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#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
roll over
to change position when you're lying down so that you're on your back if you were face down, or face down if you were on your back
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Word of the Day
oracular
Definition: (adjective) Resembling an oracle in obscurity of thought.
Synonyms: enigmatic.
Usage: As the teacher read aloud, enchanted by the oracular sayings of Victorian poets, the class became progressively more confused.
Discuss
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
admin
administrator, administration, person or department that runs an organisation
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Idiom of the Day
know-nothing
A completely ignorant, uninformed, or unknowledgeable person. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
ute
a pickup truck
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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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Idiom of the Day
know (one's) own mind
To be firmly resolute and confident in one's ideas, intentions, plans, or opinions. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: ditty
This word has appeared in 40 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
run off with
If you run off with somebody, you leave home secretly in order to be with them.
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Word of the Day
acquiescent
Definition: (adjective) Willing to carry out the orders or wishes of another without protest.
Synonyms: biddable.
Usage: She was too acquiescent to challenge authority and did everything she was told.
Discuss
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Language Log
Present prison president
In last Friday's post ("Annals of intervocalic coronal reduction"), I presented a case from 2015 where Donald Trump pronounced "president" as if it were "prison". This provoked a lot of interesting commentary about the nature and prevalence of various reduced pronunciations of that word, and so I thought I'd add a bit more evidence to the discussion. As I noted a few months ago ("'There's no T in Scranton'", 3/10/2024)
Shuang Li's INTERVIEW: NPR Media Dialog Transcripts dataset […] contains 3,199,859 transcribed turns from 105,817 NPR podcasts, comprising more than 10,648 hours. That dataset is just the transcripts, but some years ago, Jiahong Yuan and I downloaded the audio and aligned it with the texts. And I wrote a simple search script […]
Running that script to search for the word string "president of the united states" turns up 2,443 phrasal clips, from which I selected 12 (literally) at random.
[I chose a consistent context because the often-extreme across-word co-articulation in spontaneous speech means that the last syllable or two of "president" may overlap with what follows, wherefore I've included "…of the united" in the audio clips…]
Listen and see what you think — you can also download the audio and examine it with your favorite acoustic analysis programs.
(1) Your browser does not support the audio element. (2) Your browser does not support the audio element. (3) Your browser does not support the audio element. (4) Your browser does not support the audio element. (5) Your browser does not support the audio element. (6) Your browser does not support the audio element. (7) Your browser does not support the audio element. (8) Your browser does not support the audio element. (9) Your browser does not support the audio element. (10) Your browser does not support the audio element. (11) Your browser does not support the audio element. (12) Your browser does not support the audio element.
This is yet another example of a problem documented in multiple earlier posts (see below), and discussed more formally in my 2018 book chapter "Towards Progress in Theories of Language Sound Structure". Speech production maps discrete symbolic phonology onto continuous articulatory and acoustic signals, in a way that depends on language and dialect as well as linguistic and communicative context — and a lot of that process can't be coherently described by traditional symbolic allophony.
"On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet", 4/19/2018
"Farther on beyond the IPA", 1/18/2020
"What IPA means now", 9/28/2022
"Pronunciation evolution", 4/15/2022
"More post-IPA astronauts", 4/16/2022
"'There's no T in Scranton'", 3/10/2024
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pay out
to pay a sum of money to somebody, especially a large sum
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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
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* "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.
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