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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pack heat
to carry a gun
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Idiom of the Day
let (someone) off the hook
To pardon, release, or allow someone to escape from blame, responsibility, obligation, or difficulty. Watch the video
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n English teacher asks, pretend you think it’s wonderful.
John McIntyre, "It's a grand day for grammar", 9/5/2024:
In the fifth through eighth grades, I was drilled in the traditional schoolroom grammar by two formidable ladies, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, and while their results with other students were variable, what they taught me stuck.
Over years as an editor it was brought home to me that the schoolroom grammar was seriously flawed. Originally developed to apply Latin grammar to English, a bad fit because the two languages operate on different principles, but Latin was the prestige language when English was the new kid on the block. Over the centuries that grammar was distorted by an accretion of arbitrary rules and superstitions that have been exposed by linguists. But those of us who had the schoolroom grammar had little or no contact with the linguists.
Now we can. The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum, has just been published in this country by Polity Press. Pullum, the distinguished linguist and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, speaks not as the scribes and Pharisees but as one who has authority, and bridges the gap between the traditional grammar and current linguists in a short, concise book accessible to any reader willing to put in a little time.
As the new book states explicitly, it's basically a more accessible introduction to Geoff's earlier, longer, and denser work:
The first port of call for anyone who wants to delve more seriously into this book’s modern approach to English grammar would be A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar by Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Brett Reynolds (2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 2022). It’s a 400-page undergraduate-level textbook that’s fully compatible with this book in its theoretical assumptions, but it goes into a lot more detail. It’s not elementary, but then if you have read this book you are not exactly a beginner anymore.
That textbook is based on a much larger and more advanced work: The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum et al., Cambridge University Press, 2002) – the book I’ve been referring to as CGEL. It’s a large scholarly reference work (over 1,800 pages), and although it doesn’t presuppose a linguistics degree, it uses more technical concepts and vocabulary than this book, and it attempts to be complete and exhaustive. It’s intended for grammarians and designers of courses rather than for students or for the casual reader.
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Language Log
"…X, let's say Y…"
Justin Weinberg, "Analytic Philosophy's Best Unintentional (?) Self-Parodying", Daily Nous 9/6/2024:
“Someone, let’s say a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name.”
That line–recently circulated on social media by Eric Winsberg (South Florida / Cambridge) as “the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy”—is from Saul Kripke‘s Naming and Necessity.
I’m not sure its the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy, but it is pure poetry.
Justin Weinberg added:
*UPDATE: Some are suggesting Kripke’s line was meant to be funny, in which case I suppose we should broaden the request for suggestions to include intentional self-parodies by analytic philosophers.
In the comments, Eric Winsberg responded:
I don’t think he’s joking. You have to remember this is the transcript of a talk. He’s just throwing in very standard though [sic] experiment language. Compare “a number of people, say five, are tied to a railroad track”. You’re just signaling that the number 5 is only important in that it’s more than one. But in Kripke’s case, the whole point of the example is that there’s nothing distinctive about the person at all except the ensuing baptism. So he’s going “someone is born” and he’s brain goes “we need a “say” clause, and ends up making the funniest sentence ever. Kenny Easwaran added:
I’ve always interpreted this line as a clear self-parody. When he’s trying to stay object-level, he has no trouble coming up with specifics, like naming his pet aardvark Napoleon, or any example involving, say, Nixon. In this case, I think he’s observing the need to include “say X” afterwards, and then filling it in with the one thing that actually adds nothing, rather than “someone, let’s say, the future teacher of Aristotle, is born”.
FWIW, Eric Winsberg's comment about "standard thought experiment language" seems persuasive to me.
In (the transcribed and edited text of) Naming and Necessity, "let's say" is used 18 times as a rhetorical device to introduce a specific but arbitrary assumption for the purposes of the current argument, e.g. on p. 80:
Let's see if Thesis (2) is true. It seems, in some a priori way, that it's got to be true, because if you don't think that the properties you have in mind pick out anyone uniquely — let's say they're all satisfied by two people — then how can you say which one of them you're talking about? There seem to be no grounds for saying you're talking about the one rather than about the other.
He also uses plain "say" for the same rhetorical purpose, e.g. on p. 17:
Nor, when we regard such qualitatively identical states as (A, 6; B, 5) and (A, 5 ; B, 6) as distinct, need we suppose that A and B are qualitatively distinguishable in some other respect, say, color. On the contrary, for the purposes of the probability problem, the numerical face shown is thought of as if it were the only property of each die.
And on p. 87, he uses "let's say" to introduce an assumption arguendo that's vague nearly to the point of emptiness, probably because he didn't care to come up with anything more specific:
What's going on here? Can we rescue the theory? First, one may try and vary these descriptions — not think of the famous achievements of a man but, let's say, of something else, and try and use that as our description. Maybe by enough futzing around someone might eventually get something out of this; however, most of the attempts that one tries are open to counterexamples or other objections.
It might still be true that Kripke was intentionally parodying this device when he said "Someone, let's say a baby, is born" — but Eric Winsberg's hypothesis is consistent with Kripke's overall patterns of usage.
As an aside, it's worth noting that Kripke refers to the baby with the male pronouns "his" and "him", probably because that was a common prescription for generic third-person singular pronouns in 1970 when the lectures were delivered.
.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
finish off
to complete something, or to eat the last piece of something
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Word of the Day
ignoble
Definition: (adjective) Not of the nobility; common.
Synonyms: ungentle, untitled.
Usage: The princess loved the stable boy, but he was of ignoble birth, and her father refused to let them marry.
Discuss
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fsids – continued to rule until the 16th century. From the 16th century onward, the process continued in the absence of Berber dynasties; in Morocco, they were replaced by Arabs claiming descent from the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
Berbers are divided into several diverse ethnic groups and Berber languages, such as Kabyles, Chaouis and Rifians. Historically, Berbers across the region did not see themselves as a single cultural or linguistic unit, nor was there a greater "Berber community", due to their differing cultures. They also did not refer to themselves as Berbers/Amazigh but had their own terms to refer to their own groups and communities. They started being referred to collectively as Berbers after the Arab conquests of the 7th century and this distinction was revived by French colonial administrators in the 19th century. Today, the term "Berber" is viewed as pejorative by many who prefer the term "Amazigh". Since the late 20th century, a trans-national movement – known as Berberism or the Berber Culture Movement – has emerged among various parts of the Berber populations of North Africa to promote a collective Amazigh ethnic identity and to militate for greater linguistic rights and cultural recognition.
The indigenous populations of the Maghreb region of North Africa are collectively known as Berbers or Amazigh in English.
Tribal titles such as Barabara and Beraberata appear in Egyptian inscriptions of 1700 and 1300 B.C, and the Berbers were probably intimately related with the Egyptians in very early times. Thus the true ethnical name may have become confused with Barbari, the designation naturally used by classical conquerors.
The plural form Imazighen is sometimes also used in English. While Berber is more widely known among English-speakers, its usage is a subject of debate, due to its historical background as an exonym and present equivalence with the Arabic word for "barbarian". Historically, Berbers did not refer to themselves as Berbers/Amazigh but had their own terms to refer to themselves. For example, the Kabyles use the term "Leqbayel" to refer to their own people, while the Chaouis identified themselves as "Ishawiyen" instead of Berber/Amazigh. Stéphane Gsell proposed the translation "noble/free" for the term Amazigh based on Leo Africanus's translation of "awal amazigh" as "noble language" referring to Berber languages, this definition remains disputed and is largely seen as an undue extrapolation. The term Amazigh also has a cognate in the Tuareg "Amajegh", meaning noble. "Mazigh" was used as a tribal surname in Roman Mauretania Caesariensis.
Abraham Isaac Laredo proposes that the term Amazigh could be derived from "Mezeg", which is the name of Dedan of Sheba in the Targum. Ibn Khaldun says the Berbers were descendants of Barbar, the son of Tamalla, son of Mazigh, son of Canaan, son of Ham, son of Noah.
The Numidian, Mauri, and Libu populations of antiquity are typically understood to refer to approximately the same population as modern Berbers.
(Wikipedia)
When I was investigating the orthography and prehistory of the Berbers and the Tuaregs in the 70s and 80s as part my research on writing systems worldwide, I found evidence for their advanced civilization in North Africa dating as far back as twelve millennia ago in the cave paintings and rock inscriptions of the region, chiefly in the Atlas Mountains. Still today, the Atlas Mountains are home to various groups of Berbers. Among the Tuaregs, the idea of a noble class, especially noble warriors, figures prominently.
The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Berber communities, who are indigenous to North Africa. The languages are primarily spoken and not typically written. Historically, they have been written with the ancient Libyco-Berber script[...]
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
set up (2)
to put together or arrange the parts of something before using it
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Word of the Day
unsteady
Definition: (adjective) Not firm, solid, or securely in place; unstable.
Synonyms: unfirm.
Usage: He climbed carefully up the unsteady ladder and cleaned the leaves that had clogged the gutter around the house.
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Language Log
Type-token plots in The Economist
From "The Harris-Trump debate will be a clash of speaking styles", The Economist 9/6/2024:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/EconomistTypeToken1.png
The Economist's article covers some other easily-quantifiable aspects of political rhetoric, but this afternoon I'll focus on the type-token plots, since this an an especially consistent aspect of Donald Trump in comparison to other politicians:
"Political vocabulary display", 9/10/2015
"Vocabulary display in the CNN debate", 9/18/2015
"R2D2", 3/27/106
"More political text analytics", 4/15/2016
As I've suggested in the past, the main cause is Trump's repetitive style. His shallow type-token graphs are probably not due to a penchant for "plain speaking" — at least, there are stereotypical exemplars of lower-class speech style with robustly-growing type-token graphs, as discussed in "Vicky Pollard's Revenge", 1/2/2007.
On the other hand, Ernest Hemingway's writing style exhibits slower type-token growth than any other English novelist I've tested: "Lexical display rates in novels", 4/18/2020. That's not because Hemingway writes in a repetitive style — it's an interesting question what causes it, and what it has something to do with his (false) reputation for short sentences (see "Death before syntax", 10/20/2014).
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Language Log
Where weave is from
In a comment on "Trump's rhetorical 'weave'", J.R. Brewer wrote:
This thread has had the side effect of causing me to learn (at least taking wiktionary at face value and not digging deeper into other reference sources) that the "weave" of "bob and weave" etc. is a homophone etymologically unrelated to the "weave" meaning "create fabric from fibers" rather than the former being, as I had naively supposed, a metaphorical extension of the latter that had somehow drifted semantically to the point that it was no longer particularly obvious.
Below, some etymological backup from the Oxford English Dictionary…
For the transitive verb weave, glossed as "To form or fabricate (a stuff or material) by interlacing yarns or other filaments of a particular substance in a continuous web; to manufacture in a loom by crossing the threads or yarns called respectively the warp and the weft", the OED give this etymology:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/OED_Weave1.png
For the intransitive verb weave, glossed as "To move repeatedly from side to side; †to toss to and fro; to sway the body alternately to one side and the other; to pursue a devious course, thread one's way amid obstructions.", the OED indeed has a different source:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/OED_Weave2.png
For that (obsolete) intransitive verb weve, the OED give this etymology:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/OED_Weve.png
The full list of OED glosses for weve is
1. Of persons: To go from one place to another; to travel, wander, pass.
2. Of things: To go, pass, make way.
3. To move to and fro; to toss about.
4. To move or remove from one place to another; to convey or bring; to strike down.
5. To wave or brandish (a weapon). Also to beckon, make signals.
6. To toss about, trouble.
This cluster of concepts is arguably a better metaphor for Donald Trump's rhetorical "weave" than a weaver's loom is.
Beyond waive, there are also possible links to wave, whiff, waft, and waif — which associatively enrich the metaphor, even if the etymologies are uncertain.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
jerk
a stupid person
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aofen Sun, ed., Studies on the History of Chinese Syntax. Monograph Series Number 10 of Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 5-26.
I had always wondered why any Chinese — before the introduction of modern linguistics — would undertake the improbable task of writing a grammar of Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic, even though Westerners had previously written grammars of vernacular Sinitic languages. Naturally, I had several times attempted to read Ma Jianzhong's Mǎ shì wéntōng 馬氏文通 (Ma's Literary Expositor [ironically rendered as "Basic principles for writing clearly and coherently by Mister Ma" here), but I always found it unintelligible, and I have never met anyone, Chinese or foreigner, who could render it into comprehensible English, French, German, Russian, etc.
When explained rigorously and analytically, as Harold Shadick did for his A first course in literary Chinese, 3 vols. (Cornell University Press, 1968), which I still use for my introduction to Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic course, it is possible to write a useful "grammar" of the language.
Cf. Aṣṭādhyāyī by Pāṇini पाणिनि (between 7th c. and 4th c. BC), the world's first grammar. At the University of Washington, all graduate students in linguistics used to be required to take a special course on Paninian grammar. I don't know if that's still the case.
Knowing that Ma Jianzhong was a close associate of Möllendorff makes me wonder whether it was the latter who put a grammar bee in the bonnet of the former.
We started this post with the earliest recordings of Sinitic dialects / topolects and ended with the first grammar of Literary Sinitic by a Chinese scholar, and Paul Georg von Möllendorff was right there at the heart of both these pathbreaking enterprises, and much else of great consequence besides — such as helping the formidable Li Hongzhang obtain munitions and warships from the German industrial firms Vulkan and Krupp, and then going head to head with Li over his attempts to gain greater independence for Korea from China — a formidable intellect and redoubtable personality that belies the wonky-nerdy appearance we see in some of his photographs. Selected readings
* "'In Pāṇini We Trust;" (12/15/22)
* "Implementing Pāṇini's grammar" (12/1/23)
* "A new grammar of Mandarin" (10/18/15)
[Thanks to Martin Schwartz]
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
lay out (2)
to explain an idea or a plan clearly and in detail
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Word of the Day
imperceptible
Definition: (adjective) Impossible or difficult to perceive by the mind or senses.
Synonyms: unperceivable.
Usage: The world may indeed be considered as a vast machine, in which the great wheels are originally set in motion by those which are very minute, and almost imperceptible to any but the strongest eyes.
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Language Log
"The Truth About English Grammar"
It's past time for me to feature Geoff Pullum's new book, The Truth About English Grammar. The publisher's blurb:
Do you worry that your understanding of English grammar isn’t what it should be? It may not be your fault. For hundreds of years, vague and confused ideas about how to state the rules have been passed down from one generation to the next. The available books for the general reader – thousands of them, shamelessly plagiarizing each other – repeat the same misguided definitions and generalizations that appeared in the schoolbooks used by your great-great-grandparents.
Geoffrey K. Pullum thinks you deserve better. In this book he breaks away from the tradition. Presupposing no prior knowledge or technical terms, he provides an informal introduction to the essential concepts underlying grammar and usage. With his foundation, you will be equipped to understand the classification of words, the structure of phrases and clauses, and why some supposed grammar rules are really just myths. Also covered are some of the key points about spelling, apostrophes, hyphens, capitalization, and punctuation.
Illuminating, witty, and incisive, The Truth About English Grammar is a vital book for all who love writing, reading, and thinking about English.
The start of the preface:
If you have ever been led to believe that your grammar is bad, relax a little. This book aims to liberate you, not berate you. Its main aim is to lay out some of the most basic principles of grammar from the ground up, without presupposing any previous acquaintance, and to lay out those principles in a more modern and consistent way. But it also to some extent aims to free you from fears of accidentally violating grammar and being judged for it. Far too many alleged “grammatical errors” aren’t mistakes at all: they presuppose rules that don’t exist and never did.
And the start of the final section, with the header Disrecommendations:
Now for a few remarks that are just between you, me, and the gatepost. It may upset millions, but I owe it to you to speak the truth. Some of the most famous and much-loved books on how to write are grossly misinformed on grammar and usage, not to be trusted on style, and way past their use-by dates, which are spread across the 20th century.
A flagrant case is the book commonly known as The Elements of Style. It’s actually E.B. White’s revision and expansion of a 1918 book by William Strunk called Elements of Style, which White was assigned when he was in one of Strunk’s classes at Cornell in 1919. Parts of it were four decades old when White published his version with Macmillan in 1959, and they are over a century old now, after several more editions by different publishers. Much of what it says about grammar and usage is very bad advice, and some of White’s changes and additions (which Strunk never saw) are flagrant nonsense – like when White says that stranding a preposition “sounds like murder” (4th edition, page 78). Stay away from this book.
George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language” (1946) is an essay, not a book, but millions of students will have seen it in a book because it was reprinted at least 118 times in 325 editions of fifty-eight college readers between 1952 and 1996 (see “The essay canon” by Lynn Bloom in College English 61.4, 1999, 401–430). Its text can be found in scores of places on the web, and hordes of English teachers have been singing its praises for three-quarters of a century. It is full of sanctimonious virtue signaling, dishonestly cherry-picked examples, and dumb advice about writing that no one follows, like that you should never use any familiar phrase, and of course that you should never use the passive (when his own essay uses the passive far more than most writing in English does). My advice: don’t even read it, but if a[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
john
the bathroom, toilet
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Idiom of the Day
let (someone) loose (on something)
To allow someone to do something as they please, without supervision or control. Watch the video
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, which now exists in the form of Tifinagh. Today, they may also be written in the Berber Latin alphabet or the Arabic script, with Latin being the most pervasive.
The Berber languages have a similar level of variety to the Romance languages, although they are sometimes referred to as a single collective language, often as "Berber", "Tamazight", or "Amazigh". The languages, with a few exceptions, form a dialect continuum. There is a debate as to how to best sub-categorize languages within the Berber branch. Berber languages typically follow verb–subject–object word order. Their phonological inventories are diverse.
Millions of people in Morocco and Algeria natively speak a Berber language, as do smaller populations of Libya, Tunisia, northern Mali, western and northern Niger, northern Burkina Faso and Mauritania and the Siwa Oasis of Egypt. There are also likely a few million speakers of Berber languages in Western Europe. Tashlhiyt, Kabyle, Central Atlas Tamazight, Tarifit, and Shawiya are some of the most commonly spoken Berber languages. Exact numbers are impossible to ascertain as there are few modern North African censuses that include questions on language use, and what censuses do exist have known flaws.
Following independence in the 20th century, the Berber languages have been suppressed and suffered from low prestige in North Africa. Recognition of the Berber languages has been growing in the 21st century, with Morocco and Algeria adding Tamazight as an official language to their constitutions in 2011 and 2016 respectively.
Most Berber languages have a high percentage of borrowing and influence from the Arabic language, as well as from other languages. For example, Arabic loanwords represent 35% to 46% of the total vocabulary of the Kabyle language and represent 51.7% of the total vocabulary of Tarifit. Almost all Berber languages took from Arabic the pharyngeal fricatives /ʕ/ and /ħ/, the (nongeminated) uvular stop /q/, and the voiceless pharyngealized consonant /ṣ/. Unlike the Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic languages of the Afro-Asiatic phylum, Berber languages are not tonal languages.
"Tamazight" and "Berber languages" are often used interchangeably. However, "Tamazight" is sometimes used to refer to a specific subset of Berber languages, such as Central Tashlhiyt. "Tamazight" can also be used to refer to Standard Moroccan Tamazight or Standard Algerian Tamazight, as in the Moroccan and Algerian constitutions respectively. In Morocco, besides referring to all Berber languages or to Standard Moroccan Tamazight, "Tamazight" is often used in contrast to Tashelhit and Tarifit to refer to Central Atlas Tamazight.
The use of Berber has been the subject of debate due to its historical background as an exonym and present equivalence with the Arabic word for "barbarian." One group, the Linguasphere Observatory, has attempted to introduce the neologism "Tamazic languages" to refer to the Berber languages. Amazigh people typically use "Tamazight" when speaking English. Historically, Berbers did not refer to themselves as Berbers/Amazigh but had their own terms to refer to themselves. For example, the Kabyles use the term "Leqbayel" to refer to their own people, while the Chaouis identified themselves as "Ishawiyen" instead of Berber/Amazigh.
(Wikipedia)
All things considered, my original conception of the "Berbers", i.e., the Amazigh, as being a noble people from the mountains was not so far off the mark after all.
As cited above, "The term Amazigh also has a cognate in the Tuareg 'Amajegh"', meaning noble".
P.S.: For those who are interested, Wikipedia has an even more detailed article on "Names of the Berber people". Selected reading
* "Berbers in Libya" (4/23/11)
* "African (il)literacy" (6/21/21) — has much of relevance to say about an ancient African script called Tifinagh
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 5" (6/20/22)
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6" (5/12/24)
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Language Log
Berber, emic vs. etic
My mental image of Berbers is one of brave, noble people of the Maghreb (western and central North Africa, comprising Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia) who were there before the advent of the Arabs, whose migration into the region took place largely in the 7th and later centuries. As happened in Southeast Asia (including Taiwan) with the Han people from the north pushing the indigenes into the mountainous areas from the lowlands to become montagnards, the Berbers also substantially retreated into the mountains of northern Africa.
When my Uber driver told me last Sunday in Philadelphia that he was a Berber, I told him that he must be proud of his heritage, he responded, "Actually, we don't like that name. It was imposed on us by Arabs, and it means the same thing as 'barbarian'. We prefer to call ourselves 'Amazigh'."
I had barely heard of Amazigh before, and what the driver told me was so much at odds with my preconception of the name Berber that I had to look into the basis for the difference between what I had heard and believed about the Berbers since secondary school and what a Berber himself thought about that name.
The first and simplest etymology for "Berber" I turned to comes from Wiktionary:
From Arabic بَرْبَرِيّ (barbariyy, “Berber”), from Ancient Greek βάρβαρος (bárbaros, “non-Greek, foreign, barbarian”), apparently imitative of foreign speech. Cognate of English barbarian.
That seems pretty standard and is widely accepted, but I wanted to dig deeper, so I looked for more details.
First, who were the so-called Berbers? Berbers, or the Berber peoples, also called by their endonym Amazigh or Imazighen, are a diverse grouping of distinct ethnic groups indigenous to North Africa who predate the arrival of Arabs in the Arab migrations to the Maghreb. Their main connections are identified by their usage of Berber languages, most of them mutually unintelligible, which are part of the Afroasiatic language family. They are indigenous to the Maghreb region of North Africa, where they live in scattered communities across parts of Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and to a lesser extent Tunisia, Mauritania, northern Mali and northern Niger. Smaller Berber communities are also found in Burkina Faso and Egypt's Siwa Oasis.
Descended from Stone Age tribes of North Africa, accounts of the Imazighen were first mentioned in Ancient Egyptian writings. From about 2000 BCE, Berber languages spread westward from the Nile Valley across the northern Sahara into the Maghreb. A series of Berber peoples such as the Mauri, Masaesyli, Massyli, Musulamii, Gaetuli, and Garamantes gave rise to Berber kingdoms, such as Numidia and Mauretania. Other kingdoms appeared in late antiquity, such as Altava, Aurès, Ouarsenis, and Hodna. Berber kingdoms were eventually suppressed by the Arab conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries CE. This started a process of cultural and linguistic assimilation known as Arabization, which influenced the Berber population. Arabization involved the spread of Arabic language and Arab culture among the Berbers, leading to the adoption of Arabic as the primary language and conversion to Islam. Notably, the Arab migrations to the Maghreb from the 7th century to the 17th century accelerated this process. While local Arab dynasties came to rule parts of the Maghreb after the 7th century, Berber tribes remained powerful political forces and founded new ruling dynasties in the 10th and 11th centuries, such as the Zirids, Hammadids, various Zenata principalities in the western Maghreb, and several Taifa kingdoms in al-Andalus. Islam later provided the ideological stimulus for the rise of fresh Berber empires, the Almoravids and Almohads in the 11th to 13th centuries. Their Berber successors – the Marinids, the Zayyanids, and the Ha[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
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a man who takes the active role in gay or homosexual sex
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Idiom of the Day
let it slip
To accidentally or inadvertently reveal a given secret or important piece of information. Watch the video
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
catch up on the original Beetlejuice with Tam before you see the sequel! #BeetlejuiceBeetlejuice
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Language Log
China flavor
I’m still trying to figure out, in XJP rhetoric, when 中华 is used and when it’s 中国. How long has Zhongguo been used directly as an adjective this way, as opposed to 中国似的or 中国性？Is a 中国味different from a 中华味？Which smells better? pic.twitter.com/9CARnICZSu
— James Millward 米華健 (@JimMillward) September 4, 2024
For non-specialists to understand this tweet, a considerable amount of annotation and explication is necessary. Key terms
Zhōngguó 中國/国 — usually rendered as "China; Chinese", literally "central / middle kingdom"
Zhōnghuá 中華/华 — usually rendered as "China; Chinese", literally "central / middle florescence"
So named because the first ancient Chinese settlements were around the Yellow River, which was considered to be the center, and because the culture was considered to be magnificent and flourishing.
*
* In traditional East Asian thought, 華／华 (Huá) or 中華／中华 (Zhōnghuá), often translated as "Chinese", has a philosophical connotation of civilizedness and decorous behavior that transcends a strictly ethnic definition. This is in opposition to "foreigners" or "barbarians", 夷 (yí) or 夷狄 (yídí), whose cultures are uncivilized and lacking in proper morality. Therefore, in certain contexts, other nations of the East Asian cultural sphere could refer to themselves as 中華／中华 (Zhōnghuá) in the sense that they were civilized people following the classical traditions first established in Ancient China, without meaning that they saw themselves as Chinese in an ethnic sense.
* Although also used in the formal names of both the Republic and People's Republic of China, the term carries a somewhat broader sense than 中國／中国 (Zhōngguó, “state of China”) and connotes something like the "nation of the Chinese people" or "land of the Chinese culture".
(Wiktionary)
If we compare Zhōngguó 中國/国 and Zhōnghuá 中華/华, the former is more PRCish and the latter is more ROCish. However, both sides employ both designations at different times and for different purposes.
Other terms raised by James Millward are:
Zhōngguó shì de 中国似的 ("China-like")
Zhōngguó xìng 中国性 ("Chineseness; Chinese nature / character")
Zhōngguó wèi 中国味 ("Central Kingdom flavor")
Zhōnghuá wèi 中华味 ("Central Florescence flavor")
Here's the quotation from Xi Jinping printed against a blue background at the bottom of the tweet (with a few small modifications from online sources):
Wǒmen de jiàoyù… jué bùnéng péiyǎng chū yīxiē “zhǎngzhe Zhōngguó liǎn, bùshì Zhōngguó xīn, méiyǒu Zhòngguó qíng, quēshǎo “Zhōngguó wèi” de rén!
我们的教育…绝不能培养出一些“长着中国脸， 不是中国心，没有中国情，缺少中国味”的人！
"Our education… must not cultivate people who have "Chinese faces but not Chinese hearts, no Chinese feelings, and lack 'Chinese flavor'!"
Make of it what you will. For myself, I am savoring what Xi Jinping meant by his rather peculiar reference to a Chinese wèi 味 ("taste; flavor; smell; odor") as applied to people. Selected readings
* "Mee Tu flavor" (11/29/18)
* "Xi Jinping's faux classicism" (7/2/23) — with lengthy bibliography
P.S.: If you want to see the whole of Xi Jniping's smiling face, click on the X at the top right of the tweet.
[Thanks to Bruce Humes]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: bastion
This word has appeared in 214 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
get back (1)
to return to a place
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Language Log
German linguist Möllendorff and the earliest recordings of Chinese
"UCSB Library Acquires Rare Chinese Language Audio Cylinder Recordings", UCSB Library Newsletter (September, 2024)
The UC Santa Barbara Library is excited to announce the recent acquisition of the Paul Georg von Möllendorff Chinese Cylinders, a collection of wax cylinders widely considered to be the first audio recordings from China. The cylinders, recorded in the late 1800s by linguist Möllendorff, contain sixteen recitations of a popular, celebrated poem "Returning Home"' by Tao Yuanming. Möllendorff recorded the poem in various Chinese dialects to document the differences in regional languages at the time. Today, the cylinders provide a rare glimpse into the history of Chinese language and include dialects that are considered critically endangered or extinct.
Like many late 19th-century diplomats and Sinologists, Möllendorff was an extraordinary scholar. I will spend the remainder of this post describing his aims, abilities, and achievements. Möllendorff (1847–1901) was a German linguist and renowned diplomat in East Asia. While serving as Commissioner of Customs at Ningbo, China, in the 1890s, Möllendorff undertook an ambitious project to document and classify Chinese languages for the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. He asked speakers representing various Chinese languages to recite the same poem into a graphophone and then transcribed the results phonetically. Möllendorff sent the cylinders to Léon Azoulay, a prominent figure in the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, to feature at the exposition as part of a "phonographic museum" where visitors could take an audio tour of cultures around the world. After the exposition, Azoulay published a full catalog of the contents of the phonographic museum, including the donated Chinese cylinders, which were explicitly identified with Möllendorff. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/83/Paul_Georg_von_M%C3%B6llendorff_%281847-1901%29.jpg/220px-Paul_Georg_von_M%C3%B6llendorff_%281847-1901%29.jpg Möllendorff in official Korean dress
From Wikipedia:
Möllendorff is mostly known for his service as an adviser to the Korean king Gojong in the late nineteenth century and for his contributions to Sinology. In English-language publications, Möllendorff is often credited with having designed a system for romanizing the Manchu language, which was in fact the creation of his compatriot Hans Conon von der Gabelentz.
Since Wikipedia says that a citation is needed for that last sentence, and I've been hearing about this uncertainty for the last half-century, I'm hoping that some of the Manchu specialists who read Language Log will finally clarify the situation regarding the romanization of Manchu.
Half a century ago, I knew Möllendorff primarily as the author of A Manchu Grammar (Shanghai: Printed at the American Presbyterian mission press, 1892). In the course of preparation of this post, however, I've come to learn a great deal more about Möllendorff's accomplishments during the course of his life, such as learning Hebrew while still a young man, joining the Imperial Maritime Customs Service in Shanghai, becoming proficient in "Chinese", and joining the German consular service as interpreter and later vice-consul in Tianjin.
Something of great significance for me occurred during Möllendorff's service in the German consulate. Namely, he became a friend of the Qing scholar, Ma Jianzhong (1845-1900), who was an official in the secretariat of the powerful statesman, governor-general Li Hongzhang (1823-1901). What brought me to a standstill upon seeing the name of Ma Jianzhong was that he was the first Chinese to write a grammar of "Chinese", published in 1898.
Victor H. Mair (1997), "Ma Jianzhong and the Invention of Chinese Grammar", in Ch[...]
