Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
account for

If you account for something, you explain how it came to be the way it is.

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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
louse up

to spoil something or make it fail

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torrid

Idiom of the Day
don't shoot the messenger

Don't get angry at or punish someone who is simply delivering bad or undesirable news, as he or she is not responsible for it. Watch the video

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Language Log
Taiwanese in France

On a wall at INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales [National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations]) (established 1669) in Paris:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/inalco.jpg

Note that Taiwanese is referred to as "Taiwanais" in French and Tâi-gú / Tâi-gír / Tâi-gí  (MSM Táiyǔ in sinoglyphs.  According to the author of this article, where the photograph comes from, those designations are preferable to Bân-lâm-gí/gú 閩南語 (MSM Mǐnnányǔ) because, unlike Bân-lâm-gí/gú 閩南語 (MSM Mǐnnányǔ), they can directly bring the topic of discussion into the context of "Taiwan".  "In fact, the term 'Taiwanese' does clearly and directly represent a part of Taiwan's linguistic and cultural subjectivity."
Selected readings

* "Teaching Taiwanese in France" (8/17/23) — with a useful bibliography
* "Confessions of an Ex-Hokkien Creationist" (9/20/16)

[h.t. Chau Wu]

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Word of the Day
athirst

Definition: (adjective) Extremely desirous.
Synonyms: hungry, thirsty.
Usage: The young, enthusiastic student was athirst for knowledge.
Discuss

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Language Log
"Talking out of two ears"

From p. 224 of the transcript of the April 30 session of The People of the State of New York against Donald Trump, Defendant, where prosecutor Joshua Steinglass is questioning Keith Davidson, who was Stormy Daniel's lawyer at the time of the hush-money payment from Michael Cohen:

Q. During this time, were you also speaking with Michael Cohen on the phone?

A. Yes.

Q. How would you describe his demeanor during this time?

A. He was highly excitable. Sort of a pants on fire kind of guy. He had a lot of things going on. Frequently I would be on the phone with him, he would take another call, he would be talking out of two ears. Sort of like that movie with the dogs and squirrels.
I think Davidson probably meant "hair on fire", which is the normal idiom for being excited, rather than "pants on fire", which is the idiom for egregious falsehood. And it's clear what "talking of of two ears" means, logic aside. But I don't get the "movie with the dogs and squirrels" reference — any suggestions?

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Language Log
Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6

This post grew out of a comment I was making yesterday to a previous post about a wall at INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales [National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations]) (established 1669) in Paris that listed the many languages taught at that venerable institution.

As my eyes surveyed the mass of names on the wall, one thing struck me powerfully:  the large number of different Arabic languages.  This raised an interesting question:  common "wisdom" is that there is only one Arabic language, viz., Modern Standard Arabic [MSA], so how come there are so many different Arabic languages taught at INALCO?

Since the Arab vernaculars have been one of our favorite foci here at Language Log (see "Selected readings" below), I was interested to see how many different varieties of Arabic are represented on this wall:

Judéo-Arabe, Moroccan Arabic, Algerian Arabic, Libyan Arabic (but that is MSA), Yemeni Arabic (also MSA, though it is generally considered to be a very conservative dialect cluster), Lebanese Arabic, Palestinian Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Arabe Littéral (which I take to signify written / literary MSA) in contrast to dialectal Arabic (though I'm not sure how it differs from regular MSA; perhaps it is hyper-conservative to a degree that it it not really "sayable", i.e., "writable but not sayable", cf. "Sayable but not writable" [9/12/13]; i.e., MWA [Modern Written Arabic]?).

I do not include Maltese because of the Romance superstrata, nor do I include Sorabe because that only refers to the script used to write the Austronesian language known as Malagasy, much as the Perso-Arabic script is used to write Sinitic Hui (Muslim) Mandarin.
It would appear that, to the teachers and administrators at INALCO, there must be sufficient differences among all these Arabic languages that they merit having separate offerings.

It seems that Arabic speaking countries possess a diglossia of MSA for formal, "proper" occasions and usage and a variety of vernaculars on a dialectal continuum for daily informal usage. SFAIK, only Egyptian vernacular has developed a widely used literary / written / cinematic form, even transcending its political borders to a certain degree. To what extent the other vernaculars are popular in music / song / TV, etc., in general, the situation must vary widely by country.

Worldwide, Arabic has about 372.7 million speakers (source), yet it has all of these different Arabic languages listed on the INALCO wall, despite the fact that theoretically and doctrinally there is only one (MSA).

Contrast that with India, which has a total population of 1.417 billion people, yet only has two or three languages represented on the INALCO wall, if you count Sanskrit, which is overwhelmingly a classical language.  Here at Penn, we teach virtually all of India's 22 official languages, at least 10 at any given time.

Urdu, which is mutually sayable with Hindi, but not mutually readable, is not taught at INALCO (source); with 230 million speakers, it is the 10th-most widely spoken language in the world (source).
Hindi, which is taught at INALCO, has 615 million speakers and is the 3rd-most widely spoken language in the world (source).

Bengali is also taught at INALCO, probably because it is the official language of Bangladesh, has 272.7 million speakers and is the 7th-most widely spoken language in the world (source).

China has a total population of 1.412 billion people, of whom Ethnologue claims there are roughly 900 million speakers of Mandarin.  I don't believe it.  These are simply political propaganda figures put out by the CCP / PRC government.  At least half of those 900 million don't understand the other half.  It is telling that the wall refers to "Chinese" (Mandarin?) as Chinois in French and Zhōngwén 中文 (lit.[...]

, "central script / writing") in Sinographs.  Even if they're referring to "Mandarin" writ exceptionally large, Pǔtōnghuà 普通話 ("Common Speech") or Guóyǔ 國語 ("National Spoken Language") would be a better designation.

The INALCO wall also lists Cantonese, which certainly is a separate language, worldwide has nearly 100 million speakers.  Taiwanese (Táiyǔ 臺語) is listed on the wall and has approximately 15 million speakers.  Added to their related confreres on the mainland they constitute a group of approximately 50 million Minnan ("Southern Min") speakers.  I am pleased to see that the INALCO wall includes Uyghur, Mongolian, and Tibetan, all three of which non-Sinitic languages the CCP/PRC is actively trying to eliminate.
On balance, the INALCO wall reveals a great deal about the geopolitics of French language policy in the world today. Selected readings

* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 5" (8/20/22) — if you are interested in the problems raised in the current post, part 5 in the series is must reading.
* "Arabic and the vernaculars" (3/6/22)
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 2" (3/8/22)
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 3" (3/9/22)
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 4 — the case of Bible translations" (3/10/22)
* "Arabic as a macrolanguage" (10/21/18)
* "Arablish" (9/23/18)
* "Mutual intelligibility" (5/28/14)
* "Sayable but not writable" (9/12/13)
* "Sinitic is a group of languages, not a single language" (10/12/17)
* "Cantonese and Mandarin are two different languages" (9/25/15)
* "Taiwanese in France" (5/11/24)
* "Sanskrit is far from extinct" (11/29/23)
* "Sanskrit resurgent" (8/13/14)
* "Spoken Sanskrit" (1/9/16)
* "'In Pāṇini We Trust'" (12/15/22)

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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
yearn for

to want something very much

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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
effing

used as a less offensive substitute for the highly-offensive taboo word "fucking"

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instigate

Idiom of the Day
land of plenty

A fictional or imagined utopian place where there is an abundance of everything needed to survive and flourish. Watch the video

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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: bazaar

This word has appeared in 103 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?

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Word of the Day
plexor

Definition: (noun) A small hammer with a rubber head used in percussive examinations of the chest and in testing reflexes.
Synonyms: percussor, plessor.
Usage: When the doctor tapped my knee with the plexor, my reflex was so strong that I almost kicked him in the head!
Discuss

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Language Log
Tocharo-Sinica

Language Log has been fortunate to have had several guest posts and numerous comments by Douglas Adams, doyen of Tocharian studies in America (see "Selected readings" for a sampling).  Now, stimulated by the recent post on Chinese chariotry, he has written the following ruminations in response.

I read with interest the material on early Chinese chariotry.  It was far outside my competence to judge.  As you knew, I was most interested in the comment that was looking to the possibility of Tocharian > Chinese lexical borrowings.  As you also know, it has long been my suspicion that there was more west > east influence on Chinese language and culture than is generally realized.  And the "westerners" involved were most likely to have been Tocharians of one sort or another ("Tocharian D"?).  It's probably not only PIE pigs and honey that, via Tocharian, show up in Chinese.
It's a pity that the ancient Chinese, like the ancient Greeks, were so totally uninterested in the "barbarian" languages that were their neighbors.  We have our single sentence example of the Jie language recorded, not in a difficult Greek alphabet transcription, but rather in an inscrutable Chinese character transcription.  (Inscrutable because reconstructing pre-Middle-Chinese Chinese phonology makes reconstructing PIE phonology look like child's play.)  Adding to the problem of course is that Chinese phonology, at all times, renders that incorporation of foreign words possible only at the cost of (considerable) deformation.  Look, for instance, at how poor Buddhacinga's name is rendered (Fótúchéng 佛圖澄 [many people used to mispronounce that Fótúdèng]) (ca. 232–348 AD) .  Who would have guessed?

I'm still suspicious that the name given by the Chinese to the Kuchean royal house, Bai, may be connected to the homophonous designation of the "barbarian" rulers surrounding the nascent Chinese state on the North China Plain.  And, speaking of royalty, is it possible that wang 'king' might be from pre-Tocharian *wnatke (TchA nātäk 'lord'), which in turn might be cognate with Greek (w)anakt– '[Mycenean] king.' (TchA nāśi 'lady' would equally be the equivalent of Greek (w)anassa 'queen' from pre-Greek *wanakyā-, both irregularly related to 'king/lord' [where's the *-t-?].  The latter word survives in Modern Greek in pant-anassa 'all-queen,' an epithet of the Virgin Mary.)  But, even if true, who's going to believe it?

This is but a taste of what is to come.  Doug is preparing a paper that touches on one of these subjects at greater length.  It is tentatively titled "Resurrecting an Etymology: Greek (w)ánax ‘king’ and Tocharian A nātäk ‘lord’" and will probably appear in Sino-Platonic Papers sometime this summer.
Selected readings

* "Tocharian words for oil" (6/22/22)
* "The origins and affinities of Tocharian" (8/20/23) — lengthy, classified bibliography
* "Tocharian C: its discovery and implications" (4/2/19)
* "The geographical, archeological, genetic, and linguistic origins of Tocharian" (7/14/20) — with a comprehensive bibliography
* Hajni Elias, "The Southwest Silk Road: artistic exchange and transmission in early China", published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2024; Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, First View, pp. 1 – 26.  This article has impressed me to such a degree that I have rechristened the road she wrote about as "The Southwest Bronze Road".
* "From Chariot to Carriage" (5/5/24)
* "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/19)

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Language Log
Maltese Arabic: Correction?

In Victor's recent post "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6", he wrote that "I do not include Maltese because of the Romance superstrata". A more elaborate version of this idea can be found in the Wikipedia article, which tells us that

Maltese […] is a Semitic language derived from late medieval Sicilian Arabic with Romance superstrata spoken by the Maltese people. […] Maltese is a Latinized variety of spoken historical Arabic through its descent from Siculo-Arabic, which developed as a Maghrebi Arabic dialect in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091. As a result of the Norman invasion of Malta and the subsequent re-Christianization of the islands, Maltese evolved independently of Classical Arabic in a gradual process of latinization. It is therefore exceptional as a variety of historical Arabic that has no diglossic relationship with Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. Maltese is thus classified separately from the 30 varieties constituting the modern Arabic macrolanguage.

Both Victor and Wikipedia are somewhat wrong, or at least misleading — and my main evidence for this is an amusing anecdote. So onwards…
The 2010 LREC conference was held in Valetta, Malta. One of the other attendees was my colleague Mohamed Maamouri, a native speaker of Tunisian Arabic who has extensive research and publications on relevant topics, starting from his 1967 Cornell thesis The Phonology of Tunisian Arabic. His Google Scholar listing also includes "Language education and human development: Arabic diglossia and its impact on the quality of education in the Arab region" (1998),  "Dialectal Arabic telephone speech corpus: Principles, tool design, and transcription conventions"  (2004), "Developing LMF-XML Bilingual Dictionaries for Colloquial Arabic Dialects" (2012), The Georgetown Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic (2013) and The Georgetown Dictionary of Moroccan Arabic (2019).

The area around the conference venue in Valetta was oriented toward tourism, and so the personnel in restaurants, coffee shops and similar sites communicated with their customers in English, French, or other European languages. But among themselves they spoke Maltese — and naturally enough, Mohamed often joined their conversations.

Since he was clearly part of the conference crew, the puzzled response was "How do you know Maltese?" His answer (in Tunisian Arabic) was "Oh, I'm actually speaking Tunisian".

And the reaction was total shock. Eyebrows went up, eyes opened wide, bodies jumped back. This was WTF type shock,, not "how wonderful" type shock — the clerks and baristas were clearly upset at the idea that Maltese and Tunisian are not only mutually intelligible, but are sometimes indistinguishable, at least at the level of brief conversational exchanges.

After a couple of such experiences, Mohamed changes his responses, to something like "Oh, my mother is Maltese…" And of course he also looked into the matter at greater length, including discussions with local Maltese linguists. The conclusion (at least as far as I recall, 14 years later): Despite the strong socio-political divergence over the many centuries during which Malta resisted first the Arab conquest of the Maghreb and southern Italy and Spain, and then the Ottoman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean, some varieties of Maltese Arabic are apparently quite close to some varieties of Tunisian Arabic.

How can that have happened? Apparently, it's partly because of what happened in the 11th century to get the Maltese language started; but it's also because Malta is actually quite close to Tunisia by sea, and over the centuries, there was a lot of under-the-table cultural and commercial contact. This also apparently includes a certain number of families with branches in both countries. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MaltaTunisiaSicilyMap.png As I said, [...]

this is my memory of what I learned in 2010, and it might well be wrong in parts. But it suggests what Victor and Wikipedia said about Maltese may be more a matter of politico-religious prejudice than the conclusion of linguistic analysis.

See  also Martin Zammit, "The Sfaxi (Tunisian) element in Maltese", 2014:

Much to the frustration of the linguist and the historian alike, the facts surrounding the diffusion into Malta of some form of Arabic dialect, or dialects, are still shrouded in the mists of time. Neither the Arab Muslim geographers and historians nor travelers have been very informative about the Arab experience in Malta. […]

Muslim Sicily was certainly a main source of Arabic diffusion into the Maltese islands, particularly from the year 1053 onwards, in the wake of the fall of Sicily’s central government and the ensuing civil war. This migration coincided with a similar migration which, according to the historian al-Marrākushī, left the coastal towns of NorthAfrica and the interior regions and sought refuge in Sicily, Fez and Spain. These people were fleeing from the Banū Hilāl and the Banū Sulaym incursions which had reached Ifrīqiya by the year 1052. Even though al-Marrākushī does not mention Malta, “… there is a very good probability that many fled to Malta as well as Sicily.” Whatever dialectal varieties had reached the Maltese islands, towards the end of the 11th century these started coming into regular contact with the Romance languages of Malta’s military, civil and religious rulers. By the first half of the 15th century, such linguistic contact ultimately forged the lingua maltensi.

Zammit cites a long list of shared phonological and morpho-syntactic traits between Sfaxi Tunisian and Maltese, and also notes that "Tunisian, particularly sedentary, dialects and Maltese share substantial common lexicon".

A picture of somewhat greater divergence emerges from A. Čéplö et al., "Mutual intelligibility of spoken Maltese, Libyan Arabic, and Tunisian Arabic functionally tested: A pilot study" (2016):

It was found that there exists asymmetric mutual intelligibility between the two mainstream varieties of Maġribī Arabic and Maltese, with speakers of Tunisian and Libyan Arabic able to understand about 40% of what is being said to them in Maltese, against about 30% for speakers of Maltese exposed to either variety of Arabic. Additionally, it was found that Tunisian Arabic has the highest level of mutual intelligibility with either of the other two varieties.

But Čéplö et al. start their paper this way:

In Neo-Arabic dialectology, the concept of mutual intelligibility is often invoked – whether in positive (Ryding 2005) or negative terms (Abu-Haidar 1992) – to conveniently illustrate various claims about the nature of the complex linguistic landscape that is Arabic and the relationship between the Arabic varieties. As one of those varieties, Maltese is also a topic in the mutual intelligibility discussion, where the claims range from total lack of mutual intelligibility with any variety of Arabic (Owens 2010) to anecdotal evidence asserting that speakers of Arabic (usually Tunisian Neo-Arabic; see Chaouachi 2014) are able to understand Maltese nearly perfectly.

Presumably variations in the various earlier subjective and anecdotal claims, as well as the results of their controlled study, depend partly on the substantial variation in what counts as "Maltese" or "Tunisian" or "Libyan" Arabic. But it seems entirely wrong to exclude Maltese from a taxonomy of Arabic "colloquials" or "vernaculars" (i.e. Arabic languages), purely on the grounds of its borrowings from Italian.

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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Yiddish Has Some Very Useful Words (Bless These Braces)


Joanna Hausmann and Tam Yajia talk about their favorite Yiddish words. Like a hair that pokes out of your chin.

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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
"Should I Wash My Feet?" (Bless These Braces)


"A stench of cheese eminated from my feet." Tam Yajia remembers a particularly bad sleepover with Sophia Benoit on this week's Bless These Braces.

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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Tam Tells Ron Funches About An Important First (Bless These Braces)


Ron Funches tells Tam Yajia about the many cartoon characters he was crushing on as a kid.

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