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Language Log
'Tis the summer season for choking off VPNs
"The mysterious slowdown of VPNs in China", Drum Tower, The Economist (newsletter), Gabriel Crossley (China correspondent) (8/15/24)
Every summer Communist Party bigwigs leave Beijing and go to recharge in the resort town of Beidaihe on the coast. This coincides with the silly season for China watchers. There is little hard news, so rumours fly. Some are baseless speculations about the health of Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader. Others are more well-founded, such as a report that Hu Xijin, a prominent nationalist commentator, has been muzzled on social media (probably for accidentally overstepping the party line). And some are true but harder to explain: like the fact that virtual private networks (VPNs) are getting slower.
A VPN is a piece of software which makes it appear as if a computer or mobile phone is located in another country. They are an unfortunate necessity for many of us who live in China, because the government blocks online content it does not like (using a system known as the “great firewall”). VPN users can evade the censors and view blacklisted websites such as Facebook, Google and X.
But this summer popular VPNs became less reliable. Foreigners who live here are complaining. So are many Chinese. On Weibo, a social-media site, netizens said their “ladders” over the great firewall (as VPNs are known) seemed to have broken. A tracking tool run by GreatFire, a censorship watchdog, suggests the problem is widespread. Over the last 60 days, a VPN from a company called Astrill has been running 47% slower than in the previous 60 days. Another, run by ExpressVPN, a big provider of the software, has been 70% slower. It is probably the Chinese government disrupting the networks.
Technically it is illegal to use a VPN in China without official permission. But things are usually less strict in practice because the government finds VPNs useful too. Without them foreigners would be less likely to visit and local businesses would struggle to find overseas customers. So in the past officials struck a balance. They only throttled VPNs during important events, such as the meeting of China’s legislature every spring.
No such events are happening now. So the timing of this crackdown is a puzzle. In general, though, China’s censorship regime is getting tighter. Subjects that were once safe to talk about in a critical way online, such as the state of the economy, are now deemed sensitive. Perhaps the government has started to think the risks of VPNs outweigh the benefits, says a co-founder of GreatFire. If anyone knows the answer to the puzzle, they are probably sunning themselves on a beach in Beidaihe.
This is a significant phenomenon.
It reminds me of the years after the Tiananmen Massacre before the internet was widely used and people relied on fax machines to spread urgent news, all the fax machines were required to be turned off in the weeks before and after 6/4. Selected readings
* "China VPN redux" (7/17/24) — with lengthy bibliography
* "Beidaihe: Use by Communist Party" — the summer retreats (aka "summer summits") of the top leaders of the CCP are highly secretive, and strange — sometimes extremely dangerous and destructive — things happen before or after they take place (e.g., the demise of Marshal Lin Biao, on September 13, 1971 and the mega explosions with the force of tactical nuclear weapons that occurred at Tianjin on August 12, 2015, especially when it is known that contentious issues are in the air.
[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
action (1)
important or exciting activity
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Idiom of the Day
laughing in the aisles
Laughing uproariously or hysterically. (Used especially in the phrase "have someone laughing in the aisles.") Watch the video
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nts. Even their word choices sometimes differ, such as ‘football’ and ‘soccer,’ but they are all known as being part of the English language,” a friend said.
“The language Americans speak could be called ‘Americanese,’” another said.
“Sure, but they probably would not call it ‘American Americanese.’ Using ‘Taiwanese’ is one thing, but why call it ‘Taiwan Taiwanese?’ Minnanese as spoken in Singapore is called Hokkien, the word derived from the Hokkien pronunciation of the Sinitic characters for ‘Fujian.’ Why do they hot call it ‘Singapore Singaporeanese?’” the person asked.
“I also think the inclusion of ‘Taiwan’ is illogical. Should we also start saying ‘Singaporean Taiwanese,’ ‘Xiamen Taiwanese,’ or ‘Quanzhou Taiwanese?’” another asked.
“It is to distinguish Taiwan Taiwanese from ‘Taiwanese Hakka,” another said.
“Then we can say ‘Taiwanese Hakka’ and ‘Taiwanese Minnanese,’” a friend said.
“However, ‘Minnanese’ is still a discriminatory term,” another said.
“Perhaps we can use the term ‘Hokkien’ or ‘Hoklo,’” the friend replied.
The discussion went round and round with everyone having their own opinions on what to call the language spoken in Taiwan. We did not come to a conclusion.
I like the way the participants in this exciting discussion agree to disagree, and don't end up shouting at each other.
I think it is time we take a poll of what to call the main non-Mandarin language of Taiwan.
Also, I'd be curious to know what Language Log readers think we should call the national languages of (Great) Britain / England / United Kingdom; (United States of) America; Canada; Australia; New Zealand….
Selected readings
* "Taiwan(ese) Taiwanese, part 2" (7/27/24)
* "Taiwan(ese) Taiwanese" (7/22/24)
* "The classification of [nan] Chinese (Min Nan)" (7/27/24)
* "List of countries and territories where English is an official language" (Wikipedia)
* List of countries in which English is recognized as an official language (Lingoda) — 67 different countries and 27 non-sovereign entities, bearing in mind that Taiwan already uses English for certain administrative purposes and has given serious consideration to making it an official language, and so has Japan, which I have pointed out on a number of occasions on Language Log
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
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in" (9/3/2022)
I should emphasize that General Ryder is a fluent and effective speaker, as you'd expect for someone appointed to be Pentagon Press Secretary. Although there's a lot of individual and contextual variation in the relative frequency and phrasal distribution of the different sorts of "disfluencies", good communicators often provide plenty of data.
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Language Log
Nagoya Dialect and the Marvel Cinematic Universe
[This is a guest post by Frank Clements]
I saw something about Japanese dialects recently that might interest you. The makers of the Marvel movies are trying to recover the enthusiasm that's been lost due to their more recent films being critically panned and scandals with major actors, so they're introducing the classic Marvel villain Dr. Doom, who is traditionally the main villain of the Fantastic Four (created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee). They've brought back Robert Downey Jr. to play him, even though he's already played Iron Man, and they haven't explained how that is going to work.
But what's interesting from a Japan perspective is that a Fantastic Four cartoon by Hanna-Barbera that first ran in the US from 1967 to 1968 was then dubbed and shown on Japanese TV in 1969. They made the choice to give Dr. Doom (Akuma-hakase 悪魔博士 in Japanese) a comical Nagoya accent, so many Japanese associate the character with funny, hard-to-understand Nagoya-ben. Here's a short Youtube video by NONNON, a Japanese woman who reviews American cartoons, that first informed me about it. According to her, many people on Japanese social media were posting about it after the announcement.
I lived in Nagoya for a semester in college, but I never really picked up the dialect (which seems to be largely in decline, especially compared to dialects like Osaka-ben). Nathan Hopson worked there for a few years, so he may have encountered more of it in the wild, so to speak. It makes the character of Dr. Doom a lot more comical to the Japanese, which contrasts with Marvel's push to make him the new overarching villain for their cinematic universe. Maybe when they dub the movies into Japanese, they'll try to work in an in-joke referencing it all.
[end of guest post]
Selected readings
* "'Come to Nagoya' — spatial locutions" (8/17/20)
* "Tesseract Space Stone" (6/15/21)
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Learn English Through Football: (to) Lump
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Learn English Through Football
Predictions Competition: AFCON 23 and ASIAN Cup 23
The 2023 AFCON and Asian Cup tournaments are now at the last 16 stage and the Languagecaster team is organising a Predictions Competition.
The post Predictions Competition: AFCON 23 and ASIAN Cup 23 appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Learn English Through Football
Football Language: AFCON
In this football language post we explain the term 'AFCON' which is the name of the main tournament for national sidesA in Africa.
The post Football Language: AFCON appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2023 FIFA Club World Cup
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2023-24 Champions League Group Stage Review
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2023 Man City v Liverpool (Mis-hit Clearance)
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Learn English Through Football
Football Language: Rescue a point
In this football language post we explain the expression 'to rescue a point' which is when a team draws a game thanks to a late goal.
The post Football Language: Rescue a point appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: Fortress
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Language Log
Scone geography
Matthew Smith, "The scone pronunciation map of Britain", YouGov 8/16/2024:
The debate on whether you should pronounce ‘scone’ to rhyme with ‘gone’ or with ‘bone’ has been going on forever. There is evidence of people making light of the distinction as far back as 1913, with a poem in Punch Magazine:
I asked the maid in dulcet tone,
To order me a buttered scone,
The silly girl has been and gone,
And ordered me a buttered scone.
Neither side looks likely to win the argument any time soon however, with a recent YouGov study of more than 54,000 Britons finding that 51% say they pronounce the word to rhyme with ‘gone’ but 45% saying they pronounce it to rhyme with ‘bone’.
The resulting map: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/YouGovSconeMap.webp The Wiktionary entry offers a cornucopia of etymological possibilities:
Originally Scots, possibly from Middle Low German schö̂ne (“fine flour bread”), or from Greek σκόνη (skóni, “dust”) or Middle Dutch schoonbroot (“fine bread; a kind of flat angular loaf”), from schoon (“fine”) + broot (“bread”); alternatively, Scottish Gaelic sgonn (“lump, mouthful”).
…but only only one pronunciation — the "gone" version:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
The OED etymology omits the Greek and Gaelic option: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/OED_scone_etymology.png But the OED pronunciation gives (versions of) the two British pronunciations, rendered in IPA as /skəʊn/ and /skɒn/:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
The OED also gives the same pair for U.S. English, rendered as /skoʊn/ and /skɑn/:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
And one version each for Scottish English (/skɔn/), Australian English (/skɔn/), and New Zealand English (/skɒn/):
Your browser does not support the audio element.
(As usual, I'm skeptical of the accuracy/value of the IPA versions, though there's certainly a bit of content there…)
You can read the YouGov article for more geographical details — but there's some additional culinary geography fun:
A map that perhaps makes more sense at first glance is our county map showing what order people add jam and cream to their scones. This topic is hotly disputed, with proponents of the so-called ‘Cornish method’ insisting that jam should go on first, while the rival ‘Devon method’ advocates the application of cream ahead of jam.
Fittingly, both counties are the most likely in the country to practice the method that bears their name. However, while the Cornish method is by far the most common choice in Cornwall (80%), the same is not true in Devon, where people are in fact split on whether they go cream first (49%) or jam first (46%). http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/YouGovSconeMethodMap.webp Given the distinctly red tone of the map above, it is no surprise to see that the overall national results show a heavy lead for jam-firsters, which is practiced by 62% of Britons compared to 28% for the cream-first opponents.
However, there is a glimmer of hope in the long run for cream-firsters. Breaking the results down by age shows that the Cornish method’s dominance diminishes as the public get younger. While fully 80% of the over-70s dollop jam on their scone first, this falls to 48% among the under-30s.
It's probably my ignorance, but I feel that there's less of such detailed geographical socio-food-istics than there could be. (And is there even a word for it?) What I've seen for e.g. U.S. barbecue-sauce variation is not nearly as geographically or statistically elaborated, and is aimed at cooks rather than at social scientists… The YouGov article even shows the cream-jam order by age as well as geography — though not by gender, educational background, etc. :-)…
[h/t Jesse Sheidlower]
Update — Another socio-food-istic point is that U.S. scones are made to be eaten by themselves, without either jam or cream — I don't believe I've ever seen anyone n the U.S. putting jam and cream on a scone, in whatever order.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
weigh up
to consider the good and bad points before making a decision
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Word of the Day
preponderance
Definition: (noun) A superiority in numbers or amount.
Synonyms: prevalence, extensiveness.
Usage: The preponderance of the evidence strongly supports his guilt.
Discuss
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Language Log
Taiwan(ese) Taiwanese, part 3
The question of what to call the languages of Taiwan and how to classify them with regard to their sister languages on the mainland has become one of the most exciting areas of discussion on Language Log, and it shows no signs of quieting down yet, especially not when we keep getting stimulating infusions from the press like this article:
"Language naming is complicated", by Lee Hsiao-feng 李筱峰, Taipei Times (8/17/24)
Recently, the Ministry of Education announced that it would adopt the term “Taiwan Taiwanese” (台灣台語), to replace the term “Minnanese” (閩南語, “Southern Min”), as a unifying name for the language spoken in Taiwan.
I discussed this issue with some friends.
“I went to Xiamen in China in 1990 and chatted with a local. I said that his Taiwanese sounded similar to mine. He told me he speaks the Xiamen dialect of Minnanese, not Taiwanese. Taiwanese is a term only people in Taiwan use to refer to the form of Minnanese they speak, but the original term is Minnanese,” one friend said.
“As I recall, the term ‘Taiwanese’ was first coined by Japanese officials during the Japanese colonial era. At that time, prospective educators from Japan studying at Taiwan Provincial Normal Institute [now National Taiwan Normal University] were required to take Taiwanese language classes, as they were to teach Taiwanese students. Japanese police officers were also required to learn the local language so they could communicate with Taiwanese under their jurisdiction. There are several Taiwanese dictionaries that retired Japanese police have compiled,” another replied.
However, semantically, Taiwanese refers to the language of Taiwan, but Taiwan has many languages.
“The early Austronesians in Taiwan spoke 10 to 20 distinct languages. Later, immigrants from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou in China’s Fujian Province brought Minnanese of various dialects to Taiwan. The Hakka were the next ethnic group to travel in large numbers to Taiwan, bringing their own Hakka language, of which the Hailu, Sixian, Raoping, Dabu and Zhao’an are dialects. These are all languages of Taiwan, so why is only Minnanese considered Taiwanese?” one of the friends asked.
“It is because descendants of Fujian immigrants make up the majority of Taiwan’s population today,” a friend answered.
“Then why is it not called ‘Taiwanese Minnanese?’” another person asked.
“Minnanese is a discriminatory term. The Chinese character for Min (閩) contains the character for insect (chong, 虫). It was a name the early Central Plains people in China used for surrounding ethnic groups. We should not use it,” a friend answered.
“True, but this term has already become commonplace. It is fine to just keep the original meaning in mind. More than 1,100 years ago, during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, one of the kingdoms was called Min. Are you saying they called themselves insects?” a friend asked.
“Taiwanese and Minnanese are different languages from different language families. They contain many different terms and pronunciations,” a friend answered.
“The Zhangzhou and Quanzhou dialects have pronunciation differences. Are they also of different language families? The Hailu and Sixian dialects of Hakka also have their differences. Are they not from the same family as well?” another person asked.
“I remember when the Chinese writer Lin Yutang (林語堂) moved to Taiwan in 1965. He said hearing locals speak Minnanese in Taipei made him feel at home. Born in Fujian, his mother tongue was Minnanese and he could understand what Taiwanese were saying. Are these from different language families?” a friend asked.
“Exactly. If I can effectively converse with someone from Xiamen, why are our languages considered different language families?” one asked.
“American English, Australian English and British English all have different acce[...]
Language Log
More (dis?)fluent interpolations
(…and also more /bl/ lenition…)
For the latest problematic clip from J.D. Vance's past, see Hafiz Rashid, "J.D. Vance Bashed Immigration With Podcast Host Who Advocated for Rape", TNR 8/15/2024:
J.D. Vance’s 2021 appearance on a podcast episode is drawing some negative attention thanks to the extremist views of its host, as well as Vance’s own comments.
The podcast, Jack Murphy Live, interviewed Vance before his run for the Senate in Ohio. The host Jack Murphy, whose real name is John Goldman, has a history of expressing abhorrent views on rape and immigration.
In one since-deleted blog post, Murphy wrote that “behind even the most ardent feminist facade is a deep desire to be dominated and even degraded,” adding that “rape is the best therapy for the problem. Feminists need rape.” […]
Vance’s comments on Murphy’s podcast also decried what he believed were the negative aspects of immigration.
“You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish, and German immigration right? And that had its problems, its consequences,” Vance told Murphy. “You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn’t had that before.”
The story has also been picked up by at least one overseas outlet so far — Alana Loftus, "JD Vance blames higher crime rates on 'wave of Irish immigration' in resurfaced clip", Irish Star 8/15/2024. But this is Language Log, not Political-Self-Foot-Shooting Log, so my focus will be on the some characteristics of how Vance talks in that podcast, not on the political content.
The source of the fuss is a tweet by Jacqueline Sweet, viewed 2.7 million times so far:
JD Vance in 2021, while discussing earlier waves of immigration to the US:
"You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish and German immigration and that had its problems, its consequences. You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in… pic.twitter.com/SQNPwaPBLx
— Jacqueline Sweet (@JSweetLI) August 15, 2024
yeah you know I- I think it's one of those things that's evolved over time, right
so- so obviously you had this massive wage-
wave of Italian- primarily (like-) Italian uh Irish and German immigration, right
and- and- and that had- had it's problems
right it- it had its consequences you had
higher crime rates, you had these sort of ethnic enclaves developing
you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn't had that ((before))
The main thing that struck me (linguistically) about this clip was the rapidly-repeated phrase-initial words — for some past discussion, see "Fluent 'disfluencies' again" (9/3/2022) and the posts linked therein.
But transcribing the passage, I was also struck by the pronunciation of "problems", which is reduced to (something close to) a single phonetic syllable — reminiscent of the things happening to /b/-initial syllables in (some performances of) "Probably":
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Vance2021ImmigrantsX1.png Zeroing in on the performance of "problems":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
This "fluent disfluency" is not an isolated phenomenon — another semi-random sample, starting around 25:22.6 in the same interview:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
right I mean that I think that there- there are two different ideas here right
so- so one is- is like
you know I- I-
there's this guy Curtis Yarvin
who's written um about some of these things
and so- so one is to basically accept
that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself right
Let me make clear that I'm not criticizing J.D. Vance's speech style. Most people exhibit similar behavior — and as I noted about one of the speakers quoted in "Fluent 'disfluencies' aga[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: inordinate
This word has appeared in 43 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: Giant killing – AFCON 2023 Group Stage Review
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Football Language: Confederation
confederation: In this football language post we explain the term 'Confederation' which are the organisations in charge of governing football
The post Football Language: Confederation appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Learn English Through Football: Clear Cut
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Football Language: To be at it
In this football language post we explain the expression 'to be at it' which is used when a player or a team are playing really well.
The post Football Language: To be at it appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2023 Copa Libertadores Final Review – Fluminense v Boca Juniors
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