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Language Log
"I" again?
From Bill Clinton's 2024 DNC speech:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
I mean look,
what does their opponent do with his voice? He mostly
talks about himself
right?
So the next time you
hear him, don't count the lies.
Count the I's.
Count the I's.
His
vendettas, his vengeance,
his complaints,
his conspiracies.
He's like one of those tenors
opening up
before he walks out on stage like I did, trying to get his
lungs open by singing, "Me, me, me, me, me, me."
This evokes the long series of false pundit assertions about Barack Obama, especially by George F. Will, from June 2019 to May 2012 and beyond.
Will's assertions about Obama's pronoun frequency were shameless lies, but they were irrelevant to his larger point anyhow, since first-person pronoun usage is not a good metric for egocentricity or narcissism or whatever. See the discussion about Chris Christie's pronouns in "First Person Singular, Redemption Plea Edition" (1/11/2014), or the more general discussion by Jamie Pennebaker in "What is 'I' saying?" (8/9/2009).
Putting aside the pragmatics and social psychology of pronoun use, Geoff Pullum suggested that I might count
[U]ses of (wordforms of) the first-person singular pronoun lexeme in (i) speeches by Harris and (ii) speeches by Trump. Tailor-made for a Breakfast Experimenthttps://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/2122.png .
So here we go — but I'll add Clinton's DNC speech to the project.
Donald Trump RNC2024: 12586 words, 265 I's (2.1%), 348 FPSP (2.8%) Kamala Harris DNC2024: 3697 words, 83 I's (2.2%), 127 FPSP (3.4%) Bill Clinton DNC2024: 2458 words, 66 I's (2.75%), 88 FPSP (3.6%)
I'll spare you the counts and percentages for the many other speeches by these personalities that I've analyzed, but suffice it to say that Bill Clinton's jibe is not empirically supported — at least in terms of pronoun counts.
A more sophisticated analysis (perhaps of a different data source) might yield a different answer. I didn't count "his vendettas, his vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies". But here as elsewhere, crude pronoun counts are not easily mapped to personality dimensions.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: smattering
This word has appeared in 136 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
wind up (1)
If you wind up in a certain place or situation, you find yourself there by chance or because of unexpected events.
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Word of the Day
disjunct
Definition: (adjective) Marked by separation of or from usually contiguous elements.
Synonyms: isolated.
Usage: The islands were like little isolated worlds, as abruptly disjunct and unexpected as a palm-shaded well in the Sahara.
Discuss
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Language Log
Tones, Then and Now
[This is a guest post by Don Keyser]
I was relieved/reassured to read this in Language Log yesterday:
VHM: I myself remember very clearly being taught to say gongheguo 共和國 ("republic") and gongchandang 共產黨 (Communist Party) with the first syllable of each being in the first tone, then being surprised later when the PRC started pushing fourth tone for those first syllables. This sort of thing happened with many other words as well, with, for example, xingqi 星期 ("week"), which I had been taught as first tone followed by second tone, becoming two first tones.
My first Chinese language instructor, Beverly (Hong Yuebi) Fincher, used Chao Yuan-ren's Mandarin Primer. Later I studied a couple years, full-time, at the "Stanford Center" (Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies) hosted by National Taiwan University. Subsequent to that, a half decade later, I spent a year in Mandarin interpreter training at the government's Foreign Service Institute Branch School in Taiwan. In my "spare time" during that program, I studied daily an hour of Shanghainese and "Taiwanese" (i.e., Hoklo, or southern Min, or whatever).
So when I arrived in Beijing spring 1976 on the first of my three postings there, and encountered what you describe, on something as basic and oft-heard as gongchandang 共產黨, I concluded that my memory and/or learning and/or articulation skills were horribly deficient. (They probably were, but that's another story.) I convinced myself that I must have a real issue in distinguishing adequately between first and fourth tones.
Very parenthetically, I found peculiarly useful for tone-learning/reinforcement the necessity to listen "solemnly" to the guógē 國歌 ("national anthem") in movie theaters prior to the showing of the film. The characters were printed on screen as patriotic images floated by, and the tones in each of the four-character sets were pronounced in the purest Beijing-style Mandarin (i.e., not with the distinctive southern Mandarin pronunciation heard in Taipei at the time).
[VHM: I had the same experience with regard to solemnly singing the national anthem of the Republic of China before the film was shown, though, in addition, I also couldn't help but think of Sun Yat-sen (who penned it) and his Three People's Principles, plus Abraham Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, and for the people".]
—–
During my two years at the Stanford Center, I commuted via motorcycles (a Suzuki 125 and a Honda 150). They were fairly reliable beasts, but of course needed maintenance and minor repairs from time to time. So I early learned my share of "motorcycle-repair" vocabulary to be deployed when I took in my noble steed to one of the local shops.
I still remember vividly that the workers at one "complimented" me on my Mandarin … but added the observation that "However, you foreigners do not seem able to pronounce correctly the word 是 … none of you say 'si'/szu' but make some very foreign sound." By which they meant 'shi.'
I then did my rendition of 44 stone lions, all using "si" instead of "shi" where needed, which duly impressed them. And puzzled them. "So why if you CAN make that sound, do you not do so when speaking Guóyǔ 國語 ('Mandarin')?"
Reflecting my youth and lack of good sense, I told them that Mandarin, which we were taught to speak in its northern/Beijing pronunciation, has both the "si" and the "shi" sounds. To their disbelief, I countered by asking if they had not been taught the zhùyīn fúhào 注音符號 or ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ, ㄈ ("bo po mo fo"; "Mandarin Phonetic Symbols") system in their schools.
They said they had, of course. So, I asked, how do you pronounce ㄕ and ㄙ ? To which they replied "si" and "si." But if there are two different symbols in the bopomofo system, I pursued, why would each have the same pronunciat[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
joint (2)
a prison, a jail
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Idiom of the Day
laze about
To relax or spend time idly; to do nothing or very little. Watch the video
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Understanding the Trump Phenomenon
Throwback to 2016 when we sent a reporter to try to understand the average Trump voter.
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Language Log
A Hainanese mystery
[This is a guest post from Mok Ling.]
Hainanese is rather atypical of Southern Min (閩南) languages, with lots of innovations and retentions not seen in other varieties in the region: it has, for example, implosive consonants (which it shares with Vietnamese), as well as glottal-final 上聲 (a retention from Old Chinese).
The atypical feature I've found most mysterious is the tendency to pronounce the Middle Chinese 去 tone as 陰平. I haven't managed to find a consistent pattern in the words affected by this tonal shift.
Just for context: I unfortunately do not know which part of the island my grandparents are from. I was told ethnic tensions within the Chinese community in the island of Tanjung Pinang (where they eventually settled) discouraged them from transmitting any kind of information about this to their children. Looking at phonetic data compiled online (from the dialect dictionary kaom.net as well as recordings of Hainanese), it seems that our family lect most resembles Qionghainese (瓊海話).
Here are some examples of the 去-平 change, transcribed from my own speech (these are arranged in no particular order):
話 ("language") ʔiɛ²⁴
畫 ("to draw") iɛ²⁴
花 ("flower") ʔɦiɛ²⁴
號 ("number") ʔɦɔ²⁴
步 ("step") ʔɓɔu²⁴
命 ("life; destiny") mia²⁴
利 ("sharp") lai²⁴
利 (only in 利用) li²⁴
用 ("use", only as a noun) iɔŋ²⁴
二 ("2", as a cardinal and seemingly only word-initially) ʔɗzi²⁴
共 ("and") ka²⁴*
弄 ("to joke") laŋ²⁴
賣 ("to sell") ʔɓɔi²⁴
*As for 共, my mother taught me very carefully to read it as gōng in Mandarin rather than gòng. I thought it had to have been dialectal influence, but 趙元任 Chao Yuen-ren's 1962 article "What is Correct Chinese" shows that I wasn't alone in being taught this antiquated pronunciation.
[end of guest post]
VHM: I myself remember very clearly being taught to say gongheguo 共和國 ("republic") and gongchandang 共產黨 (Communist Party) with the first syllable of each being in the first tone, then being surprised later when the PRC started pushing fourth tone for those first syllables. This sort of thing happened with many other words as well, with, for example, xingqi 星期 ("week"), which I had been taught as first tone followed by second tone, becoming two first tones.
Selected readings
* "Tabudish and the origins of Mandarin" (5/21/13)
* "Confessions of an Ex-Hokkien Creationist" (9/20/16)
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
undies
pieces of underwear, esp. women's panties
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Idiom of the Day
lay (one's) life on the line
To put oneself in harm's way (to achieve something), especially at the risk of losing one's life. (Sometimes used hyperbolically.) Watch the video
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Language Log
Personification
Most rhetorical devices have classical Greek names, arriving in English through Latin and French: analepsis, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, … But there are some common cases, like personification, where the English word is entirely Latinate, although the Greeks certainly used knew and used the technique. The OED's etymology is "Formed within English, by derivation", and the earliest OED citation is from 1728.
This came up because I started a post about Elle Cordova's use of personification in her clever skit “Subatomic particles hang out in the Universe Saloon”:
(For a less artistic approach to the subject of the Universe Saloon chain, see Steve Nadis, "Diminishing Dark Energy May Evade the ‘Swampland’ of Impossible Universes", Quanta Magazine 8/19/2024.)
Someone in the comments section will probably tell us what term or phrase the Greeks used for "personification". But meanwhile, I'll share with you something interesting that I found in looking for the history of other rhetorical terminology, starting with metaphor. Quintilian wrote about mĕtaphŏra in Book 8 of his Institutio Oratoria, and like other Latin authors, he transliterated the word directly from the Greek model μεταφορά, which literally meant "transport" (and still does). But I think his proposed constraint on the use of metaphors was an original peeve:
At ego id agendo nec pastorem populi auctore Homero dixerim, nec volucres per aera nare, licet hoc Vergilius id apibus ac Daedalo speciosissime sit usus. metaphora enim aut vacantem occupare locum debet aut, si id alienum venit, plus valere eo quod expellet.
For my own part I should not regard a phrase like “the shepherd of the people” as admissible in pleading, although it has the authority of Homer, nor would I venture to say that winged creatures “swim through the air,” despite the fact that this metaphor has been most effectively employed by Virgil to describe the flight of bees and of Daedalus. For metaphor should always either occupy a place already vacant, or if it fills the room of something else, should be more impressive than that which it displaces.
Personification can be seen as a kind of metaphor — a bartender giving beer to a customer == the Higgs boson giving mass to a quark. But under whatever name, it's a technique that Elle Cordova has used effectively in this and other skits, in ways that Quintilian wouldn't have objected to. I covered an earlier example in “ICYMI: Aptos replaces Calibri”, 3/2/2024.
Update — Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française has personnification, said to be
xviiie siècle. Dérivé de personnifier.
…which raises the question of who copied whom, but doesn't otherwise help.
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9 AD' 25-220 AD).
Earliest extant attestations are in the Book of Rites and Lost Book of Zhou:
前有摯獸，則載貔貅。
When there is a ferocious beast (of prey) in front, the flag with a pixiu / leopard('s skin) on it should be displayed.
山之深也，虎豹貔貅何為可服？
The mountains being thus deep, how can tigers, leopards, and pixiu be tamed?
(Wiktionary)
There's even a whole Wikipedia article on the píxiū 貔貅. Don't pay too much attention to the fantastic iconographical details, because — when it comes to strange / legendary / mythological creatures — the Chinese just love to pile on the weirdness.
Both of the characters used to write this name have Kangxi radical 153 zhì 豸 added on. That's not important (ostensibly means "badger", "legless insect", or "legendary beast"). What's important are the phonetic components (the "spellers") on the right side of the characters. The word was probably originally written without the radicals, just the phonetic components. This is very common in the development of the Chinese script (radicals [semantic classifiers / indicators] added later to disambiguate homophones).
The fact that this same creature has alternative near-homophonic orthographical forms is highly significant. It is a principle of my Sinological philology that such disyllabic terms with orthographical variants are usually an indication that they are transcriptional and borrowed from a non-Sinitic source.
If the bìxié 辟邪 / píxiū 貔貅 is related to the baškuč / paškuč, as we have been told, it is likely to have been brought by East Iranian speakers. In a detailed philological study of baškuč / paškuč, David Buyaner, concludes:
Bearing in mind the role played by the speakers of various Eastern-Iranian dialects[19] settled on the Great Silk Road in the transmission of folklore narratives of eastern origin to the West, we can conclude with a good deal of likelihood that the bird name *pasku(n)č was borrowed from some Eastern-Iranian source (probably Khotanese) into Parthian and that from there it penetrated Persian and the non-Iranian languages of the Caucasus and Mesopotamia.
[19]Mostly Sogdians, but not only.
See Buyaner's "On the Etymology of Middle Persian baškuč (Winged Monster)," Studia Iranica, 34 (2005), 19-30, available here and here.
A similar vector may have been operative in the transmission of the baškuč / paškuč eastward. Selected readings
* "What is the difference between a dragon and a /lʊŋ³⁵/?" (2/10/24)
* "A (troop / troupe of) dragon(s) tromping / flying" (12/4/23)
* "'Lord of Heaven' in ancient Sino-Iranian" (5/28/24)
* “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
[Thanks to Martin Schwartz]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: absolve
This word has appeared in 48 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
set back (2)
If something has set you back fifty dollars, it has cost you fifty dollars.
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2024-25 Bundesliga Season Preview
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
ripped (2)
intoxicated, drunk, drugged
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Idiom of the Day
leap to (someone's) mind
To suddenly or immediately materialize in someone's mind. Watch the video
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ion?
A conundrum. And I knew I was pushing my luck for a gāo bízi 高鼻子 ("big / high / long nose") so I left it there, and we parted friends until the next time I needed a part or a repair.
[end of guest post] Selected readings
* "A Hainanese mystery" (8/21/24)
* "Hypercorrect Mandarin tones" (10/15/23)
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: resonate
This word has appeared in 434 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
go off (1)
If something goes off, it stops working because of a power cut.
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Word of the Day
char
Definition: (verb) Burn slightly and superficially so as to affect color.
Synonyms: blacken, sear, scorch.
Usage: The fire charred the ceiling above the mantelpiece, and my mother had to hire a painter to cover up the discoloration.
Discuss
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Language Log
Regional claims on "yeah no / no yeah"
For some reason, people from different social groups in different regions all over the world believe that saying (things like) "yeah no" and "no yeah" is their special thing.
Maybe it's a New York thing:
#newyorkersbelike pic.twitter.com/ShW7SXq016
— Kevin B (@guaritopapi) January 14, 2019
Or maybe it's part of "How to Speak Midwest":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Today I'm gonna teach you how to speak Midwestern.
First thing you need to learn is the ABCs,
which in the midwest is the yeah-no-yeah.
But really, it's a feature of California English?
Or maybe it's Australians (Erin Moore, "Yeah-No: A Discourse Marker in Australian English" Honours thesis, Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, 2007; and other publications).
Or uneducated British millennials from Bristol…
Or maybe it's U.S. young people in general ("Yeah no", 4/3/2008):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/YeahNo.png
Or Afrikaans and South African English.
Also the analogous phrasing in Romanian, Russian, and no doubt many other languages…
And "Yeah, no, well, in fact 'yeah no' is pretty much the thematic idiom of NPR."
Wikitionary has an entry citing Australia, New Zealand, California, and Upper Midwestern U.S.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: prolific
This word has appeared in 738 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
muck up
If you muck something up, you do it badly and fail to achieve your goal.
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Word of the Day
anodyne
Definition: (adjective) Capable of soothing or eliminating pain.
Synonyms: analgesic, analgetic.
Usage: She was in intense pain following the surgery and wondered whether the anodyne properties of her medication would be sufficient.
Discuss
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Most Memorable DNC Speeches: Trump Is Trash
What more is there to say?
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Language Log
Sino-Persian chimera
We've been on the trail of the griffin for some time: "Griffins: the implications of art history for language spread" (8/9/24), "Idle thoughts upon the Ides of March: the feathered man" (3/11/23) — very important (not so idle) observations about griffins in the pre-Classical West by Adrienne Mayor, with illuminating illustrations. Following the leads in these and other posts, I think we're getting closer to the smoking gryphon (in some traditions, e.g., Egyptian sfr/srf, it is thought to be fiery).
One name from the Middle East rings a bell with a well-known fabulous monster from classical China. That is
…the Armenian term Paskuč (Armenian: պասկուչ) that had been used to translate Greek gryp 'griffin' in the Septuagint, which H. P. Schmidt characterized as the counterpart of the simurgh. However, the cognate term Baškuč (glossed as 'griffin') also occurs in Middle Persian, attested in the Zoroastrian cosmological text Bundahishn XXIV (supposedly distinguishable from Sēnmurw which also appears in the same text). Middle Persian Paškuč is also attested in Manichaean magical texts (Manichaean Middle Persian: pškwc), and this must have meant a "griffin or a monster like a griffin" according to W. B. Henning.
(Wikipedia)
That reminds me of the 辟邪. In Mandarin, it is pronounced bìxié. I'm not confident we can say for sure it is a griffin per se, though it is a chimera of some sort. More feline than avian, I believe, though at least it has wings, and if we look at images of the bìxié 辟邪 and compare them to the Paškuč / Baškuč, we will find that there are quite a few resemblances, though, again, I'm not making a case that the bìxié 辟邪 is equal to the griffin. It would be unlikely for an imaginary, fabulous beast to retain iconographical fidelity across thousands of miles and hundreds of years. Indeed, even within a single tradition, the details of an imaginary beast vary wildly through time and space (e.g., the bìxié 辟邪 itself has many different competing versions).
As Wiktionary tells us, bìxié 辟邪 is "a chimaera-like figure common in Chinese and Persian art". ***** Reading that sentence was electrifying. So far as I know, no one has made a philological identification of the bìxié 辟邪 and the Paškuč / Baškuč. Rather, the statement that the two fabulous creatures, the Persian and the Sinitic, are related — "a chimaera-like figure common in Chinese and Persian art" — was likely to have been made by art historians based on a commonality of iconographical features and alleged traits.
zdic, the online Classical Chinese dictionary, defines bìxié 辟邪 as "to ward off evil spirits; mythical lion-like animal that wards off evil". In my estimation, this sort of definition may be styled as wàngwénshēngyì 望文生義 ("forced, superficial translation of a transcription"). My dissatisfaction with "to ward off evil spirits" is underscored by the fact that there is a completely different transcription, for which see below.
First, though, let us examine the historical phonology of bìxié 辟邪:
The Middle Sinitic reconstruction (ca. 600 AD) of the first character is bjiek; the Old Sinitic reconstruction (ca. 600 BC) of the first character is /*peɡ/ or /*beɡ/
The Middle Sinitic reconstruction (ca. 600 AD) of the second character is zjae; the Old Sinitic reconstruction (ca. 600 BC) of the second character is /*ljaː/
Hence, /*peɡ/ /*ljaː/ or /*beɡ/ /*ljaː/.
Now it gets very interesting, because there is an alternative orthography for the name of this fabulous creature, and that is píxiū 貔貅.
Middle Sinitic bjij xjuw
Old Sinitic /*bi qʰu/
This mythological animal is deeply embedded enough in Chinese lore and legend that it is even to be found in classical texts from around the time of the Han Dynasty (202 BC-[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
take
stolen money or goods
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Idiom of the Day
lay the groundwork (for something)
To create or prepare the basics or essential foundation (for something); to pave the way (for something). Watch the video
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