused about the difference between "political asylum" and "insane asylum", or just expects or hopes that his audience will be. But since this is Language Log and not Political Psychiatry Log, let's look into the usage history and the deeper etymology.
The OED's first entry, dated to 1439, is
1.a. A place of sanctuary for criminals and debtors, offering protection from legal retribution; a place of refuge and protection from the law. Now historical and rare.
Then, from 1596,
1.b. gen. A secure place of refuge, shelter, or retreat.
From 1842, 2.b. Protection and (usually temporary) permission to stay granted by a state to a refugee, esp. a political refugee, from another country. Cf. political asylum n.
And also, from 1775, 3.b. spec. A secure institution or establishment for the confinement and treatment of people diagnosed with severe mental illness; a psychiatric hospital. Also: a prison for mentally ill criminals. Now chiefly historical.
recorded earliest in lunatic asylum n.
Terms such as psyciatric hospital [sic] are now generally preferred.
The OED's etymology:
< classical Latin asȳlum refuge, sanctuary < Hellenistic Greek ἄσῡλον refuge, sanctuary, use as noun of neuter of ancient Greek ἄσῡλος (adjective) safe from violence, inviolable < ἀ- a- prefix + σύλη, σῦλον (usually in plural, σῦλαι, σῦλα) booty, seized cargo, (in Attic) right of seizure, perhaps < συλᾶν to strip off, to rob, plunder (if this is not from the noun); ultimate origin unknown.
And you may enjoy perusing the Greek stem's relevant entries in Liddell-Scott-Jones, which include
* σύλη "the right of seizing the ship or cargo of a foreign merchant",
* συλάω "strip off (esp. the arms of a slain enemy)", and
* συλεύς "privateer".
I should note in passing that Steven Cheung's "relatable couch" simile raises rhetorical puzzles of its own…
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
sax
saxophone
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Language Log
Yuezhi archeology without concern for Tocharian language
We have entered a new chapter in the history of the so-called Silk Road. What has happened? For the first time in the history of the field of Silk Road Studies, Chinese archeologists have gone out into the field beyond their own political borders. They are leading their own expeditions and carrying out their own excavations in other countries. An American archeologist who has worked in the stans (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) for three decades and is out there exploring and excavating right now — always slowly and patiently — and who has close ties to the local archeologists, tells me that the region is crawling with Chinese archeologists who are working in support of Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), for which see below. As a result, they are now in a position to interpret their discoveries as they see fit, and that takes a radically different approach from what scholars have been saying, among other things, about an elusive people known as the Yuezhi for the last century and more.
"China Reaches Back in Time to Challenge the West. Way, Way Back: The country’s archaeologists are striking out along the Silk Road to trace the reach of ancient Chinese civilization, disputing long-held beliefs", by Sha Hua, WSJ (7/29/24).
One of their flagship efforts is unfolding in Central Asia, a region where empires clashed and intersected for centuries, and where Western archaeologists have long dominated.
Under clear blue skies in May, Chinese and Uzbek researchers gathered around a 10-foot-deep trench dug into a terrace overlooking the village of Chinor, along Uzbekistan’s Surxondaryo River.
Inside the trench, a young Chinese archaeologist examined soil extracted with a tube-shaped spade as his Uzbek counterpart stood at the edge of the dig, explaining the team’s work to the village mayor. Scattered around them were 24 other dig sites, all ancient graves containing artifacts that challenged long-held assumptions about the region’s history.
The site, called Chinortepa, was discovered by a team under the direction of Wang Jianxin, a 71-year-old archaeologist based at Northwest University in the central Chinese city of Xi’an, the eastern starting point of the Silk Road.
Wang had long argued that the international understanding of the Silk Road—a term popularized in the 19th century by a German explorer—was dominated by Western scholars who naturally tended to focus on exploring how the West had influenced other cultures along the route.
“I want to add China’s voice to the field,” Wang said in an interview.
The scholar has spent two decades studying the Yuezhi [月氏], a group of nomadic herders who had roamed the grasslands of present-day northwestern China during the first millennium B.C. After a major defeat at the hands of another nomadic tribe in the second century B.C., they fled west, eventually settling in Central Asia—the first people from the East to do so, according to historical records.
Wang long wondered what happened to the Yuezhi after they left China, and he started exploring excavation possibilities in Central Asia as early as 2009. In 2013, three months after Xi announced the Belt and Road Initiative [BRI]*, Wang reached an agreement with Amridin Berdimurodov, then director of the Institute of Archaeology at Uzbekistan’s Academy of Sciences in Samarkand, to launch a joint study of ancient nomadic cultures in Central Asia.
[*VHM: Shortly after Xi became paramount leader in November, 2012; it is obvious how vitally important this massive trade project is in Xi's plans for global domination.]
Over the next decade, Wang’s team uncovered dozens of hitherto unknown nomadic settlements in Uzbekistan, stunning other archaeologists active in th[...]
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
fall apart
If something falls apart, it breaks into pieces or parts start falling off.
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Word of the Day
sanctimonious
Definition: (adjective) Feigning piety or righteousness.
Synonyms: holier-than-thou, pharisaic, pietistic, self-righteous.
Usage: With a sickeningly sanctimonious smile and a tap of the fork on her glass, she began the first meeting of the Society of Suburbanites Saving the World.
Discuss
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Language Log
Mongolian text-to-speech, online transliterator of Cyrillic to classical script
From IA:
By way of introduction to what you see below under the asterisks, regarding the (not-always) technical reasons for the paucity of webpages in Mongolian script, see some of the comments here, especially the one at the top (Greg Pringle).
I might mention that the president of Mongolia's webpage in Mongolian script — which he links to — only displays correctly for me in Chrome, not in Firefox and not on my iPhone (Safari).
*******
Google Translate (set to: English –> (Cyrillic) Mongolian), no audio
Transliterate Cyrillic Mongolian to classical Mongolian
Websites in classical Mongolian
(Cyrillic) Mongolian TTS — the brief video demonstration here is veyr impressive
These are awe-inspiring resources.
Selected readings
* "Script origin and typology, part 2" (7/5/24)
* "Mycological meandering: vernacular variora" (7/4/19)
* Anshuman Pandey, "Final proposal to encode Old Uyghur in Unicode" (pdf) (12/18/20) — very informative, both historically and linguistically; a learned, scholarly composition pandey@umich.edu pandey.github.io/unicode
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
bite off
to separate something from whatever it's attached to by biting it
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inguistic dilemma,” this special issue aims to problematize this phenomenon, exploring its origins, causes and impacts, thereby reflecting on how to interpret and advance the study of Chinese citizenship.
Why do citizenship practices in China often occur in the form of absent, concealed, or distorted language of citizenship? What political, social, and cultural factors contribute to this case? How does the change in citizenship language impact citizenship practices and actions? Is there consistency, misalignment, or conflict between citizenship language and practices? How should we understand these relationships? How can we comprehend this phenomenon from a historical perspective? What insights do these considerations provide for our understanding of Chinese politics and society in general?
We invite scholars to join us in exploring these issues. We welcome research from a range of disciplines and methods, particularly those interested in employing the approach of citizenship to analyze everyday struggles and creative acts that may not be explicitly recognized as citizenship in public and private life. We encourage researchers to reflect and explore the diverse named and unnamed citizenship practices in everyday interactions, revealing their profound theoretical and practical significance for understanding contemporary Chinese politics and society.
For further information about the call for papers and the target journal to which the organizers aim to submit selected papers, Citizenship Studies, contact Canglong Wang (c.wang@brighton.ac.uk). Selected readings
* "Citizenship and syntax (updated, and updated again)" (7/25/18)
* "Chinese nationality" (2/20/22)
* "Linguistics Required for British Citizenship" (11/1/05)
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
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Language Log
The language of citizenship
The PRC does have a word for "citizen", namely, "guómín 國民" (lit., "person of a country"), but it is a bit more problematic to find a Chinese word equivalent to the abstract concept of "citizenship". If we mean by "citizenship", "the status / condition of being a citizen of a certain country", the legal term "guójí 國籍", which signifies the country in / to which an individual enjoys certain rights, duties, and privileges, will suffice. If, however, we are searching for a term that conveys the notion of "a person's conduct as a citizen" (Collins) or "the character of an individual viewed as a member of society" (Random House), it is difficult to find a comparable Chinese term.
It is interesting that PRC citizenship in the latter respect is defined pretty much in terms of its absence
Below is a call for papers that engages on this subject: Chinese Citizenship in Linguistic Dilemma:
Civic Practices and Social Struggles in the Xi Jinping Era
Overview
In the study of Chinese citizenship, a perplexing and understudied phenomenon persists—how does the enactment of citizenship remain possible despite the stringent regulation and elimination of citizenship language in public and private discourse? This issue can be theoretically addressed by drawing on Engin Isin’s conceptualization of citizenship as an apparatus of government, as outlined in his new book, “Citizenship: New Trajectories in Law” (2024). According to Isin, there is a gap between the ordinary language of political thinking in emancipatory citizenship practices and the language of political thinking in dominating citizenship practices. This gap generates sites and senses of social struggles, through which citizens and noncitizens construct various ordinary languages to raise questions of social justice, rights, equality, and solidarity, performing their rights regardless of their status of citizenship. It is these ordinary, situated, and enacted performances that disrupt hegemonic languages by performing citizenship without explicitly naming it.
This special issue, however, focuses on China under Xi Jinping’s leadership, examining social struggles that do not explicitly invoke citizenship in a context where control and restrictions on individuals and organizations have visibly intensified. It aims to reveal the profound theoretical and practical implications of these struggles for understanding the complex relationships between the state and society, and between the state and individuals in contemporary China. We view citizenship as an open, dynamic, creative, and performative concept, filled with possibilities for struggling against dominating power.
We define the official, authorized language that directly employs the terms of citizenship and core elements (such as rights, obligations, and public participation) as the “language of citizenship.” We refer to the “language for citizenship” as the everyday discourses along with relevant practices that indirectly relate to and point towards terms of citizenship. While the use of the language for citizenship in socio-political struggles is common across different polities (Guo 2022; Isin 2024; Wang 2022), it becomes more complex in China. Particularly over the past twelve years under Xi Jinping’s rule, the concept of “citizen” has been intentionally and systematically diminished and excluded from everyday public discourse by dominating political power (Stern and O’Brien 2012). In recent years, the use of the citizenship term and its related core elements (especially citizen rights and public participation) has surprisingly reduced, if not completely disappeared, from both social discussions and academic research, as well as from public life and individual actions.
Does this mean the enactment and practice of citizenship in China have diminished or disappeared as wel[...]
ams of study dedicated to it is unclear.
The Daily Nous article reproduces a visual-textual pun on the university's logo: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/valparaiso-good-school.png This is not as drastic or as sudden as what happened to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, but it's another straw in the higher-education wind…
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Language Log
"Conservative"?
Matthew Erskine, "The Meaning of Conservative: Lessons from the Valparaiso University Dispute", Forbes 7/25/2024:
Valparaiso University is seeking to sell three valuable paintings, including a Georgia O'Keeffe, to fund renovations for freshman dormitories. The university argues that two of the paintings, purchased with funds from a 1953 donation by Percy Sloan, do not meet the donor's stipulation for "conservative" art. The donation specified that the funds be used to acquire "conservative" American art, which the university claims does not include modernist works like O'Keeffe's "Rust Red Hills" and Childe Hassam's "The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate."
Here are images of the three paintings, starting with Georgia O'Keefe's Rust Red Hills: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ValparaisoArt1.webp Childe Hassam's The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ValparaisoArt2.webp And Frederic Church's Mountain Landscape: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ValparaisoArt3.jpeg The "not conservative" argument has been challenged, as the Forbes article goes on to note:
The University's decision has sparked significant controversy and mixed reactions from various stakeholders, including students, faculty, art historians, and the broader community. Critics argue that using the art collection as a financial resource undermines the university's cultural and educational mission. Gretchen Buggeln, a professor of art history, called the move "completely beyond the pale" and "unethical". Student activists have also voiced their disapproval, organized protests and are calling for alternative solutions. Richard Brauer, the museum's founding director, and Philipp Brockington, a retired professor, have filed a lawsuit to block the sale. They argue that the sale violates the terms of the original donation and the university's mission. The university has moved the paintings to a secure location pending the outcome of legal proceedings .
The Administration justifies the decision to sell the paintings as a necessary step to address declining enrollment and financial challenges. The proceeds from the sale are intended to fund much-needed renovations to freshman dormitories, which are seen as critical to attracting new students and improving campus life. The legal arguments revolve around the interpretation of "conservative” art, and that the paintings in question do not meet the donor's stipulations for "conservative" art. They claim that the modernist styles of the O'Keeffe and Hassam paintings do not align with the original intent of the donation, which specified acquiring "conservative" American art, which originally was concentrated in 19th century Hudson River landscapes. […]
The Indiana attorney general's office has not objected to the sale, and the decision now rests with Judge Michael Fish of Porter County Superior Court. The judge's interpretation of what constitutes "conservative" art will be crucial in determining whether the sale can proceed.
A possible problem for that argument is that (according to Wikipedia) Frederic Church "was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters.'
According to Art Daily ("Valparaiso University closes museum and moves ahead with selling from the collection", 8/2/1014)
Valparaiso University has closed its Brauer Museum of Art and dismissed the director, Jonathan Canning, as part of an administrative restructuring announced late last week to address the tuition-dependent school’s falling enrollment and mounting operating deficit. The move surprised the local community as it comes just weeks after the museum opened America the Beautiful, its summer exhibition of Impressionist paintings drawn from the permanent collection. It also comes as the University moves ahead with its plan to sell the museum’s three most valuable paintin[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
lardass
an overweight person, esp. one with large buttocks
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Idiom of the Day
Lady Luck
The personification of fortune, whether good or bad. (Sometimes spelled in lowercase.) Watch the video
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r.
* Zhao Shi, football player.
* Zhang Weili, mixed martial artist, ring name "Magnum". She is the first ever Chinese and East Asian champion in UFC history.
* Chang Yongxiang, wrestler.
It must have been quite a trip to live in a city where people were constantly quoting idioms, even when they wanted to ask / give directions Selected readings
* "'The old man at the pass loses his horse'" (5/2/20)
* "Mixed literary and vernacular grammar" (9/3/16)
* "I'm (like)" (8/30/21)
* "Learning Chinese is easy — not" (7/18/22)
* "Eighty-one Cantonese proverbs in one picture" (2/27/14)
* "Too tired to love: new set phrases in Pinyin" (12/23/19)
* "Chinese proverbs" (1/19/16)
* "More literary troubles for Xi Jinping" (1/3/19) — see especially this comment for the sharply diminished usage of set phrases in contemporary speech and writing
* "A [class.] zoo" (1/18/15)
* "Mistakes in English and in Chinese" (2/13/18)
* "How to learn to read and write Chinese" (8/13/19)
* "Excessive quadrisyllabicism" (2/17/18) — I was reminded of this post by this tweet from the author of the following famous article
* "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" (8/27/91)
[Thanks to Christopher Shell]
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Language Log
When AI hallucinations are a Good Thing
Locally consistent hallucinations, anyhow… Zoë Hannah, "We pushed this ChatGPT game to the limits, but playing it the right way is more fun", Polygon 7/30/2024: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/DeepGame0.webp Apparently, we all like playing god, and we all like doing it badly. I bet none of us thought that removing the ladder from our Sims’ pools was such a universal experience until it became a pretty popular meme, and it’s no secret that lots of mods are centered on adding, uh, explicit elements to games. So, naturally, when I started playing around with DeepGame, Utile Labs’ ChatGPT-based choose-your-own-text-adventure game, I put my best sicko foot forward.
The game, which runs on ChatGPT and is available to anyone with an account, generates stories in a variety of genres. You start off with a command like “Play a romantasy story” or “Surprise me” and let the GPT do its thing — and despite my desire to break the game, I found it much more enjoyable when I took it just a little more seriously.
DeepGame’s first response almost always begins with scene-setting followed by introducing you, the protagonist, as well as a few side characters and a clearly stated challenge or adventure. Then the game asks, “What do you do next?”
Answering the question is titillating, to say the least. There are no prompts or choices to pick from — you can go in any direction at all, and the game keeps up, spitting out several paragraphs to move the story along after each of your responses.
What’s more, if you have the paid version of ChatGPT, you can use the command “visualize” to generate an image of the current scene using Dall-E. It’s a feature that’s easy to forget about if you treat the game like reading a novel — at least for me, since I typically create an image in my head as I read — but you shouldn’t ignore it, because whatever parameters the devs put on the image generator make for some truly delightful interpretations. It’s the more imperfect side of DeepGame, which is part of why it makes me so giddy — and you can always regenerate the image if it decides to throw in some random characters or elements that don’t match up with your narrative.
As Wikipedia explains,
Adventure games were initially developed in the 1970s and early 1980s as text-based interactive stories, using text parsers to translate the player's commands into actions. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became popular, initially by augmenting player's text commands with graphics, but soon moving towards point-and-click interfaces. Further computer advances led to adventure games with more immersive graphics using real-time or pre-rendered three-dimensional scenes or full-motion video taken from the first- or third-person perspective. Currently, a large number of adventure games are available as a combination of different genres with adventure elements.
Exchanging old-fashioned parsers and story-generation rules for an LLM is an obvious development, but this is the first example I've seen. The transcript for one of Ms. Hannah's DeepGame adventures is here.
In any case, this is an application where real-world facts are not relevant — though keeping track of the state of the fantasy world still matters, and forgetting what's happened, what's been found and what hasn't, etc., would definitely be bad. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/DeepGame1.webp ➖ @EngSkills ➖
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: satirist
This word has appeared in 23 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
check in
If you check in, you give your details at a hotel's reception desk, or at an airline's check-in counter, when you arrive.
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