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#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Idiom of the Day
know full well
To know or be aware of something without any possible doubt. Watch the video
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hold of the name “Taiwan” and not afford other groups the ability to use the name either?
Circling back to the start, language is power. This is a reality. Groups that are large have more influence and languages naturally coalesce toward power and prestige. The name “Chinese” refers to the spoken word and written script of the official language used in China, but China is also composed of several ethnic groups and peoples.
Using “Chinese” to refer to all languages and scripts spoken and written by ethnic Han people is Han chauvinism, and this is no less unjust toward non-Han peoples.
Taigi falls under the Min language umbrella, just as Mandarin is a part of the Sinitic language umbrella. Linguists emphasize that all languages are equal — that no language is inferior to another or lacking in refinement or sophistication — but power dynamics has always differed greatly from this linguistic principle. Renaming “Taiwanese Minnanese” as “Taigi” is closely related to Taiwan’s self-identity. It is a political question.
Languages are productions based on customs, conventions and the ideas of a population. Languages progress and names evolve. From “Minnanese” to “Taiwan Minnanese” to “Tai-uan-ue” and “Taigi,” the adoption and dropping of names involve the majority of the populace that speaks the language.
Sound changes as studied in Comparative Historical Linguistics may be characterized as governed by phonological laws, but what sets these transformations in motion (migrations, disasters, wars, pathbreaking inventions, etc.) is very much aleatory in nature. We know what Minnanese is now, but we have not yet fully discovered and described its origins and evolution. All the less can we predict what it will be half a century, a century, or two centuries from now. Selected readings
* "Taiwan(ese) Taiwanese" (7/22/24)
* "The classification of [nan] Chinese (Min Nan)" (7/27/24)
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
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ribing Taiwanese tend to compare with Mandarin, or lack distinction. between Taiwan and mainland China where [nan] is spoken. Selected readings
* "Taiwan(ese) Taiwanese" (7/22/24)
* Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Taiwan's language situation
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
queer
homosexual, gay
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Idiom of the Day
not know (someone) from a bar of soap
To be completely unaware of or know nothing about someone; to have never met the person indicated. Watch the video
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Language Log
Annals of intervocalic coronal reduction
What word do you hear in this clip?
Your browser does not support the audio element.
If you heard "prison", you agree with me, and with Google's speech-to-text algorithm.
But in fact the word is "president". The context is this passage from a 2015 speech, in which Donald Trump talks about a man who felt compelled to buy excavation equipment from Komatsu rather than Caterpillar — and in context, I bet you hear the word as "president":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
I said why did you do that? He said because
Japan just cut their currency so low Donald
that I had no choice I had to do it
I feel so guilty
he said but I owe it to my wife and my family and my employees
and the company that I built
they couldn't compete with it
and I said isn't that sad
I said do you mind if I use that story?
He said use it what do you mean use it for what?
I said I'm gonna run for president
that's a good story for me to be honest
but that's happening and it's happening even worse with China
The YouTube transcript continues to hear "prison":
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpGonnaRunForPrison.png
Also seen in the the subtitles:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpGonnaRunForPrison1.png
What's going on here? Well, there's a totally normal lenition-unto-deletion of the intervocal /d/ between the last two syllables of "president", with merger of the last two vowels into a nasalized schwa-ish sound, and production of the word-final /t/ as an unreleased glottalization that might as well just be the expected silence. Result: "prison".
Another audio clip, with a bit more of the context:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Yet another example of the regrettable failure of linguists to document how people actually talk…
Here's the YouTube video, starting a little earlier in the speech:
How did this come to my attention? A journalist asked me for comments on changes in Donald Trump's speech over the years, and so I took a look at some of his rally speeches from the last three presidential campaigns.
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Language Log
"Protein" in Chinese and Japanese
[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson]
I recently received the following delightful question from Hilary Smith (University of Denver) about the origins of the term for protein in Chinese (dànbáizhì) and Japanese (tanpakushitsu). Thanks to her for pointing me down this lovely rabbit hole!
The hanzi/kanji used are identical (蛋白質), though in written Japanese the term is often タンパク質 or たんぱく質 because the 蛋 character is not one of the “regular use” kanji (常用漢字 jōyō kanji) selected by the officially announced by the Japanese education ministry for mastery during compulsory education.
Hilary wrote that she had circumstantial evidence from some extant texts that, like a lot of other technical vocabulary, this word was coined in Japan to translate a European term in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. That language, she suspected, was German. In German, the word is Eiweiß, which breaks down to Ei (egg) weiß (white). This is a perfect match for the Sino-Japanese term’s first two characters; the third means “stuff” or “substance.”
Hilary asked if I could confirm the German origin and comment on the date of coinage in Japanese. The answer turned out to be a fascinating train of translation with a detour into (and immediately away from) testicular imagery.
The standard answer to the origins of 蛋白質 in Japanese is provided by the Nihongo daijiten (“Great Japanese Dictionary” 日本国語大辞典), last edited in 1995. The dictionary cites Shiba Ryōkai’s (司馬凌海 1839-1879) 1862 七新藥 (Shichi shin’yaku, “Seven new medicines”) as the oldest extant use of the term 蛋白質. That comes in a passage describing protein binding:
「…蛋白質と相結合して以て其功を発す」
…tanpakushitsu to aiketsugō shite, motte sono kō o hassu
Roughly: “[It] binds with protein and thereby has its effect”
In digging just a little further I came across an article by Shiba Tetsuo (芝哲夫) that uncovers evidence of the term used a year earlier, in 1861, by Kawakami Kōmin (川本幸民 1810-1871). Kawakami was the translator to Japanese of Julius Adolph Stöckhardt’s (1809-1886) Die Schule der Chemie (“School of Chemistry”), a highly influential text first published in 1846. It went through over twenty editions and was widely translated. Thus far, the German origins hypothesis for 蛋白質 was holding up well, though the date of origin was pushed back far beyond not just the texts Hilary had access to, but even a year past its canonical coinage.
However, Kawakami was not working directly from German. Japan had centuries of skill and knowledge working from Dutch texts (via Rangaku 蘭学, or “Dutch learning”), and Kawakami was a veteran scholar of the Dutch learning. He therefore turned to an existing Dutch expanded translation by Jan Willem Gunning, De scheikunde van het onbewerktuigde en bewerktuigde rijk: bevattelijk voorgesteld en met eenvoudige proeven opgehelderd: derde Nederduitsche uitgave van Stöckhardt’s Schule der chemie (“The chemistry of the organized and unorganized kingdom… 3rd. ed. of Stöckhardt’s Die Schule der Chemie”). Kawakami’s multi-volume translation was published as化学新書 (Kagaku shinsho, “New book of chemistry”). Therein, he used the term 蛋白質 to translate the Dutch “eiwit,” which is structurally identical to the German Eiweiß.
The remaining mystery, which Shiba addresses, is why Kawakami elected to use the glyph 蛋. In Japanese, “egg” (tamago) can be written multiple ways, including with the single character 卵. Other than in the compound 蛋白質, the 蛋 character is rarely seen outside of Chinese restaurant menus in Japan today because it is not incuded in the jōyō kanji. I won’t speculate on the chicken-and-egg causality problem of whether it fell into disuse and was removed from the list or whether removal from the list is what made it fall out of use. It is enough to say that the 蛋 character is unusual these days. Shiba speculates th[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
afters
dessert, sweet dish eaten after the main course of a meal
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Idiom of the Day
know every trick in the book
To be aware of or knowledgeable in every possible way to do or achieve something, especially ways that are clever, cunning, or ethically questionable. Watch the video
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hnical literacy / knowledge", i.e., "the codification of engineering, commercial, and industrial practices"
Fair enough, but neither this team of brilliant analysts nor any other scholars I know of attribute Japan's meteoric rise to the fact that, despite their being sealed off from the rest of the world until Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794-1858) with his Black Ships forced the Japanese empire to open its ports and gates (1852-54), their possession of a flexible script (phonetic kana plus morphosyllabic kanji) was operative. In my estimation such a writing system would have played a significant role in their lexicographic borrowing and epistemological foundations. Selected readings
William C. Hannas, Asia's Orthographic Dilemma (Honolulu, Hawai'i: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997).
William C. Hannas, The writing on the wall: How Asian orthography curbs creativity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press, 2003).
[Thanks to Ben Benzon]
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Language Log
English usage in Taiwan
From a Facebook page with Army background in Taiwan: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/voiceofhan.jpg Facebook page for Voice of Han Broadcasting Network
(漢聲廣播電台 hànshēng guǎngbō diàntái)
from Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense
The large lettering on the poster reads:
zǎo ān
bù wèi fēngyǔ
dōu shì weather nǐ
早安
不畏風雨，
都是weather你
Good morning
Not afraid of wind or rain
It's all for you
The "weather" is a crosslingual pun for wèile 為了 ("for; on behalf of").
You can see that the soldiers are all decked out for inclement weather, which comes a lot in Taiwan.
The poster is part of the publicity for the Han Kuang Exercise, which is going on right now (Monday, Jul 22, 2024 – Friday, Jul 26, 2024).
The Han Kuang Exercise (Chinese: 漢光演習; pinyin: Hànguāng Yǎnxí) is the annual military exercise of the Republic of China Armed Forces in Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu for combat readiness in the event of an attack from the People's Liberation Army of the People's Republic of China.
(source)
For those who are curious, "Han Kuang" superficially means "light / glory of Han", but in the context of the Han Kuang Exercise, its authoritative intent originally was Dàhàn guāngfù 大漢光復 ("gloriously restore the Great Han"). That harkened back to the Han Dynasty (202 BC-25-220 AD), but, in the context of the ROC-PRC confrontation, it had the implication of "retake the mainland". That was clearly the sentiment of the KMT (Nationalist) government and the couple of million people from the mainland who accompanied Chiang Kai-shek when he retreated with his armies to Taiwan when the communists conquered China. After the KMT lost its dominance over the island nation to the Taiwanese majority DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) at the beginning of the new millennium, the Han Kuang Exercise — regardless of the original intent of the name — was reinterpreted to emphasize the strongest possible defensive posture against the threat of an attack by the PRC / CCP. (source, especially note 1)
This year the Han Kuang Exercise has particular poignancy and urgency because of the heightened tensions in the region and the ever increasing hostility of the mainland military forces.
Aside from the crosslingual pun involving "weather" that I explained above, there's another very important linguistic aspect to the Han Kuang Exercise that I almost neglected to mention. Namely, the Han Kuang Exercise is carried out bilingually, in "Chinese" and English. I would hope that "Chinese" means that the written components of the war games are in Mandarin, but that the spoken components include Taiwanese and other languages of Taiwan.
I have on several occasions mentioned that the government of Taiwan during the 21st century has made it clear that it wishes to make English an official language of the country. The fact that the Han Kuang Exercise is conducted in "Chinese" and English is solid evidence of working toward the realization of this goal. Selected readings * "English as an official language in Taiwan" (12/8/18)
* Ralph Jennings, "Isolation-wary, Chinese-speaking Taiwan moves to make English an official language", Los Angeles Times (10/15/18)
* "Taiwan to make English an official language next year, says official", Jennifer Creery, Hong Kong Free Press (8/31/18)
[Thanks to shaing tai]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: defector
This word has appeared in 38 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
speak up (2)
If you speak up, you publicly state your position on an issue, or publicly oppose or defend someone or something.
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Word of the Day
ineffable
Definition: (adjective) Incapable of being expressed.
Synonyms: indescribable, unspeakable, untellable, unutterable, indefinable.
Usage: There was an expression of ineffable sadness on her face as she spoke, and I could not but feel that she knew that I knew her secret.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: exacting
This word has appeared in 265 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Word of the Day
inerrant
Definition: (adjective) Incapable of erring.
Synonyms: infallible.
Usage: Many traditional theologians insist that biblical texts are the literal Word of God and as such are inerrant and infallible.
Discuss
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Language Log
Taiwan(ese) Taiwanese, part 2
"Taigi a political question of identity", By Hugo Tseng, Taipei Times (7/27/24)
The issue of whether to call the language spoken in Taiwan “Minnanese” (閩南語) or “Taigi” (台語, taiyu, also called Hoklo or Taiwanese) has long been a subject of debate. On the surface, it seems to be a simple question about language, but in essence it is a political question of identity.
Perhaps we could gain some inspiration from the duality of English as a language. English was, at its earliest, the language of the Angles — the Germanic people from the German-Danish border who invaded and settled in what is now known as England, whose name meant the “Land of the Angles.”
Through colonization and the spread of the language across the world, English — even as it melded with and adopted local characteristics and traits from other languages — remained essentially the same. In the US, Australia and other Anglophone countries, English is the name of the language, but the name is appended with a qualifier — the name of the country where it is used — such as American English or Australian English.
There is another aspect to the name English. England being the “Land of the Angles” has led to a linguistic “representation” that eclipses the languages of the original Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles and the Germanic Saxons who later invaded and settled in England from continental Europe. This is also a display of linguistic force, and it is a reality that cannot be anything but accepted.
What, no British English? But the greatest impact of all on the development of the English language was brought about by the Norman Conquest. And who were the Normans? Vikings / Norsemen who had originally spoken Old Norse, but who soon switched to Old French after they had settled in northern France. It was they who brought massive amounts of French linguistic influence to the British Isles after their conquest of 1066. I mention this only because the linguistic transformations that have occurred in East Asia, including Taiwan (originally peopled by Austronesian speakers, some of whom still survive there), are equally profound and pervasive, lest we ever entertain the mistaken notion that Chinese / Sinitic / Han, or any of its daughter languages, has "indisputably" (wú kě zhēngyì dì 無可爭議地) been the language of East Asia or any of its parts "since time immemorial" (zìgǔ yǐlái 自古以來).
From a linguistic standpoint, the origins of Taigi come from the convergence of the two parent branches of Tsuan-tsiu-ue (泉州話) and Tsang-tsiu-ue (漳州話). The first speakers of this language in Taiwan sailed across the “Black Ditch” — or the Taiwan Strait — to set down roots in Taiwan. All said, Taigi is a localized amalgamation that historically adopted influences from Dutch, Taiwanese indigenous languages, Japanese and Beijing-based Mandarin Chinese, gradually forming the Taigi spoken today.
If we are to split languages based on their linguistic branching, “Minnanese” is an umbrella term, but as a semantic hypernym, Minnanese has broader connotations and scope. Taigi is more specific, as a hyponym, with narrower connotations and scope, putting it on the same hierarchical level as the Amoy (廈門話) spoken in Xiamen, China, Tsang-tsiu-ue spoken in Zhangzhou, China, and Tsuan-tsiu-ue spoken in Quanzhou, China — all distinct languages in their own right.
People should remember, though, that there is a language in southwestern China and among several groups within Southeast Asia called “Tai” (also written as 台語 in Chinese), of which Thai from Thailand is a major language.
Some claim that using Taiwanese (台語) to refer to “Taiwanese Minnanese” is a form of Hoklo chauvinism and that using the name “Taiwanese” is unfair to other linguistic groups and ethnic groups who have also settled for a long time in Taiwan. How does one ethnic group take[...]
Language Log
The classification of [nan] Chinese (Min Nan)
[Serendipitously, right while we are in the midst of energetic discussions over the classification of and terminology for the languages of Taiwan, I received a communication from the international body that is charged with such matters for all the languages of the world, namely, an arm of the ISO. The following (after the page break) is a guest post by Janell Nordmoe, Registrar of ISO 639-3 Language Coding Agency. For those who are not familiar with it, "ISO 639 is a standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) concerned with representation of languages and language groups." (source)
There have been significant changes with the publication of 639:2023, including that the decision on CRs rests with the Maintenance Agency, not SIL as Language Coding Agency for 639-3. This link describes the four sets within ISO 639, the Maintenance Agency.
At the link to the info about the 639 standard, the public reports link is the bottom of the page under Public Reports from the Maintenance Agency.]
——————————————————- New language code proposals for Taiwanese
While researching Taiwanese, I encountered your work in several places including Language Log, which led me to write to you. The short question I'm requesting your comment on is, how is Taiwanese distinct from Min Nan Chinese/Hokkien [nan] in terms of literature and ethnolinguistic identity?
The long version: In 2021 the Registration Authority for ISO 639-3, SIL International, received two requests to create codes for Taiwanese in the comprehensive set codes for world languages. They can be found at Taigi 2021-044 and Taiwanese 2021-045 (part of an 11-way split of [nan] Chinese, Min Nan) proposal. The consideration of these two requests was delayed due to the expected revision of ISO 639 (which was finally completed at the end of 2023) and is now underway.
Both change requests lack sufficient evidence from scholarship with regard to the creation of a new language code for Taiwanese as distinct from [nan] Min Nan Chinese, which both Ethnologue and Glottolog currently list as dialects of [nan] (in the case of Glottolog, Taipei Hokkien is a sub-dialect of Quan-zhang dialect).
According to the ISO 639:2023 standard, the distinction between a language and a dialect is based on the criteria below. In the case of Taiwanese, we have not found scholars making the case that Taiwanese is not intelligible with Hokkien/Min Nan/[nan] as in (a). The best case seems to rest on the distinct identity and distinct literature basis of criterion c.:
1.
Two related language varieties are normally considered to belong to the same individual language if speakers of each language variety have inherent understanding of the other language variety at a functional level (they can understand each other based on knowledge of their own language variety without needing to learn the other variety)
2.
Where spoken intelligibility is marginal, the existence of a common literature or common ethnolinguistic identity with a central language variety that both speaker communities understand is a strong indicator that they should nevertheless be considered varieties of the same individual language
3.
Where there is enough intelligibility between language varieties to enable communication, they can nevertheless be treated as different individual languages when they have long-standing, distinctly named ethnolinguistic identities coupled with established linguistic normalization and literatures that are distinct
Would you care to comment, for the benefit of the 639 Set 3 Language Coding Agency and for the 639 Maintenance Agency (MA) voting members, on the distinctiveness of Taiwanese from [nan] Min Nan in terms of
1.
Literature
2.
Ethnolinguistic identity
Articles and blogs desc[...]
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hold up (2)
to support something and stop it from falling down
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Word of the Day
ungainly
Definition: (adjective) Lacking grace or ease of movement or form.
Synonyms: clumsy, clunky, gawky, unwieldy.
Usage: He was a gawky lad with long ungainly legs, but she thought he was the most handsome boy she had ever seen.
Discuss
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at Kōmin chose 蛋 for ei rather than 卵 because the latter character visually references testicles whereas 蛋 unambiguously means bird eggs. For those interested, the original passage is:
「蛋白」のオランダ語はeiwitで直訳すると卵白であるが，幸民はなぜ…「蛋」の字をこれに充てたのであろうか。卵は象形文字としてみればわかるように，これは男性の性器を表わす意味がある。幸民はそれを嫌ったのであろうか，鳥のタマゴを意味する。「蛋」を採用して「蛋白」とした… (708-709)
To sum up, we have a German text translated and elaborated into Dutch that was then translated into Japanese. A rather literal translation of “egg white” (Eiweiß/eiwit) as “egg white substance” (蛋白質) yielded the Japanese term that was then imported into written Chinese and given a sinified pronunciation. Also, we avoided male gonads.
Selected readings
* "The transformative power of translation" (7/25/24)
* "Japanese words that are dying out: focus on diabetes" (11/21/23)
* "Advanced lexicography for diabetes in Japan and China" (11/21/23)
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: haptic
This word has appeared in five 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
flick through
If you flick through a book or a magazine, you have a quick look at a few of the pages.
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Word of the Day
baleful
Definition: (adjective) Threatening or foreshadowing evil or tragic developments.
Synonyms: menacing, minacious, minatory, ominous, sinister, threatening, forbidding.
Usage: He sprang on the horse of a Blackfoot warrior whom he had slain, and escaping at full speed, brought home the baleful tidings to his village.
Discuss
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economics book translated into Japanese. In the course of this work, he encounters difficulties with the concept of “competition.” He decides to coin a new Japanese word, kyoso, derived from the words for “race and fight.”* His patron, a Confucian, is unimpressed with this translation. He suggests other renderings. Why not “love of the nation shown in connection with trade”? Or “open generosity from a merchant in times of national stress”? But Fukuzawa insists on kyoso, and now the word is the first result on Google Translate.
[*VHM: I think this explanation may be confusing to some readers. Fukuzawa's neologism for "competition" is kyōsō 競争, which may also mean "rivalry, contest, emulation, tournament, strife". 競 by itself may mean "compete" and 争 by itself may mean "contest".]
There is a lot more in this paper. In particular, showing how the translation of documents lead to productivity growth on an industry by industry basis and a demonstration of the importance of this mechanism for economic growth across the world.
The bottom line for me is this: What caused the industrial revolution is a perennial question–was it coal, freedom, literacy?–but this is the first paper which gives what I think is a truly compelling answer for one particular case. Japan’s rapid industrialization under the Meiji Restoration was driven by its unprecedented effort to translate, codify, and disseminate Western technical knowledge in the Japanese language.
If you have time, many of the comments that follow the post are illuminating in their own right and worth delving into.
Now, on to the original paper:
"CODIFICATION, TECHNOLOGY ABSORPTION, AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION", by Réka Juhász, Shogo Sakabe and David Weinstein, NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH Working Paper 32667 (July, 2024) Abstract
This paper studies technology absorption worldwide in the late nineteenth century. We construct several novel datasets to test the idea that the codification of technical knowledge in the vernacular was necessary for countries to absorb the technologies of the Industrial Revolution. We find that comparative advantage shifted to industries that could benefit from patents only in countries and colonies that had access to codified technical knowledge but not in other regions. Using the rapid and unprecedented codification of technical knowledge in Meiji Japan as a natural experiment, we show that this pattern appeared in Japan only after the Japanese government codified as much technical knowledge as what was available in Germany in 1870. Our findings shed new light on the frictions associated with technology diffusion and offer a novel take on why Meiji Japan was unique among non-Western countries in successfully industrializing during the first wave of globalization. Telling prefatory quotation
“At present, the learning of China and Japan is not sufficient; it must be supplemented and made complete by inclusion of the learning of the entire world… I would like to see all persons in the realm thoroughly familiar with the enemy’s conditions, something that can best be achieved by allowing them to read barbarian books as they read their own language. There is no better way to enable them to do this than by publishing [a] dictionary.” Shozan Sakuma (1811-1864), 1858, quoted in Hirakawa (2007, p. 442, emphasis added)
Hirakawa, S. (2007). Japan’s turn to the West. In J. W. Hall, M. B. Jansen, M. Kanai, and D. Twitchett (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Japan: The Nineteenth Century, Volume 5, pp. 432–498. New York: Cambridge University Press.
N.B.: Already in the middle of the 19th century, Japanese were thinking of an East Asian co-prosperity condominium with China.
As to why the trajectory of scientific change was so radically different in Japan from what it was elsewhere outside of Europe, the authors have their own hypotheses and draw their own conclusions, which are basically centered on economic realities and grounded in "tec[...]
Language Log
The transformative power of translation
"Not Lost In Translation: How Barbarian Books Laid the Foundation for Japan’s Industrial Revolution", by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (July 22, 2024)
I am grateful to Alex Tabarrok and his colleague Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution University of George Mason University's Mercatus Center for introducing me to what is one of the most mind-boggling/blowing papers I have read in the last decade.
First, here is Tabarrok's introduction, and that will be followed by selections from the revolutionary paper to which I am referring.
Japan’s growth miracle after World War II is well known but that was Japan’s second miracle. The first was perhaps even more miraculous. At the end of the 19th century, under the Meiji Restoration, Japan transformed itself almost overnight from a peasant economy to an industrial powerhouse.
After centuries of resisting economic and social change, Japan transformed from a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural economy specialized in the exports of unprocessed, primary products to an economy specialized in the export of manufactures in under fifteen years.
In a remarkable new paper, Juhász, Sakabe, and Weinstein show how the key to this transformation was a massive effort to translate and codify technical information in the Japanese language. This state-led initiative made cutting-edge industrial knowledge accessible to Japanese entrepreneurs and workers in a way that was unparalleled among non-Western countries at the time.
Here’s an amazing graph which tells much of the story. In both 1870 and 1910 most of the technical knowledge of the world is in French, English, Italian and German but look at what happens in Japan–basically no technical books in 1870 to on par with English in 1910. Moreover, no other country did this. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/juhasz1.jpg [Click to embiggen for easy reading]
Translating a technical document today is much easier than in the past because the words already exist. Translating technical documents in the late 19th century, however, required the creation and standardization of entirely new words.
…the Institute of Barbarian Books (Bansho Torishirabesho)…was tasked with developing English-Japanese dictionaries to facilitate technical translations. This project was the first step in what would become a massive government effort to codify and absorb Western science. Linguists and lexicographers have written extensively on the difficulty of scientific translation, which explains why little codification of knowledge happened in languages other than English and its close cognates: French and German (c.f. Kokawa et al. 1994; Lippert 2001; Clark 2009). The linguistic problem was two-fold. First, no words existed in Japanese for canonical Industrial Revolution products such as the railroad, steam engine, or telegraph, and using phonetic representations of all untranslatable jargon in a technical book resulted in transliteration of the text, not translation. Second, translations needed to be standardized so that all translators would translate a given foreign word into the same Japanese one.
Solving these two problems became one of the Institute’s main objectives.
Here’s a graph showing the creation of new words in Japan by year. You can see the explosion in new words in the late 19th century. Note that this happened well after the Perry Mission. The words didn’t simply evolve, the authors argue new words were created as a form of industrial policy. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/juhasz2.jpg [Click to embiggen for easy reading]
By the way, AstralCodexTen points us to an interesting biography of a translator at the time who works on economics books:
[Fukuzawa Yukichi {1835-1901}] makes great progress on a number of translations. Among them is the first Western[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hood (2)
a criminal, a member of a criminal gang
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Idiom of the Day
knock (one's) head against a/the wall
To attempt continuously and fruitlessly to accomplish some task or achieve some goal that is or seems ultimately hopeless. Watch the video
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: Euro 2024 Review – The Best and Worst
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indie
rock music not released by major music labels
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