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Language Log
The perception and construction of Hong Kong identity via the quotation of non-standard Cantonese
Assertively spicy and conspicuously Cantonese
That's almost a contradiction in terms, because Hong Kongers are not very big on spicy food and they generally are not very good at cooking it either.
Photographs of walls in a popular chain of special Yunnan style spicy noodles in Hong Kong:
(Facebook) http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/tamjai.jpg In the second photograph where it has Latin letters on a red background, at first I thought it said "SPICY MAIR". The second word is actually "málà 麻辣", which means "numbing and spicy", a quintessential Sichuanese combination of flavors.
Also prominent (on the wall with yellow neon lights) is TamJai SamGor ("Three Tam Brothers' Noodles"), which is how the restaurant is known to most people.
Perhaps the most famous tagline associated with the TamJai SamGor ("Three Tam Brothers' Noodles") restaurants is "dung3 lin2 caa4 siu2 tin4 凍鏈茶少田". It looks like it means "frozen chain tea few fields". I've shown it to many native speakers of Mandarin, and even some individuals who have exposure to and knowledge of Modern Standard Cantonese (MSC) can't get it.
That's Tamjaiese (taam4 zai2 waa6 譚仔話) for MSC dung3 ling4 caa4 zau2 tim4 凍檸茶走甜 ("iced lemon tea [without adding sugar because it's already] on the sweet side"). The phrase is searchable on Google.
What is Tamjaiese? Aside from the delicious, inexpensive food served at TamJai SamGor ("Three Tam Brothers' Noodles"), one of the things about it that brings in the crowds is the Nonstandard Cantonese (NSC) spoken by the waitpersons (many of whom are new immigrants from Guangzhou) that customers find delectable, and are even disappointed when the waitpersons speak MSC, as documented in these videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBSCA9w_8dI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwRzG1CL2BY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Q2BBNY7YI
At the beginning of the last video, the waiter repeats the customer’s order in standard Cantonese, but the customer does not think the waiter understands. Then, a Tamjaiese speaking waitress uses NSC Tamjaiese to repeat the order, and the customer is satisfied. After this, the male waiter starts to practice NSC Tamjaiese.
Tam Jai Noodle is so popular that it even has its own quite good Wikipedia entry in English.
Here's a good description of Tamjaiese on a Japanese blog.
Here's an advertisement related to NSC Tamjaiese English. In this ad, gwat1 mo1 ling4 骨魔鈴 (looks like it means "bone demon bell") actually stands for "good morning". Sorry, I don't know the NSC Tamjaiese, so I just gave the MSC pronunciation.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/tamjai2.jpg Selected readings
* "A Less Grand Chinglish" (5/30/06)
* "The mystery of 'mouthfeel'" (11/2/16)
* "Wonton in Zanthoxylum schinifolium etzucc sauce" (5/6/15) — "málà 麻辣", which means "numbing and spicy"
* "Prickly ash revisited", JSBlog – Journal of a Southern Bookreader (5/7/15)
* "Taishan and Chinatown" (2/5/22)
[thanks to shaing tai, Zeyao Wu, Zhaofei Chen, and Xinyi Ye]
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Idiom of the Day
in no way
Not at all; not by any means. Watch the video
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
blow out
If a flame blows out, it goes out because someone blows on it or because of the wind.
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Language Log
"Lord of Heaven" in ancient Sino-Iranian
[This is a guest post by Chris Button about xiān 祆 (usually defined in English as: Ahura Mazda, god of the Zoroastrians 祆：胡神也。 From: Shuowen Jiezi, circa 2nd century AD Xiān: húshén yě. [Pinyin]Xian is the god of the foreigners.
(source)
The two components of the 祆 glyph are shì 示/礻 ("show, reveal, manifest; spirit") and tiān天 ("sky, heaven, celestial").
Although hugely important in the history of religions in China, the etymology of xiān 祆 is highly elusive. Through close attention to the phonology of the glyph and its components, Chris aims to ferret out the source of a possible loanword.]
============
I've been pondering over 祆 EMC xɛn "Ahura Mazda, Zoroastrianism" for a while and its possible relationship with 天 EMC tʰɛn "heaven" (compare 忝 EMC tʰɛmˀ with 天/祆 as phonetic in the top half).
Pulleyblank 1983 (originally going back to a 1962 comment) suggests the EMC xɛn ~ tʰɛn alternation reflects dialectal divergence from an OC lateral fricative ɬ-. In 1995, he changed the lateral fricative to a velar fricative xj- and noted the palatalization of the -m coda to -n.
I favor a reconstruction of 祆 EMC xɛn as OC xjə̯m, but I don't accept a dialectal relationship with 天 EMC tʰɛn OC tʰə̯ɲ since 天 appears to have 丁 EMC tɛjŋ OC ta̯ɲ as phonetic in the oracle-bone script (note the schwa/a ablaut).
It occurs to me that xjə̯m for 祆 perhaps reflects a loanword instead that just became associated/confused with 天 on account of some semantic and phonological proximity. One source of the loan could be a compressed form of what became variously Ahuramazda, Ormazd, Hormoz, etc. Alternatively, if we are willing to go back a little further, xjə̯m could perhaps reflect an intermediary stage still retaining some features of Indo-European h₂ems- that was the source of just the Ahura "lord, deity" component.
============ Selected reading
* “Zoroastrianism between Iranic and Sinitic” (11/18/22)
* "So spoke Zoroaster: camels and ancient Sinitic reconstructions" (1/13/21)
* "Zoroastrianism and Mazdaism: Evidence from Sogdian and Pahlavi" (1/15/21)
* "Indo-European religion, Scythian philosophy, and the date of Zoroaster: a linguistic quibble" (10/9/20) — with an extensive bibliography
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Word of the Day
nosegay
Definition: (noun) A small bunch of flowers.
Synonyms: bouquet, corsage, posy.
Usage: The wedding was informal and intimate, with the bride wearing a simple white dress and holding a nosegay of daisies.
Discuss
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Language Log
The modernity of the Middle Ages
You'd be surprised by how many of our most common, comfortable expressions come from the medieval period. Here are twelve collected by Madeleine Pelner Cosman as part of her book on words and phrases from the medieval period that you are likely to be quite familiar with. 12 Expressions that we got from the Middle Ages, Medievalists.net, May 21, 2024 Crocodile tears
To display insincere sadness. A few ancient and medieval writers believed that crocodiles would cry while eating their victims. The story was spread in England by the 14th-century travel writer John Mandeville. He explains that “these serpents slay men, and they eat them weeping; and when they eat they move the over jaw, and not the nether jaw, and they have no tongue.” Bring home the bacon
To earn a living or achieve success. This expression dates back to 1104 when a nobleman and his wife dressed themselves as peasants and asked the local Prior for a blessing for not arguing after a year of being married. In response, the Prior gave them a side of bacon. Afterwards, the nobleman gave land to the monastery on the condition they gave couples who accomplished the same deed with the same reward. Knock on wood
If you have good luck and want to keep it. Cosman sees this expression deriving from pre-Christian times, when people performed rites “to inspire spirits dwelling in wood or trees, such as the maypole, or to awaken them after winter slumber, as with the divinities affecting agriculture and human life.” Hocus pocus
Doing a trick, usually said by a magician. This actually derives from words spoken in Latin during a Mass: when a priest lifted up the eucharist to his parishioners, he would say “Hoc est corpus domini,” which means “This is the body of the Lord.” Lick into shape
To bring into satisfactory condition or appearance. In medieval bestiaries, you would find an unusual description of bears and how they give birth to their young. Here is how one 13th-century bestiary describes it:
The bear gets its Latin name ‘ursus’ because it shapes its cubs with its mouth, from the Latin word ‘orsus’. For they are said to give birth to shapeless lumps of flesh, which the mother licks into shape. The bear’s tongue forms the young which it brings forth. On the carpet
It now means to call upon someone doing bad things. However, its origins in French (‘sur le tapis’) is that it was customary to put a carpet on a banquet table, which was often the centre of conversation. Buckled down to work
To focus on your job. It comes from medieval warriors having to make sure their armour was buckled and safely on before going out to battle. Out-Herod Herod
To exceed in violence or extravagance, inspired by the Biblical character. Even before it was used by Shakespeare in Hamlet, the expression could be found in medieval mystery plays. A long spoon
To keep a safe distance from danger. Cosman notes that in medieval lore, “the best kitchen or banquet implement for supping with the Devil was a very long-handled spoon.” Goose is cooked
When someone is in trouble. This expression has two origin stories. In one of them, it is ascribed to the Christian reformer Jan Hus when he was burned at the stake in 1415. In the other version, the 16th-century King of Sweden, Eric XIV used the phrase when he burned down a town that he was besieging after they had mocked him by putting out a goose along the walls. Crow’s feet
A reference to the fine lines that appear around your eyes as you age. The English writer Geoffrey Chaucer is credited with first using the expression. In his work Troilus and Criseyde we find the line “you may live long and proud till crow’s feet grow under your eyes.” Food for worms
To be dead and buried. One can see this exp[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
guts
courage
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
keep up (1)
to continue doing something that has been successful
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Idiom of the Day
in its infancy
In the early, nascent period of development or implementation. (Typically of an area of activity, interest, research, etc.) Watch the video
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that they seem to have different themes. While the tokens in Russian reflect language about the government and public institutions, the tokens in Japanese have a lot of different ways to say “thank you.”
…
After I published the story [in the link mentioned a few paragraphs above], Victor Shih, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, commented on it on X: “When you try not [to] train on Chinese state media content, this is what you get.”
It’s half a joke, and half a serious point about the two biggest problems in training large language models to speak Chinese: the readily available data online reflects either the “official,” sanctioned way of talking about China or the omnipresent spam content that drowns out real conversations.
In fact, among the few long Chinese tokens in GPT-4o that aren’t either pornography or gambling nonsense, two are “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “People’s Republic of China.” The presence of these phrases suggests that a significant part of the training data actually is from Chinese state media writings, where formal, long expressions are extremely common.
…
The lack of quality training data is a much bigger problem than the failure to filter out the porn and general nonsense in GPT-4o’s token-training data. If there isn’t an existing data set, AI companies have to put in significant work to identify, source, and curate their own data sets and filter out inappropriate or biased content.
It doesn’t seem OpenAI did that, which in fairness makes some sense, given that people in China can’t use its AI models anyway.
Still, there are many people living outside China who want to use AI services in Chinese. And they deserve a product that works properly as much as speakers of any other language do.
I would tend to disagree with the author's last point. If China doesn't want its people to know about the world and doesn't want the world to know about what's going inside the Great Firewall, I don't think AI, Google, or any other outside entity should make costly, time-consuming efforts to compensate for the willful obscurantism of the CCP/PRC (except maybe foreign intelligence agencies). Selected readings
* "The perils of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the PRC" (4/17/23)
* "Vignettes of quality data impoverishment in the world of PRC AI" (2/23/23)
[h.t. Mark Liberman]
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
kef | kif
plant material that's smoked or ingested for its mind-altering effects, such as cannabis, marijuana or hashish
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Word of the Day
redolent
Definition: (adjective) Having or emitting fragrance.
Synonyms: aromatic.
Usage: The whole atmosphere was redolent with the savory fumes of roast meat.
Discuss
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Idiom of the Day
be brought in from the cold
To be allowed to join or participate in a group from which one was previously excluded; to be accepted in a certain social setting. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
oi!
a sound used to attract someone's attention, like "hey!"
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Language Log
Sinicization of language and culture (architecture in particular)
Before and after the recently completed sinicization of the Grand Mosque of Shadian, Yunnan, in southwest China: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/shadian.jpg Domes gone (more about them below). Minarets transformed into pagodas that are not suitable for calling the faithful to prayer five times a day.
These photographs are from:
"Last major Arabic-style mosque in China loses its domes",
Exclusive: Experts say changes to Grand Mosque of Shadian mark completion of five-year sinification campaign
by Amy Hawkins and Elena Morresi, The Guardian (5/25/24)
Readers of Language Log are certainly aware of the strictures against Islamic language and religious practices that have been imposed by the CCP throughout the PRC (e.g., against the Uyghur language and people in Xinjiang), but perhaps were unaware of how staunchly opposed to Islamic architecture the CCP/PRC government has been. The case of the Grand Mosque of Shadian, Yunnan is a good example of why the authorities are so intent upon removing the overt symbols of Islam as a foreign-derived religion.
Excerpts from the article of Hawkins and Morresi:
The last major mosque in China to have retained Arabic-style features has lost its domes and had its minarets radically modified, marking what experts say is the completion of a government campaign to sinicise the country’s Muslim places of worship.
The Grand Mosque of Shadian, one of China’s biggest and grandest mosques, towers over the small town from which it takes its name in south-western Yunnan province.
Until at last year, the 21,000 square metre complex featured a large building topped with a tiled green dome, adorned with a crescent moon, flanked by four smaller domes and soaring minarets. Satellite imagery from 2022 shows the entrance pavilion decorated with a large crescent moon and star made from vivid black tiles.
Photographs, satellite imagery and witness accounts from this year show that the dome has been removed and replaced with a Han Chinese-style pagoda rooftop, and the minarets have been shortened and converted into pagoda towers. Only a faint trace of the crescent moon and star tiles that once marked the mosque’s front terrace is visible.
Yunnan’s other landmark mosque, Najiaying, less than 100 miles from Shadian, also recently had its Islamic features removed in a renovation.
What is the CCP/PRC rationale for tearing down these magnificent examples of Islamic architecture in China?
In 2018 the Chinese government published a five-year plan on the “sinification of Islam”. Part of the plan was to resist “foreign architectural styles” and to promote “Islamic architecture … that is full of Chinese characteristics”. A leaked Chinese Communist party memo shows that local authorities were instructed to “adhere to the principle of demolishing more and building less”.
They have done the same thing to Christian architecture, tearing down dozens of impressive cathedrals, except for a few in big cities that are well known as historical monuments to international tourists (dollars!). Many beautiful churches in small villages have been dismantled to the ground. Symbols of foreign religions are especially vulnerable, inasmuch as they are relatively small yet particularly powerful: crosses and the crescent moon, especially when combined with the star of Islam. The latter combination is conspicuously offensive to superpatriots when juxtaposed to the Chinese communist flag symbol of one large star surrounded on one side by four smaller stars. The large, central star is usually held to represent the CCP, the four small stars the people, sometimes defined according to their social classes. A more detailed explanation may be found in Britannica:
The red of the Chinese f[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
footy
Australian Rules Football, Aussie Rules Football
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Language Log
The poetics of translation and the synesthesia of appreciation
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-forty-seventh issue:
"Metric Montage in Chinese Poetry," by Conal Boyce.
https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp347_metric_montage_chinese_poetry.pdf
Keywords: Chinese poetry; metric montage; Shěn Zhōu; Lǐ Bái; Lǐ Hè; Frodsham
ABSTRACT
It is said that the most obvious thing is the hardest to notice. For classic Chinese poetry, the most “obvious” thing is its metric montage, which is not just one of its features, but its life‑blood. Defined in a 1929 essay on Soviet film theory, the concept of metric montage can help us understand how Chinese poetry works as well: namely, with a steady pulse, each the notional analog of a cinematic “shot,” but timed so that two such shots — i.e., two hànzì — pass per second. That is to say, we read two characters of Chinese poetry for each heartbeat, assuming a nominal resting rate of 60 beats per minute (BPM). But that is only the basic rhythmic aspect, with its several variants excluded from this summary. Once the visual aspect is added to the mix, it changes the way one judges whether a supposed translation of a Chinese poem should be accepted as English literature or downgraded to an attractively packaged species of commentary, with caesuras.—–
All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/
Selected readings
* "Sacré bleu! — the synesthesia of Walmart cyan" (10/8/22)
* "Chinese Synesthesia" (7/26/17)
* "Synesthesia and Chinese characters" (3/9/17)
* "Parenthetical, alphabetical, ironical commentary in Sinographic texts" (12/29/21)
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: amiable
This word has appeared in 60 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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ression in the Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-century monastic text. In the Middle English, it states “Ne schalt tu beon wurmes fode?”
Some of our colleagues are constantly quibbling over whether it is suitable / permissible ever to refer to our research as focused on the Middle Ages or medieval period, instead of keeping our nose to the grindstone (an apt saying from the late medieval period). Selected readings
* "Insults, oaths, and curses in the Middle Ages" (5/26/23)
* "Old, Middle, and Modern English" (9/2/23)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
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Idiom of the Day
in layman's terms
In words that can be understood by people outside of a given profession or field of expertise, i.e., without the use of jargon or highly technical terms. Watch the video
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
take up (1)
to fill an area of space or a period of time
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Language Log
Hermaphrodite vs. intersex in Mandarin
[This is a guest post by Charles Belov. To show what a dedicated, eclectic listener of Asian popular media Charles is, I've left his signature block intact.]
As a frequent, essentially monolingual consumer of Asian popular media, one of the issues for me has always been how translations succeed or fail at communicating both the particular Asian culture and how it can be expressed meaningfully in English. ¿Where does the translation reflect current or past Asian culture and where does it reflect American or British culture of the audience?
A term of concern for me at the moment is "cíxióngtóngtǐ 雌雄同體" (lit. "male female same body"), which Wiktionary translates as "hermaphrodite." However, Wiktionary also notes in the English entry for "hermaphrodite" that this term is now considered offensive and that "intersex" is the preferred term.
This came up for me as the song 雌雄同體 by Taiwan* rock/pop group Mayday seems to be one of the songs regularly earworming me, and I ran the lyrics through Google Translate. Rather than intersex, the song's narrator seems to me to be what in my lingo is "genderqueer" and what today's young people call "non-binary." But I don't know whether "雌雄同體" is now considered offensive in Taiwan intersex culture. The Wiktionary entry for non-binary gives fēièryuán 非二元 (lit., "not two prime") as the translation. So that might have been a better title for the song were it released today; however, the song came out (so to speak) in 2003, long before the term "non-binary" was coined.
I've decided to call the song "Gender Queer" rather than "雌雄同體" when referring to the song in social media.
¿Thoughts?
References: 雌雄同體 audio with copyable lyrics (click Lyrics link for lyrics) 雌雄同體 lyric music video (content warning for flashing images)
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* – I've adjectived Taiwan in my idiolect; the group sings mostly in Mandarin and I want to avoid confusion with the Taiwanese language
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Chas Belov
He/Him/His/Himself
My Writing:
* Blog http://chasbelov.com
* New Play Exchange https://newplayexchange.org/users/1646/chas-belov
My music:
* My tunes playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLdlgvDfBTAJ_RIOAvnC71z0r9GKihU8O
* Loop music channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC18Aq0lxFjZHKWXhtDpXyAw
* My YouTube channel ChasMusic" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/@ChasMusic (plays immediately)
* Electric Brain Machine (loop music) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLdlgvDfBTAJyfi0QnvF4Nn37-i5XGA76
* 9-12 Hour Chills meditation music playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLdlgvDfBTALQKl8vA2ZEmqp8eOT90szE
* Songs I love https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLdlgvDfBTAJb2Jx86sRBuOQqh-mcJN0y
============= Selected readings
* "Gender bending" (10/6/15)
* "Linguistic reaction at The New Yorker" (3/8/16)
* "Transgender(ed)" (7/4/10)
* "OED on the language of sexual and gender identity" (4/3/18)
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Word of the Day
inebriant
Definition: (noun) An intoxicant.
Synonyms: alcoholic beverage, intoxicant, alcohol.
Usage: He guzzled the inebriant like a thirsty man would water and promptly dropped to the floor with a thud.
Discuss
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
zero
a worthless person, someone who's done nothing worthwhile in life
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Language Log
OpenAI's Chinese problem
We have expressed concern over the quality of training and source materials for Chinese AI and LLMs. Less than a week ago, we examined "AI based on Xi Jinping Thought (5/21/24), which may be considered as an attempt to "purify" what goes into Chinese AI. It turns out that there really is a problem, and it is affecting not just China's own AI efforts, but is infecting ours as well. OpenAI’s latest blunder shows the challenges facing Chinese AI models:
Finding high-quality data sets is tricky because of the way China’s internet functions.
By Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review (May 22, 2024)
As we shall soon see, pursuing this topic takes us into very sensitive, disquieting territory concerning the nature of China's internet. It will be difficult for us to avoid assessing the quality of China's knowledge basis and information resources overall.
Here are the opening paragraphs of the MIT Technology Review article by Zeyi Yang:
Last week’s release of GPT-4o, a new AI “omnimodel” that you can interact with using voice, text, or video, was supposed to be a big moment for OpenAI. But just days later, it feels as if the company is in big trouble. From the resignation of most of its safety team to Scarlett Johansson’s accusation that it replicated her voice for the model against her consent, it’s now in damage-control mode.
Add to that another thing OpenAI fumbled with GPT-4o: the data it used to train its tokenizer—a tool that helps the model parse and process text more efficiently—is polluted by Chinese spam websites. As a result, the model’s Chinese token library is full of phrases related to pornography and gambling. This could worsen some problems that are common with AI models: hallucinations, poor performance, and misuse. I wrote about it on Friday after several researchers and AI industry insiders flagged the problem. They took a look at GPT-4o’s public token library, which has been significantly updated with the new model to improve support of non-English languages, and saw that more than 90 of the 100 longest Chinese tokens in the model are from spam websites. These are phrases like “_free Japanese porn video to watch,” “Beijing race car betting,” and “China welfare lottery every day.”
Since such phrases account for 90% of the language used to train the model, even Chinese find it alarming:
“It’s an embarrassing thing to see as a Chinese person. Is that just how the quality of the [Chinese] data is? Is it because of insufficient data cleaning or is the language just like that?” says Zhengyang Geng, a PhD student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
On behalf of the Chinese people, I have been complaining for years that most of the world's internet is not available to them. Even with VPNs (and not everybody can afford a VPN), there are so many websites that they just can't reach. That's one of the main reasons why I personally do not like to spend much time in China — you just feel so cut off.
If OpenAI and search engines such as Google want to include China in the world wide web of information flow, they have no choice but to mine what is available on the Chinese internet, and I would have to say not much that isn't Chinese or is permitted by the paranoid Chinese government. In any event, the products of neither OpenAI nor Google are accessible in China, nor are Wikipedia or so many other extremely valuable sources of information from outside the Great Firewall.
It's all VERY DEPRESSING.
It could be tempting to draw a conclusion about a language or a culture from the tokens OpenAI chose for GPT-4o. After all, these are selected as commonly seen and significant phrases from the respective languages. There’s an interesting blog post by a Hong Kong–based researcher named Henry Luo, who queried the longest GPT-4o tokens in various different languages and found[...]
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pull back
If an army pulls back, it moves its forces back from the front-line or from wherever it's been fighting the enemy.
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Language Log
Gecko noises and human anxieties
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-forty-sixth issue:
"The Imagery of House Geckos and Tokay Geckos in Imperial Era Chinese Literature," by Olivia Anna Rovsing Milburn.
https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp346_chinese_geckos.pdf
Keywords: House geckos; Tokay geckos; Chinese literature; virginity tests; magic; rain-making
ABSTRACT
This paper explores Chinese literary images of house geckos and tokay geckos. Because house geckos are numerous, widespread, and apt to live close to human beings, they are the lizard species people most often encounter. Literary records of geckos for the two thousand years of the imperial period show that extensive attention has long been paid to them. These citations, however, have focused almost exclusively on the use of dead geckos in magical practices used to determine women's virginity, during which the woman's arms were daubed with either gecko ash or its blood. Accordingly, geckos feature prominently in erotic writings focused on male anxieties about women's sexual experience. Live house geckos, on the other hand, were mentioned only in the context of their role in religious rain-making rituals. They appear in a host of writings as creators of rain (or, less desirably, hail). Tokay geckos, on the other hand, live far from the heartlands of the Chinese world, and thus they came to symbolize travel to remote, exotic regions, where bizarre, unfamiliar creatures made strange, loud noises in the night. Exploring imperial era Chinese writings about house geckos and tokay geckos reveals the extent to which human concerns have been projected onto lizards, to the point that such concerns overshadowed daily observations of these ubiquitous little creatures.
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All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/
Things that go bump in the night.
Selected readings
* "The call / name of the gecko" (4/26/24)
* "Another early polysyllabic Sinitic word" (9/21/21) — a detailed disquisition on the Sinitic word for "gecko" (géjiè 蛤蚧), including in a number of different topolects, with a lengthy bibliography
* "That gecko's pleasant accent: Martin and Mellors" (6/16/10)
* "Magical Penis Wine" (9/23/21)
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Language Log
"Cooperate him"
Frequent commentator AntC sent email about a transitive use of cooperate, used by Karen Friedman Agnifilo in an interview with Michael Popok about Walt Nauta's role in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
And so it makes sense why
uh they would want to cooperate him
and i- it also makes sense why they would reach out before indictment
and give him that opportunity.
AntC's analysis:
Donald Trump continues to make legal and linguistic history. That's a transitive usage of "co-operate"; _not_ "co-operate with him". (All the online dictionaries or usage guides I could find are firmly of the opinion 'co-operate' is intransitive; 'co-operate him' is a mistake for 'co-operate with him'.)
It seems to be a specialised legal term: to turn an accused/potential defendant/conspirator into a co-operating witness testifying against the 'big fish'.
I think he's wrong that this usage is "a mistake for 'co-operate with him'" — instead, it's an example of the general Causative/Inchoative Alternation:
The Causative/Inchoative alternation involves pairs of verbs, one of which is causative and the other non-causative syntactically and semantically (e.g., John broke the window vs. The window broke).
The case of cooperate is a different from the standard Englisdh examples like break, boil, increase, etc., because the subject of its intransitive version can be the a group of cooperators as well as an individual cooperator — though the morpho-syntactic and semantic patterns of such verbs are diverse (e.g. meet, join, agree, play, …)
But AntC is right that this is a specialized legal usage. And his gloss "to turn an accused/potential defendant/conspirator into a co-operating witness" — is transparently causative.
Another recent example, also connected to one of the Trump cases, can be found in "Trump organization executive granted immunity. TRANSCRIPT: 8/24/2018, All In w Chris Hayes":
And it may just be that they wanted to charge Michael Cohen with the crimes that they had him on and that everybody knew about before it got too late. And then you start to bring him in and cooperate him.
And there are plenty more of them Out There, unconnected with any of Donald Trump's indictments.
Web search turns up other examples of "cooperate <someone" that do match AntC's "cooperate with <someone" analysis, suggesting either that it's a common error in typing or speech, or that there are some varieties of English where this usage is the norm.
Here's the YouTube YouTube segment that started this off:
➖ @EngSkills ➖
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
turn around
to change something unsuccessful into something successful
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