35152
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Funny Or Die (Youtube)
A Color Purple Themed Bat Mitzvah (Bless These Braces) #podcast #comedy #batmitzvah
Hayley Marie Norman's Bat Mitzvah theme would be the color pink. Tam Yajia's was the color purple. But not The Color Purple.
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Idiom of the Day
in hospital
Receiving medical or surgical treatment, care, or attention at a hospital. Primarily heard in UK. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
charwoman
Definition: (noun) A woman hired to do cleaning or similar work, usually in a large building.
Synonyms: cleaning lady.
Usage: The charwoman cleaned every bathroom in the office building after the executives left for the evening.
Discuss
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/27/19)
* "Polyscriptal Taiwanese" (7/24/10)
* "The Roman Alphabet in Cantonese" (3/23/11)
* "Love those letters" (11/3/18)
* "Acronyms in China" (11/2/19)
* "Ask Language Log: The alphabet in China" (11/6/19)
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Language Log
Mix and match Japanese orthography
Most Language Log readers are aware that the Japanese writing system consists of three major components — kanji (sinoglyhs), hiragana (cursive syllabary), and katakana (block syllabary). I would argue that rōmaji (roman letters) are a fourth component, as they are in the Chinese writing system.
How do people decide when to switch among the different components of the Japanese writing system? Of course, custom and usage determine when to use one and when to use another. (It's a bit like masculine, feminine, and neuter in gender based languages [a frequent and recent topic on Language Log] — you don't ask why, you just do it].) In most cases, convention has fixed which of the three main components of the writing system is used for a particular purpose. On the other hand, since I began learning Japanese half a century ago, I noticed a fairly conspicuous slippage regarding what I had been led to believe were predetermined practices.
Sanae Heist, a senior studying linguistics at Columbia University, brought this whole matter to the surface when she wrote to me as follows:
I understand you study Chinese, but I was wondering if you happened to know any information about the contexts in which Japanese people switch the writing systems, i.e. hiragana or katakana for words that would traditionally be written in kanji or katakana for words typically in hiragana. I have caught my mother (Japanese), myself (half Japanese heritage speaker), and some Japanese friends doing this, and although I've yet to grasp the exact context for when this occurs (I usually just mimic how the word was written by the other person), I am curious to know whether there's a larger pragmatic role than just for emphasis or for convenience.
Interesting questions.
My observations are that there is a lot of variability in the way people mix and match hiragana, katakana, and kanji.
Here's a response from a specialist on Japanese orthography, J. Marshall Unger, emeritus professor at Ohio State University:
After 1945, the Ministry of Education established rules about kanji and kana to be taught in school. Briefly, only approved kanji and their approved readings* should be used (some exceptions for kanji in personal names had to be permitted); only simplified kanji were approved (again, some exceptions had to be tolerated); hiragana were to be the default syllabary for Japanese words not written with kanji; katakana were to be used for non-Japanese words. One was not to use the spelling of long vowels in hiragana when using katakana, nor vice versa.
*This subsumes cases of a kanji followed by okurigana; e.g. 分かる was specified for wakaru, but one finds 分る for the same word in pre-war writing.
Prior to 1945, there was much greater variation in how people wrote. I recall that there's a novel by Tanizaki in which each chapter is supposed to be the diary entry of a husband or his wife: he uses katakana as the default and rather formal language; she uses hiragana and a more vernacular style.
I don't think what the student is asking about goes much beyond words such as taihen, which can be 大変or たいへん, which can be written either way unless (s)he is including the wild variations one sees in manga balloons, etc. As the example of taihen shows, common SJ words may be written in hiragana—obscure SJ words that use kanji not on the approved list have to be written, in whole or in part, using hiragana, or else be replaced with synonyms. Of course, when the LDP introduced the joyo kanji, the list of approved kanji was demoted to the status of a 'guide' (meyasu): in theory, any damned kanji can now be used, and word-processor makers have been adding kanji of extremely limited utility to their inventories ever since. Now that people often rely on conversion routines to produce text rather than writing by hand, [...]
Idiom of the Day
in the hope that
With the expectation, intention, or desire that (something will happen). Watch the video
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Word of the Day
figurine
Definition: (noun) A small molded or sculptured figure; a statuette.
Synonyms: statuette.
Usage: She had all the delicate grace of that Tanagra figurine that you have in your studio, Basil.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: thoroughfare
This word has appeared in 104 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
kook
a strange or eccentric person
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
take down (1)
If you take down a large structure, you dismantle it, or separate it into the parts from which it was assembled.
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(whence also English nether) + the zero-grade of the root *sed- (“to sit”) (whence also English sit).
(source)
Martin further suggested that "Gnaizdo" probably comes from a toponym and cited "Swallow's Nest" in Crimea (Ukrainian: Ластівчи́не гніздо́, romanized: Lastivchýne hnizdó; Russian: Ласточки́но гнездо́, romanized: Lastochkíno gnezdó)
So where did that initial "g" of "gnaizda" come from? I surmise that somehow it was picked up from Germanic, which does have words beginning with "gn-" (e.g., "gnat", "gnit", "gnaw", "gnash"); cf. "kn-" words, which are plenteous in Germanic.
It's interesting that it was the initial "gn-" cluster that strongly attracted my attention in the first place. It looked Germanic, but it didn't seem to fit with the rest of the word. Selected readings
* "Whimsical surnames" (3/16/24)
* "Ukrainian at the edge" (10/30/22)
[Thanks to Peter Golden and Mehmet Olmez]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: foolhardy
This word has appeared in 26 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
uncool
not good, not acceptable, not fashionable
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
wait around
If you have to wait around for something, you have to wait a long time for it.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: erudition
This word has appeared in 26 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
pig (2)
a police officer
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
tie up (1)
to tie together the ends of something
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all kinds of weird errors show up in what one sees.
It sounds like the rules are not written in stone, that there's a lot of flexibility and informality in how hiragana, katakana, and kanji usage plays out.
And here's a response from Nathan Hopson (formerly at Nagoya University), who teaches at the University of Bergen in Norway:
I've actually had this conversation with a colleague in Japanese linguistics. She thinks it's a viable research topic, i.e., that it's not fully explained as a phenomenon.
There are some cases of words written in all three scripts in common usage:
癌 がん ガン (cancer)
There is a different feel to each. I can't confidently articulate a full explanation for all three, but がん is definitely trying to soften the blow or make the whole thing less terrifying (e.g. がん保険, gan hoken for insurance).
拉麺 ラーメン らーめん (ramen)
ガン is also an example of katakana being used for a "native" Japanese word because long strings of hiragana can be hard to parse — we expect them to be grammatical markers such as verb conjugations, etc.:
ごみ ゴミ (waste/trash/garbage)
Another type would be animal names, where the katakana is sometimes acting, explicitly or implicitly, as the Latin scientific name and sometimes as ゴミ above:
犬 いぬ イヌ (where the last can mean Canus canus)
人 ひと ヒト (where the last can mean Homo sapiens)
All this is further complicated by the choice to add the annotative glosses called ルビ (rubi, from the 5.5-pt font size used for interlinear annotations). The most common type is furigana, which gloss the readings of kanji. They are often seen with characters beyond the 2000-ish basic kanji or with proper nouns, etc., for which the reading is obscure, etc. That obviously depends a great deal on audience. But you can also use, for instance, the readings of synonymous kanji (or even antonyms, etc.) to add what I guess we'd call "color" or "flavor": glossing 迷宮 (meikyū) with ラビリンス might mean "The Labyrinth" instead of "labyrinth, while 退治 (taiji) with こども makes a fetus an (unborn) child.
* h/t Aya Homei for those two examples
If I want you to read 日本 as ニッポン instead of にほん, I could either do that by just writing out the katakana or glossing the kanji.
In any case, in the majority of instances, orthographic choice reflects some assumptions about audience (what do they know, expect, etc?). There are conventions, which we use without a lot of intentionality, but the thing about conventions is, breaking them deliberately is fun. It's part of the word play we all engage in, whatever the language.
After I shared these observations with Sanae, she replied:
Thank you so much for such a generous response and for extending my question to others you know. I get the general consensus that the orthography variations are an individual stylistic decision, which I agree is a feature of all languages (perhaps not in orthography, but the general concept of variations and flexibility in language). This just happened to catch my eye in recent months so I really appreciate the extra background knowledge and examples that were provided.
As one can readily see, Sanae's questions about variation in Japanese orthography lead to larger issues of deviation from standards (not standard deviations!) in language in general. Selected readings
* "Katakana nightmare" (6/20/19)
* "The esthetics of East Asian writing" (4/7/12)
* "Ye Olde English katakana" (8/11/14)
* "More katakana, fewer kanji " (4/4/16)
* "Kanji as commodity " (4/30/18)
* "The economics of Chinese character usage " (9/2/11)
* Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)
* Helena Riha, "Lettered Words in Chinese: Roman Letters as Morpheme-syllables" (pdf)
* "Zhao C: a Man Who Lost His Name" (2/27/09)
* "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 3" (11/25/18)
* "The actuality of emerging digraphia" (3/10/19)
* "Sememic spelling" (3[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: sparse
This word has appeared in 194 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
nab
to catch someone doing something wrong
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
come in (1)
to enter a room or a building
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Seinfeld Dreams with Hayley Marie Norman (Bless These Braces: Episode 8)
"Hayley Marie Norman (Datemare, AP Bio) joins Tam to talk about her career as a child performer, sex dreams with sitcom characters, and a color purple themed Bat Mitzvah. But not The Color Purple. You'll see.
Get all 10 episodes of season 1 now, and stay in touch for new episodes, news, and show extras: https://norby.link/ceiRm2
Key Moments
03:55 - Celebrity Crushes and Sex Dreams
06:58 - New Years Wish
12:06 - Discovered By Cindy Crawford
16:46 - Shaving Your Legs for the First Time
21:25 - Hayley's Interest In Judaism
23:40 - Reading The Diary of Anne Frank as an Adult for the First Time
25:14 - Jewish Food
26:57 - Eating the Bar Mitzvah Candy
29:14 - "Half-assing it" and Reconnecting with Judaism
33:00 - A Color Purple Themed Bat Mitzvah
33:50 - Howie Mandel's Penis
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Idiom of the Day
have skin in the game
To have a personal investment, usually monetary, in the pursuit of some goal or achievement, especially in business and finance. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
nickelodeon
Definition: (noun) A cabinet containing an automatic record player; records are played by inserting a coin.
Synonyms: jukebox.
Usage: When they arrived at the dance hall, the professional musicians were dismayed by the presence of the popular nickelodeon.
Discuss
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Language Log
New worlds, words, and letters
A recent strip from Dinosaur Comics:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/DinosaurComics4174.png
Mouseover title: "stop, you fool! you're building a world far too quickly and far too awesome! no narrative will ever live up to it!!"
And a couple of days later:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/DinosaurComics4176.png
Mouseover title: "hesternal means "of or pertaining to yesterday" and long-time dino comics readers already know and love and use "nudiustertian", meaning "the day before yesterday". you can tell a long-time dino comics readers by how hodie they sound AND ARE!!"
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Language Log
Nest: a rare and perplexing surname
By chance, I came across the surname "Gnaizda". Its phonological configuration puzzled me for a while, but then I began to formulate hypotheses about its origin. I briefly thought that it might have been Semitic and considered the possibility that it was cognate with "genesis". It was easy to rule out "genesis", though, because that goes back to the PIE root *gene- ("give birth, beget").
Rather than making stabs in the dark about what language Gnaizda might derive from, I thought it would be more sensible to search for individuals with that surname and see whether there were any pertinent biographical, genealogical, or onomastic information available about them.
The most prominent Gnaizda I found was the civil justice advocate, Robert Gnaizda (1936-2020), who was the General Counsel and Policy Director for the Greenlining Institute based in Berkeley, California. There are many references to him on the internet. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article on Robert Gnaizda does not provide any etymological information about his surname.
Here's what l could glean from various sources. Robert Gnaizda, the civil rights attorney, passed away in 2020 at age 83. His grandfather was a Russian Jew (from what's now Ukraine) who came through Ellis Island sometime between 1900 and 1910. At the time he didn't speak English, probably only Russian and Yiddish. Upon settling in Brooklyn, the family surname was Gnaizda, but I have not been able to find a record of that surname in Russia or in the Ellis Island records from that decade. I have no idea how the family ended up with that name. There was nothing else for me to do but forge ahead as best as I could on my own.
I was familiar with the Hebrew word "genizah", since Penn houses many volumes of the famous Cairo Genizah, which was discovered in 1896. Moreover, two scholars associated with Penn were awarded MacArthur Fellowships to work on the Cairo Genzah manuscripts, Shelomo D. Goitein in 1983 and Marina Rustow in 2015.
I suspected that "genizah" was an expansion from a hypothetical Semitic triconsontal root g-n-z, and it turns out I was right:
From Hebrew גְּנִיזָה (g'nizá, “archiving, preservation, storage; hiding; genizah”) (plural גְּנִיזוֹת (g'nizót)), from Old Persian *ganzam, from Old Median *ganǰam (“depository; treasure”).
(Wiktionary)
The word genizah comes from the Hebrew triconsonantal root g-n-z, which means "to hide" or "to put away", from Old Median *ganza- (“depository; treasure”). The derived noun meant 'hiding' and later a place where one put things, and is perhaps best translated as "archive" or "repository".
(Wikipedia)
Though it was fun researching the etymology of "genizah", I decided not to pursue it as the source of Gnaizda because, among other reasons, I couldn't determine how, within Hebrew, it acquired suffix -da nor how initial consonant cluster gn- arose within Hebrew.
Martin Schwartz called my attention to Russian "gnezdo гнездо" and Polish "gniazdo", both of which mean "nest".
Here's the etymology of the Russian word:
From Old East Slavic гнѣздо (gnězdo), from Proto-Slavic *gnězdo, from Proto-Balto-Slavic *nisdá, from Proto-Indo-European *nisdós.
(source)
Here's the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European root *nisdós:
From the adverb *h₁ni (“down”), from *h₁én (“in”), + the root *sed- (“sit”) + *-ós. Literally "where [the bird] sits down".
(source)
Cf. English "nest":
From Middle English nest, nist, nyst, from Old English nest, from Proto-West Germanic *nest, from Proto-Germanic *nestą, from Proto-Indo-European *nisdós (“nest”), literally "where [the bird] sits down", a compound of *ni (“down”)[...]
Idiom of the Day
in the eye of (something)
At, in, or amidst the central or focal point of something. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
portent
Definition: (noun) An indication of something important or calamitous about to occur.
Synonyms: omen, prognostication, presage, prodigy.
Usage: The soldier looked to the sky for a portent and was gripped with fear when he read his future in the clouds.
Discuss
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Language Log
LÀ encore…
Continuing my anecdotal exploration of "focus"-like phenomena in French, I dove into a random point in the middle of a random Radio France podcast ("Libre Pensée – L’Europe, l’Union européenne et les élections européennes", 4/14/2024). And within a few seconds, I heard this, where the apparent "focus" on là caught my attention:
Euh mais pour bien comprendre il faut là encore revenir à l'histoire —
décidément nous faisons un peu un cours d'histoire aujourd'hui
Your browser does not support the audio element.
(Google translation for those who need it…)
Zeroing in a bit:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LibrePensee1X1A.png The performance of "LÀ encore" (= "THERE again") in that phrase contributed the title of this post, for an obvious reason. Note that in addition to the higher pitch and louder amplitude, là also has about 100 msec of glottalized onset.
The following phrase lacks any obvious "focus"-like elements, but does illustrate some extreme lenition phenomena — more on French lenition in the future…
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LibrePensee1X1B.png A little bit later in the same podcast, we get
Certains peuvent le penser.
Mais là encore, je pense que le mieux c'est euh de se rapporter
à la fois à l'histoire et à des faits précis.
L'histoire d'abord.
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(The Google Translate version)
Phrase by phrase, again:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LibrePensee1X2A.png Interestingly, here "là encore" is mostly backgrounded, with "là" short, soft, and low in pitch, while "encore" just has the more-or-less obligatory medial-phrase-final rise.
In the next phrase, à la fois and et have the kind of parallel-marking "focus" we saw before with toutes/tous…
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LibrePensee1X2B.png And in the last phrase, histoire seems to get a strong prosodic "focus":
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LibrePensee1X2C.png Random anecdotes like these are easy to find, and confirm my impression that French speakers make frequent communicative use of the prosodic features — duration, pitch, amplitude — that are associated with (the many meanings of) the term "focus" in languages like English.
That's not to say that French prosodic "focus" is the same as English prosodic "focus". But we'll never learn what's going on if we continue to maintain the fiction that prosodic "focus" doesn't exist in French.
One final note on possible universality. On one hand, these prosodic features are iconic — we are not going to find a language where emphasis, contrast, novelty, etc., are signaled by shorter duration, lower pitch and amplitude, more co-articulation, etc. However, these features are modulations of the basic prosodic systems of the language in question, as we can see clearly in a tone language like Mandarin Chinese, where we have a good idea of what patterns are being modulated. And there do seem to be languages (or varieties) where the uses of such modulations are much more restricted. The dimensions of the relevant typology are mostly unknown — or rather, have been presented in various radically over-simplified and empirically empty ways.
➖ @EngSkills ➖
