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Learn English Through Football Podcast: Delicately Poised – 2024 Champions League Quarter Finals
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Idiom of the Day
in the circumstances
Due to the conditions or particular situation; such as the case is. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
trawler
Definition: (noun) A fishing boat that uses a trawl net or dragnet to catch fish.
Synonyms: dragger.
Usage: The fisherman boarded the trawler at four in the morning.
Discuss
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ccentuation (or whatever it is) of donc in the first phrase, and focus on the adjectives tous or toutes in the final four phrases. Aligned pitch tracks are given below, and you can hear and see that in each case, the word tous or toutes is "focused", in some sense of that term:
Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/dernierjour00X4A.png Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/dernierjour00X4B.png Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/dernierjour00X4C.png Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/dernierjour00X4D.png Is this just "emphasis"? Or is it indicating the choice of all rather than some or most?
Could the reader have placed the "focus" in those phrases on cours, prétoires, jurys, justices? If she had done so, how would it change the meaning?
I'm not confident enough in my knowledge of French to be sure — but I believe that in an English translation with a similar sequence of phrases, my choice would matter:
… all the courts, all the tribunals, all the juries, all the justice systems
… all the courts, all the tribunals, all the juries, all the justice systems
And I imagine that the French situation is similar.
[Note: this post's title is the common version of what André Gide is said to have said when asked to name the greatest French poet — for more on the folklore and the facts, see Justin O'Brien, "Hugo,-hélas!", French Review 1964.]
[Also, Beth Ann's Lewis Carroll quotes — and a lot of other good stuff — can be found in Chapter VI of Through the Looking Glass.]
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Language Log
Two brushes in one hand — virtuoso calligraphy
Mind-boggling!
Selected readings
* "Robot calligraphy" (12/27/19)
* "Robot philosopher-calligrapher" (5/6/22)
[h.t. shaing tai]
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Idiom of the Day
follow (someone or something) in stride
To follow the direction, lead, or guidance (of someone or something); to act in accordance (with someone or something); to follow suit. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
panpipe
Definition: (noun) A primitive wind instrument consisting of several parallel pipes bound together.
Synonyms: syrinx, pandean pipe.
Usage: When his parents refused to buy him an instrument, the industrious ten-year-old fashioned himself a makeshift panpipe out of string and some pieces of dried bamboo he found in the garage.
Discuss
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ny drugs from India, Persia and Central Asia; that the 16th century was in the midst of a massive influx of silver and goods via South East Asia and the Philippines; and that the 18th century was when European missionary medicine began to enter China. Already from this simple timeline one can put together a potted history of the use of cloves in traditions other than the Chinese, the likely periods and vectors of contact, and use this as a framework for further research.
This project on traditional Asian drug names is a good example of how DH is capable of unlocking, unleashing, and conveniently organizing vast bodies of previously undigested raw data. Selected readings
* "The language of spices" (1/6/24)
* Gábor Parti,“Mapping the Language of Spices: A Corpus-Based, Philological Study on the Words of the Spice Domain", Sino-Platonic Papers, 338 (Jan. 2024), 1-243.
* "Asafoetida: Satanically stinky spice" (12/10/23)
* "Garbler of spices" (8/21/22)
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Sophia Benoit Prefers To Read Than Watch (Bless These Braces) #podcast #funnyordie
"When I see people sometimes they depress me." Sophia Benoit explains why there are some things she'd rather read than watch on this week's Bless These Braces with Tam Yajia.
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Idiom of the Day
in (someone's) wheelhouse
In, related to, or matching someone's general interests, abilities, or area of familiarity; in someone's comfort zone. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
surfactant
Definition: (noun) A chemical agent capable of reducing the surface tension of a liquid in which it is dissolved.
Synonyms: wetting agent, surface-active agent, wetter.
Usage: She ordered a new pair of glasses and had the lenses coated with a surfactant that would act as an anti-fogging agent.
Discuss
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Language Log
Polysyllabic sinoglyphs
From Markus Samuel Haselbeck, responding to Egas Moniz-Bandeira on Twitter/X:
As the discussion of polysyllabic sonography goes on, I want to add a character that I recently discovered in a Chinese restaurant, here in Leuven. I guess it is pronounced Zhōngguó (中國), China? https://t.co/1cc65vq4fC pic.twitter.com/UveFSHK3dz
— Markus Samuel Haselbeck (@CiaoCiaota) April 8, 2024
Proof that the sinoglyphic writing system is open-ended, both with regard to the number of sinoglyphs it includes and the number of syllables each glyph contains.
Selected readings
* "A new polysyllabic character" (4/3/16)
* "Polysyllabic characters in Chinese writing " (8/2/11)
* "Polysyllabic characters revisited" (6/18/15)
* "The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation" (2/6/12)
* "Yet another polysyllabic Chinese character" (10/31/16)
* "The infinitude of Chinese characters" (9/9/20) — with an extremely long bibliography
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ng at a school, I highly recommend they check out ChinaICAC. Please feel free to pass along my email to any students you know who might be interested in such a career path. Closing remark by VHM
Regardless of what you may have heard from other sources or read in the media about declining applications and enrollments from PRC students, at a place like Penn the number of students from the PRC who apply and enroll continues to grow. At the same time, their quality ceaselessly improves, such that the competition to get into good schools is ever more intense. I must say that teaching M.A. students from China during the past decade or so has been one of the greatest joys of my entire career.
It is interesting that many of them, especially those who receive their degree from the Graduate School of Education, go back to China to take up a position as "college counselor", thus ensuring a constant stream of self-perpetuating students who go abroad to seek higher education. Selected readings
* "'Chinese — Traditional'" (1/30/11)
* "Yes-no questions in mathematics and in Chinese" (2/10/17)
* "The degendering of the third person pronoun in Mandarin " (12/12/13)
* "The degendering of the third person pronoun in Mandarin, pt. 2" (10/16/17)
* "Roman-letter Mandarin pronoun of indeterminate gender " (9/9/16)
* "Sweden's gender-neutral 3rd-person singular pronoun " (4/13/17)
* "Gender bending " (10/6/15)
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Language Log
Chinese (il)logic from inside
[Prefatory note: The Chinese author of this guest post, TCI (encrypted acronym to protect her identity) holds a humanities M.A. from a top tier American research university which she attended from 2016 to 2018. She has been employed for several years as an adviser to students in China who desire to study abroad (especially the USA) in high school, college, or university. Her statement will be followed by the remarks of a long experienced, well established practitioner of that profession (application counselor) in China who explains its aims and modus operandi.
The author (TCI) emphasizes what she considers to be a lack of logic in Chinese thought. It is ironic that her focus is very much on the gender of personal pronouns at a time when many people in America are trying to do away with or downplay that aspect of personal pronouns. Before dismissing what she says out of hand, bear in mind that for TCI it is a cri de coeur. She grew up in China learning one system of thought, came to America and struggled to learn another, and now she has gone back to China and is trying to teach the next generation of students who want to come to America and think like Americans how to be less fraught in learning this new way of thinking.
Although, in this essay, TCI cites her examples mainly from the gender of personal pronouns, she could also also do so with regard to tense, number, conjunctions, and other facets of language usage. In her mind, these misusages are not the failure of inadequate language training, but of not subscribing to the demands of strict logic. Mind you, this is what TCI genuinely believes. Since she is the one who time and again has felt that her way of thinking was illogical, we have to try to get inside her head and sympathize with why she feels that way and empathize with her efforts to overcome such feelings of illogicality.] TCI
As I have been tutoring my sister writing her English essay lately, I realized that she, and along with her many peers, aren't very logical when it comes to writing academically or talking / storytelling. I then realized I had the same issue when I first came to the States as a high school sophomore. When I wrote essays for my English class, I expressed lots of personal opinions. Instead of using concrete evidence to support my point of view, I used different adjectives to explain my point. In one word, I wasn't very logical. As time went on, I gradually got better. But I now realize it's not only me, or my sister. The majority of Chinese students have this issue.
I discussed this matter with some friends who also studied in the US or the UK. One thinks it's because Chinese schools don't teach logical thinking. I think that is partly true. But when I think of it at greater length, I wonder could it be more than the school's teaching? Is it because Chinese, as a language, is totally different from English? [VHM: emphasis added] Is it the same with people's habits of thinking or speaking? For example, he/she/it in English vs. tā 他/她/它 in Chinese. In English, he/she/it sound totally different, are spelled differently, have different variants (such as his/hers/its), while in Chinese 他/她/它 all sound the same. Their variants 他的/她的/它的 still sound the same. The only difference is how you write it on paper. I searched for 他/她/它 in the oracle bone scripts. These three characters look drastically different as you can imagine.
I wonder could it be possible that in a Chinese setting, confusions exist and people get used to them. For example, I tell SC [a friend] that another friend didn't do well in a test 他/她考試沒考好 tā kǎo shì méi kǎo hǎo. SC wouldn't know if it's a girl or a guy that I am referring to without knowing who I am talking about. Because it's just tā 他/她. But I wouldn't explain to SC that tā is a girl or a guy. I would just ass[...]
Idiom of the Day
in the view of (someone)
In someone's or some group's opinion. Watch the video
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Language Log
Fish-in-fish matryoshka sinoglyph
Egas Moniz-Bandeira on Twitter/X:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/fishinfish.jpg
It's cute, clever, fun, but do the Chinese need it as part of their bloated (!) writing system?
Does Unicode need this inessential / nonessential / unessential sinoglyph as part of the world's functional writing systems?
Selected reading
* "Cucurbits and junk characters" (3/30/24)
* "Another "variant" character" (4/7/24)
* "Polysyllabic sinoglyphs" (4/11/24)
* "The economics of Chinese character usage" (9/2/11)
* "How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16)
* "The infinitude of Chinese characters" (10/9/20) — with an extremely lengthy bibliography
[h.t. Geoff Wade]
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
narc | nark
a narcotics officer, a police officer working in drug trade suppression
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
rope in
If somebody ropes you in, they persuade you to do something you don't really want to do.
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Language Log
Victor Hugo, hélas
Focus is perhaps the single most perniciously ambiguous word in the field of linguistics. In Beth Ann Hockey's 1998 dissertation, "The interpretation and realization of focus: an experimental investigation of focus in English and Hungarian", she wrote:
Linguists have associated the word “focus” with a wide variety of phenomena. In addition a wealth of other terms including “new,” “emphasis,” “stress,” “rheme,” “comment,” “accented,” “prominent,” “informative” and “contrast” have been attached singly or in combination to phenomena that seem to be the same as, similar to or overlapping with those that have been called focus.
Beth Ann quotes a few relevant passages from Lewis Carroll, including
‘That's a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
‘When I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘I always pay it extra.’
The other day, a talk about perception of prosodic "focus" by French and English adults and children reminded me of this ambiguity. It also brought up an issue that I've been wondering about for more than 50 years, since Jacqueline Vaissière half-persuaded me that French lacks any prosodic signaling of "focus". I expressed this half-persuasion in "Intonational focus", 4/29/2011, where I wrote
There are some languages (e.g. French) where intonational focus apparently doesn't exist, at least not in the same way as in English. Instead, I'm told, speakers must use cleft constructions ("C'est X qui Y") or other re-phrasing in order to do the things that English speakers can do with intonation alone, such as to adapt a proposition in response to different possible questions, or to underline a parallel contrast.
Because I sometimes hear native speakers of French using what seems to me like intonational focus — sometimes combined with syntactic methods for signaling information structure, and sometimes not — I've wondered whether intonational focus might be stigmatized in standard spoken French, rather than completely absent. But I accept that some things that English speakers are happy to do with intonation are really impossible in French, for example focusing or contrasting prepositions or verbal auxiliaries: "It's *under* the box (not *top* of it)"; "It *was* there (but now it's gone)".
And a few years later, a few of us proved that French speakers encode corrective focus in number strings prosodically, just like speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese do, but unlike speakers of Korean and Japanese (Yong-cheol Lee, Bei Wang, Sisi Chen, Martine Adda-Decker, Angélique Amelot, Satoshi Nambu, and Mark Liberman, "A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus", IEEE-ICASSP 2015).
Corrective substitution (e.g. "3 1 5 6" in place of mis-heard or mis-remembered "3 1 9 6" is only one of the many things that the word "focus" is used for; and "focus" on one number in a string is a case where there are no easy syntactic solutions. So this is just one small skirmish in the larger "prosodic focus in French?" battle, which in turn is just part of the "prosodic theory" campaign in the "communicative intention" wars.
But anyhow, this encouraged me to finally look for "focus" in some samples of actual French talk. Or at least at one sample — I went to LibriVox, and randomly picked a reading of Victor Hugo's Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné.
I noticed a relevant example in the second sentence of the preface — but a couple of paragraphs later, there's a sentence with a whole bunch of them:
Il le déclare donc, et il le répète, il occupe, au nom de tous les accusés possibles, innocents ou coupables, devant toutes les cours, tous les prétoires, tous les jurys, toutes les justices.
Your browser does not support the audio element.
(If your French is not up to the job, I'll turn you over to Google Translate, which is close enough…)
Let's skip the de-a[...]
Language Log
A very noisy channel
From Breffni O'Rourke:
I thought you might appreciate this effort by Dall.E. The prompt was "Create a diagram of Shannon and Weaver's model of communication."
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ShannonWeaverFiction.jpeg
That image is a totally incoherent representation of the "noisy channel model", pictured in a more helpful way in Claude Shannon's 1948 monograph A Mathematical Theory of Communication:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/NoisyChannel1948.png
And a version with some added color can be found in the Wikipedia article on "The Shannon-Weaver Model".
Breffni's comment:
Among other things, it's interesting to see what it's done with the text, which I guess it's treating as a purely visual element, maybe analogously to 'decorative English'.
I'm not sure — my guess was that Dall.E found a lot of web text related to the model, and some relevant images, but totally and completely failed to understand the basic ideas. Then again, maybe it's better viewed as a somewhat creative hallucination.
Of course humans can also get things wrong. The Wikipedia "Noisy Channel Model" article weirdly fails to mention Shannon or his 1948 monograph, which is kind of like an Easter article referencing egg hunts, peeps, and chocolate bunnies, while omitting Jesus and the bible.
More from Breffni:
On the other hand, Dall-E seems to be able to generate images from text explicitly given in the prompt "Can you make me a visual of the words Shannon and Weaver in the style of a neon sign?" I should have put quotes around "Shannon and Weaver", but it handled that ambiguity creatively":
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ShannonWeaverNeon.png
See "Noisily channeling Claude Shannon" (8/6/2012) for a bit more background.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
joint (1)
a place where people can eat, or drink, or be entertained
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
fall off
to become less in amount or lower in level
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Language Log
Digital Humanities for the study of traditional Asian medicines
A guest post for The Digital Orientalist (4/10/24), under The Magic of Philology and Indexing, Polyglot Asian Medicines (Foundational Resources and Digital Tools), by Michael Stanley-Baker, Christopher S.G. Khoo and Faizah Zakariah (all three are based at academic institutions in Singapore), "Tracking Drug Names Across Language, Time, Space and Knowledge Domains to Produce New Visions of Traditional Medicine".
This is a richly detailed article with many links and citations. I will not attempt to cover, much less extensively quote, lengthy portions. Instead, I will begin with the authors' general introduction, note the main sections of the article, refer to the graphs, and quote one typical section to show what the authors' approach can accomplish. Introduction
Digital Humanities is akin to “critical thinking,” so vaunted in the humanities, because it allows us to reinterpret existing primary materials in new ways, according to researchers’ critical interests. These unanticipated new discoveries are somewhat akin to “discovering” existing archaeological materials “in the basement” of museums and archives—already there in the record, but previously unnoticed, quietly waiting to be brought to the fore.
One fundamental way DH does this is by allowing us to re-index old materials in entirely new ways. Mining old texts and organising them according to critical interest is much more powerful than simple “comprehensive” or arithmetic summaries that reiterate old assumptions. It offers the potential to re-discover the past, to re-organise materials and explore them in different ways, making new connections, even without generating “new” information.
The Polyglot Asian Medicine investigates the history of Asian drugs using a philological orientation, by transforming print and manuscript publications into machine-actionable data.In this way it develops new ways to interact with the ancient past, connect it with the lived present, and possibly shape the future development of heritage medicines.
In this post I describe how we modelled the interconnections between different domains of knowledge using tabular data initially, and produced a knowledge graph which allows users to search, navigate, and explore them to make novel discoveries. The digital medium is far more effective than print for reproducing the philological sophistication of local knowledge systems, while also allowing for links to rigorous, valid, modern scientific data. Through modelling and interconnecting different knowledge styles, we can begin to unpack the problems of the current state of ethnopharmacology – the lack of simplistic standardisation of these systems is not a bug, it is a feature. The power of interlinked data and digital multi-media is that they allow us to connect these knowledge scenes without degradation of indigenous knowledge styles. Sections
Verified and Updated Species
Accounting for Pluralism with Critical Philology
Reconstructing Multiple Ontologies with a Knowledge Graph
New Ways to Explore Historical Name Data
Data Confirmation Five graphs and tables, including Polyglot Medicine Knowledge Graph and emphasizing Synonymy
The authors introduce
an entirely novel way to research the entry of new drugs into the Chinese pharmacopoeic tradition. For example, we can discover the introduction of different uses of the same species, cloves [dīngxiāng 丁香], over time:
Fruit (母丁香): 5th Century 雷公炮製輪
Seed (丁子香): 6th Century 齊民要術
Bark 丁香樹皮: 8th Century 海藥本草
Root 丁香根: 11th Century 開寶本草
Twigs 丁香枝: 16th Century 本草綱目
Essential Oil 丁香油/丁香露: 18th Century 藥性考/本草拾遺
Readers sensitive to the historiography of Chinese medicine will recognise the 8th century Haiyao bencao 海藥本草 which introduced ma[...]
Language Log
Feeling wet
Yesterday in one of my classes, a female student from China said that she didn't like to exercise in the morning because she felt "wet". At first, I couldn't believe my ears, so I asked her, "Did you say 'wet'?" "Yes," she said, "wet". I couldn't understand in what way she would feel "wet" in the morning and how that would prevent her from doing exercises.
We wouldn't use the English word "wet" to describe a morning condition that would discourage us from doing exercises, so I tried to think of other related words (synonyms or near-synonyms for "wet") that would work better. "Logy"? "sodden"? "heavy"? But I couldn't come up with any equivalent words that would fit the bill. I specifically was disinclined to choose the word "shī 濕", which literally does mean "wet", but didn't believe that's what she meant because it would signify something like "drenched", "dripping", "soaked", not a systemic condition of the body, unless it means something in traditional Chinese medicine that I'm not aware of.
I puzzled over this conundrum for a while without making any significant progress, so today I sent her an e-mail asking the following question: "What Chinese word / concept did you have in mind when you said you felt 'wet' in the morning"?
She promptly replied, "When I say 'wet', it means 'shī 濕'（cháoshī de 潮濕的 ['moist, damp'], shīrùn de 濕潤的 ['wet, humid']) in Chinese, or in English I may say 'moist', 'humid', or 'damp' instead."
I almost fell through the floor.
See the "Selected readings" below.
Selected readings
* "Moist aversion: The twitter thread" (4/28/20) — with nearly a score of earlier LLOG posts on word aversion and related phenomena, some bordering on the scandalous
Here are a couple of additional posts that I dug up on my own:
* "Wet turban needless wash" (8/5/08)
* "The mystery of "mouthfeel'" (11/2/16)
If you look at the entries in this google search, you will find that studies on the phenomenon of "moist aversion" worked their way out from Language Log to the broader internet.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
beef
a conflict with someone; a complaint against someone
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
write up
to write a report or an article based on notes written earlier
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Try And Say This Phrase Without Laughing (Bless These Braces) #podcast #funnyordie #siblings
"""I have to diagnose you with a really serious disease..."" Sophia Benoit tells Tam Yajia about her favorite childhood game on this week's Bless These Braces.
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ume SC knows whom I am talking about according to the setting or the context of our conversation. So maybe when Chinese students write, because of their Chinese way of thinking, they assume lots of common understandings. So they don't need to be so logical? When they write, they tend to be all over the place? I also thought of how Chinese as a language could be more complicated than English? Sometimes by looking at how certain characters are structured helps one understand the context, such as 人 rén (person) vs. 眾 zhòng (lots of people), while in English it's person vs. crowd. Because Chinese language is structured in such complicated ways, therefore people just don't pay so much attention to the logic? (I am not saying that Chinese or English is better than the other, just trying to figure out why are most Chinese students illogical )
I am not sure if this example demonstrates my point clearly. I remember when I first came to the States, I had the strangest problem with my English speaking. I mixed the usage of he/she when I could express the rest of the sentence without any problem. Sometimes, even though I knew clearly I was talking about a girl, I would say "he xxxxxx". It was like part of my brain wasn't functioning properly. But I overcame the issue in about two to three weeks as I got used to English speaking everyday. I asked around and found out I wasn't the only one who suffered from this problem.
This may help to explain why many of my colleagues do not like to admit students directly from China to our graduate programs, demurring, "They don't know how to think". Instead, my colleagues prefer that Chinese students study somewhere else (a "feeder" school) before coming to Penn. Francis Miller
Francis, who received a B.A. from Penn in May 2013, and then finished his M.A. in December 2013, both from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, offers the following observations on higher educational counseling in China (remember that TCI is a higher education counselor in China):
I worked for a boutique edu consulting company called AIC Education in Beijing from 2015-2017, and then at Xi’an Tie Yi High School from 2018-2023. This year in August I’m starting work with my wife at Avenues Shenzhen.
The role is usually referred to as a "college counselor" or something similar. For example, my official title is Dean and College Counselor. In Chinese, there are lots of different ways to say college counselor, but I think the most professional way for a school-based counselor is "shēngxué zhǐdǎo 升学指导 ("guidance for further studies") For example, before, my title at my school in Xi'an was "shēngxué zhǐdǎo zhǔrèn 升学指导主任" ("Director of Continuing Education Guidance"). Some schools use a more clunky direct translation from English like hǎiwài dàxué zīxúnshī 海外大学咨询师 ("Overseas University Consultant / Counselor") or something like this. This is not to be confused with people who work at companies or are "independent education consultants", who are usually known as liúxué zīxún gùwèn 留学咨询顾问 ("Study Abroad Consultant"), or simply as an "agent" (zhōngjiè 中介), however zhōngjiè 中介 in Chinese and "agent" in English mean quite different things in this field. Not that you need / want to know the nitty gritty, but an agent is usually a person or company who has a contractual relationship with a university to facilitate recruiting and is compensated with commissions on a per-capita basis based on the number of students who apply and/or enroll at the university, while in Chinese zhōngjiè 中介 is usually the company with consultants who shepherd students through the application process for a (sometimes hefty) fee and/or may write and submit college applications on the student's behalf.
The biggest professional organization for school-based college counselors is China Institute of College Admission Counseling (ChinaICAC– click on the link to get impressive evidence of the large size of this organization). If you know of students who are interested in worki[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: fabricate
This word has appeared in 30 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
beat box
to create rhythmic percussive sounds with your mouth, especially when accompanying rhymes or rapping
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