Language Log

The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation, pt. 2

2019-02-11T13:08:16Z

Emma Knightley asks:

My background is that I grew up in Taiwan learning Traditional Chinese and now most of what I use in my professional life is in Simplified Chinese. How exactly should the character of hē, "to drink," be written?

I grew up learning that the character inside the bottom-right enclosure is 人. Now I see that it is mostly written as 匕. I don't know when this changed, and I don't think it's a matter of Traditional vs Simplified, either, as I see both versions in Traditional writing as well. This Wiktionary entry illustrates the confusion nicely. No one I know has noticed this change, which leads me to think that I'm either losing my mind or experiencing the Mandela Effect.

Here's the character that Emma is asking about: 喝 (traditional and simplified), but it is also written thus: [Whoops! No matter how hard I try, I can't get my browser to produce this character, even though I use the correct Unicode number, U+FA78. Whoops again! By tricking my browser, I think I can get it to appear here, , though I can't guarantee it'll still be there when I make this post (I won't attempt to type it again later in this post, but will simply refer to it as "the phantom character")]. It's the form with 人 in the bottom-right enclosure, not 匕. Actually, in the latter version, the stroke that starts at the top left, goes straight down vertically, then abruptly curves to the right before ending with an upward hook serves as the left side and bottom of the bottom right of this form of hē ("to drink"), so the only thing inside the "enclosure" at the bottom right is a short stroke that slants downward to the left, not 匕.

The Wiktionary entry for hē ("to drink") does indeed illustrate the problem nicely, since the character in the heading is the one my browser won't produce, but the examples for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean all have 喝, while the one for Vietnamese has the one that I can't call up with U+FA78.

As for the pronunciation of 喝 and the phantom character I can't produce, we have:

hē ("to drink")

hè ("shout loudly")

yè ("with a hoarse sound")

kài (listed in Wiktionary and other sources, but I haven't been able to track it down otherwise and assign a meaning to it, so I'm a bit dubious about its existence as a morphosyllable in MSM, though it may well exist in one or another topolect [e.g., Taiwanese], though I'm not sure where it comes from and I have no idea what it means) — FLASH!! Just found it in Hànyǔ dà zìdiǎn 漢語大字典 (Unabridged character dictionary of Sinitic; HDZ), 1.653b, where it says that, in this reading, 喝 = alas, can't copy this one either; it is the fourth rare variant from the left under yìtǐzì 异体字 — top center here (HDZ says, believe it or not, that it means "sound" [shēng 聲])

Aside from the phantom character that I can't type, variants of 喝 include 欱 and 哈, and there are about half a dozen others that I cannot type. The main point of this post, however, is that Emma and I, and doubtless millions of others, were not too long ago taught to write hē ("to drink") with a form of the character (U+FA78) that now barely exists. If we wrote 喝, it would have been considered an error.

Readings

"The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation" (2/6/12)
"How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16)
"Chinese character inputting" (10/17/15)
"Is there a practical limit to how much can fit in Unicode?" (10/27/17)
"Character crises" (6/15/18)
"Ask Language Log: Looking up hanzi for ignoramuses" (11/29/17)
"Sinological suffering" (3/31/17)
"Writing characters and writing letters" (11/17/18)
"An immodest proposal: 'Boycott the Chinese Language'" (11/18/18)
"The wrong way to write Chinese characters" (11/28/18)
"Sinographs by the numbers" (1/22/19)

Indirect question marks?

2019-02-11T12:55:19Z

Theresa May's 2/10/2019 letter to Jeremy Corbyn includes a sentence ending in a question mark that caught Graeme Orr's attention:

As I explained when we met, the Political Declaration explicitly provides for the benefits of a customs union – no tariffs, fees, charges or quantitative restrictions across all sectors and no checks on rules of origin (paragraph 23). However, it also recognises the development of the UK's independent trade policy beyond our economic partnership with the EU (paragraph 17). I am not clear why you believe it would be preferable to seek a say in future EU trade deals rather than the ability to strike our own deals? I can reassure you that securing frictionless trade in goods and agri-food products is one of our key negotiating objectives (for precisely the reasons you give – protecting jobs that depend on integrated supply chains and avoiding a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland). The fundamental negotiating challenge here is the EU's position that completely frictionless trade is only possible if the UK stays in the single market. This would mean accepting free movement, which Labour's 2017 General Election manifesto made clear you do not support.

In formal writing in general, the standard policy seems to be not to use question marks after indirect questions, such as the why-clause in this case. (Not that I'm any sort of authority on orthographic standards.)

Graeme's commentary brings in "question marks … in speech", by which he presumably means rising intonation, and usage in informal writing, as well as the possibility of a compositional or editing error:

Many people seem to use question marks after declarations, especially in speech, to invite further conversation. I and others lapse into using them, especially in informal writing, to soften a claim. But there is nothing soft about the rest of her paragraph, which is highly argumentative. Is her use a slip, caused by the ‘why’? Or does it somehow stress that his position if questionable? Or simply that it was a late night and her staff were stretched?

An image of the letter is here — and here's a screenshot of the paragraph in question:

Linguistic common ground as privilege

2019-02-10T20:21:41Z

Below is a guest post by Christian DiCanio:

2019 was named the International Year of Indigenous Languages by UNESCO. My friends and colleagues at the recent Annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) have been on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media discussing what this means for Linguistics as a field. With respect to publishing, several journals have pushed to emphasize linguistic research on indigenous languages. The LSA's own flagship journal, Language, has put out a call for submissions on different indigenous languages of the world. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America has even put out a call for submissions on under-represented languages.

There may be other journals too (which I am currently unaware of) attempting to emphasize how work on indigenous languages enhances our knowledge of language more generally, improves scholarship, and, in many cases, can promote the inclusion of ethnic minorities speaking or revitalizing these languages. This is all very positive and, as a linguist and scholar who studies indigenous languages of Mexico, I applaud the effort.

Will it be enough though? If linguists are serious about promoting the equality of indigenous languages and cultures in publishing, a greater type of paradigm shift needs to take place in what we believe is worthy of scholarship.

1. Not just a numbers game
When you read academic articles in linguistics, chances are that the topic is examined in a language that you know about. This is partly due to speaker population. There is extensive scholarship in English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Arabic, French, Russian, and Portuguese because 4.54 billion people speak these as their first or second languages.

Where linguistic scholarship has developed has also played a strong role. There are 263 million first language speakers of Bengali and 23 million first language speakers of Dutch in the world. Bengali outnumbers Dutch by more than 11:1. Yet, a quick search on Google Scholar for "Bengali phonetics" reveals 4,980 hits, while a simultaneous "Dutch phonetics" search reveals 52,600 hits. A search for "Bengali syntax" reveals 11,800 hits while "Dutch syntax" reveals 180,000 hits. When it comes to academic articles, the numbers are reversed. Here, Dutch outnumbers Bengali by either 10:1 or 16:1.

Dutch phonetics and syntax are not inherently more interesting than Bengali phonetics and syntax. Bengali has a far more interesting consonant system (if you ask me as a phonetician). Even Bengali morphology, which is far more complex than Dutch morphology, is under-studied relative to Dutch. Dutch speakers just happen to reside in economically-advantaged countries where there has been active English-based scholarship on their language for many years. Bengali speakers do not.

2. Small phenomena in big languages, big phenomena in small languages
A consequence of studying a language that has a history of academic scholarship is that many questions have already been examined. There is a literature on very specific aspects of the sound system of English (look up "English VOT", for instance) and Dutch morphology (look up "Dutch determiners", for instance). If linguists wish to study these languages and make a contribution, they must take out their magnifying glass and zoom in on specific details of what is already a restricted area.

To a great degree, the field of linguistics respects this approach. Scholarship is enhanced by digging deeply into particular topics even in well-studied languages. Moreover, since many members of the field are familiar (at least passively) with the basic analyses of phenomena in many well-studied languages, linguists zooming in on the particular details benefit from shared common ground. Resultingly, linguists are able to give talks on very specific topics within the morphology, syntax, phonology, or pragmatics of well-studied languages. One can find dissertations focusing on specific types of constructions in English (small clause complements) or specific morphemes in Spanish (such as the reflexive clitic 'se'). This is the state of the field. Linguists all agree that such topics are worthy of scholarship.

But imagine if you were asked to review an abstract or a paper where the author chose to zoom in on the specific details of a particular syntactic construction in Seenku (a Mande language spoken by 17,000 people in Burkina Faso, see work by Laura McPherson) or how tone influences vowel lengthening in a specific Mixtec language (spoken in Mexico). These are minority and indigenous languages. Many linguists would agree that these topics are worthy of scholarship if they contribute something to our knowledge of these languages and/or to different sub-disciplines of linguistics, but where do we place the bar by which we judge?

In practice, linguists often think these topics are limited in scope – even though they are no more limited than topics focusing on the reflexive clitic 'se' in Spanish. A consequence of this is that those working on indigenous languages must seek to situate their work in a broader perspective. This might mean that the research becomes comparative within a language family or that the research is a case study within a broader survey on similar phenomena. Rather than magnifying more deeply, if they want their work to be considered by the field at large, linguists working on indigenous languages often take the "go wide" approach instead.

Note that this is not inherently negative. After all, we should all seek to situate our work in broader typologies and compare our findings to past research. It's just that the person working on the Spanish reflexive clitic is seldom asked to do the same. Their contribution to scholarship is not questioned.

3. Privilege and a way to move forward
For the most part, academic linguists believe that all languages have equal expressive power. It is possible to express any human idea in any language. Linguists also believe (or know) that language is arbitrary. De Saussure famously argued that the relation between the signified and the signifier is arbitrary. In other words, it is equally valid to express plurality on nouns with an /-s/ suffix (in English) or a vowel change (in Italian and Polish). No specific relation is better than another in a different language. If we take these ideas seriously, research on certain languages should not be more subject to scrutiny than research on other ones.

Whether intentioned or not, both people and languages can be granted privilege. Scholars working on well-studied languages benefit from a shared linguistic common ground with other scholars which allows them to delve into deep and specific questions within these languages. This is a type of academic privilege. Without this common ground, scholars working on indigenous languages can sometimes face an uphill battle in publishing. And needing to prove one's validity is a hallmark of institutional bias.

So, how do we check our linguistic privilege in the international year of indigenous languages? As a way of moving positively forward into 2019, I'd like to suggest that linguists think of the following questions when they read papers, review abstracts/papers, and attend talks which focus on indigenous languages. This list is not complete, but if it has made you pause and question your perspective, then it has been useful.

Question #1: What languages get to contribute to the development of linguistic theory? Which languages are considered synonymous with "Language"?

If you have overlooked an extensive literature on languages you are unfamiliar with and include only those you are familiar with, you might be perpetuating a bias against indigenous languages in research. "Language" is not synonymous with "the languages I have heard of." Findings in indigenous languages are often considered "interesting footnotes" that are not incorporated into our more general notions of how we believe language works.

Question #2: Which phenomena are considered "language-specific"?

There is value to exploring language-specific details, but more often than not, phenomena occurring in indigenous languages are considered exotic or strange relative to what is believed to be typical. Frequently, judgments of typicality reflect a bias towards well-studied languages.

Question #3: Do you judge linguists working on indigenous languages or articles on indigenous languages by their citation index? (h/t to Laura McPherson)

Citations of work on indigenous languages are often lower than citations of work on well-studied languages. In an academic climate where one's citation index is often considered as a marker of the value of one's work, one might reach the faulty conclusion that an article on an indigenous language with fewer citations is poor scholarship.

Question #4: Do you quantify the number of languages or the number of speakers that a linguist works with?

If a linguist studies one or two indigenous/minority languages, do you judge their knowledge of linguistics/language to be lesser than that of someone who does research on one or two well-studied languages? If so, you are privileging well-studied languages.

I'd like to specifically note that I am not a sociologist of language or a sociolinguist. There are undoubtedly others who have probably worked on this question.

Above is a guest post by Christian DiCanio.

X of Y ↔ Y(ed) X

2019-02-11T02:14:57Z

Robert Ayers sent in this cartoon:
And asked "Was the 'colored person' fall from grace strictly a one off due to history? I see no movement from, eg, 'Asian person' to 'person of Asia'. Or 'Irishman' to 'man of Ireland'."

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to ignore the people/persons issue, and focus of the kinematics rather than the dynamics of the colored people to people of color change.

The Google Books ngram viewer makes it clear that people of color has recently taken the lead:

Looking at the ratio, we see that people of color is now about 3 times more frequent in the surveyed publications:

Article counts from the NYT archive lead to the same conclusion, with the difference that the overall sum of the terms increased more recently:

As for the dynamics of the change, and the answer to Robert Ayers' question, the driving forces are clearly the indexical connotations of socio-culturally loaded terms. But that's a subject for another day.

Penn motto

2019-02-10T02:11:21Z

Is there a mistake here?

Photograph courtesy of Ines Mair. Taken yesterday in Pfaffenhofen, Tirol, Austria. The glass was purchased in Philadelphia by her husband Gerald Mair when he was a visiting student at the University of Pennsylvania Law School decades ago.

The story of the Penn motto:

Penn's motto is based on a line from Horace's III.24 (Book 3, Ode 24), quid leges sine moribus vanae proficiunt? ("of what avail empty laws without [good] morals?"). From 1756 to 1898, the motto read Sine Moribus Vanae. When it was pointed out that the motto could be translated as "Loose women without morals", the university quickly changed the motto to literae sine moribus vanae ("Letters without morals [are] useless"). In 1932, all elements of the seal were revised. As part of the redesign, it was decided that the new motto "mutilated" Horace, and it was changed to its present wording, Leges Sine Moribus Vanae ("Laws without morals [are] useless").

(Source)

I rather like what we have ended up with.

Addendum

At least some early Latin texts have leces = leges (e. g., Eph. Ep. 19).

Subpar subtitles

2019-02-09T17:49:27Z

This is a full length martial arts action movie (English title "Sword Master"). You probably won't be able to stand watching much of it, and you have to put up with some pretty atrocious fighting scenes, but if you stick around for a few minutes of the Chinglish subtitles, you'll find them to be quite bizarre, although most seem to be just poor automatic translation.

"A[n] elite swordsman who is haunted by his skill, and a challenger who aims to take his place at all costs."

Incidentally, it has nearly 11,000,000 views, so some people must enjoy what they're seeing.

There are 746 comments (I read all of them). Most are about the poor quality of the subtitles, though some drift over into the deeper meaning of the movie. Here are a few of my favorites (the final one is the best):

=================

Ally Hosenbokus, 11 months ago: the person who wrote these subtitles is certainly an expert in linguistics.

Nina Willems, 11 months ago: living computer mean run occasional box repeatedly facility owner testing.

REPLY: Robbie McGill, 10 months ago: Did you use the same linguist as they did for the sub-titles ???

Mike OZ, 9 months ago: The subtitle must be in a new language never heard before!

Judy Neville, 8 months ago: Is the translator high?

Tofu, 1 year ago: Good movie, but the English Subs are obviously NOT done by human. Shame. smh

Paul Fonua, 8 months ago: It's obvious none of you picked up on the poetic style of the translation. After a few readings into the translation, it should be clear to all that the translator isn't using words, but ideas for the translation.

Luther Israel, 8 months ago: I enjoyed the subtitle, it made me use my brain while watching

Abinash Daimari, 10 months ago: i cudnt understnd anything

Jesus Christ, 11 months ago: Good movie with proper special effect, but the subtitle is just junk :(… The meanings behind the scene are good and deep, which reflect the core of long Chinese tradition and culture. Only your true opponent do understand you. It's the supreme honor to die under the sword of your true opponent. Sacrifice for your own clan and for what you love. Life is miserable if you only live in hate and pain. Understand and embrace whatever your other half has, otherwise leave is the only resurrection……

PeterDad60,1 year ago (edited): Ahh just another Communist Party Propaganda film designed make Chinese people think they can actually do this things! To me, it's a sign that Chinese are insecure about their manhood and true fighting abilities. Can't the Chinese government simply make a movie with the Chinese people doing what is actually possible? For once? Oh that's right, this is propaganda.

srey sros bopha, 1 year ago: The ugly face master told his tricks to the other guy,, so the meaning of this,, Don't trust nobody…

Teresita Azada, 8 months ago: They we're fingting with long dress, how do they fight with so many clothes

YouTubex, 1 year ago: The translation are so funny that they bring an extra layer of entertainment to this magnificent movie.

Hemant Yadav, 11 months ago: Seems to be a good movie… Closed within 12 minutes due to wrong Subtitles

dare devil, 1 year ago: I wana watch it til the end but NO!! THE CAPTION IS PURE STUPIDITY! IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE MOVIE! The translator is so stupid!

Ay Oba, 4 months ago: What what subtitle writing, my no knowing

Mhay PM, 9 months ago: Hahah im so entertain of the subtitle so funny

Tim, 8 months ago Translated for your enjoyment by the children of the Shanghai elementary school.

sonicvictory, 10 months ago: Its like a 2 year old tried to translate this into subtitles. frikin lol.

Steve Firth, 5 months ago: I know the subs are hilariously poor n all, but can anyone explain why it drops in to Greek(?) at 54:43?

Stephanie Murray, 8 months ago: Subtitles are science fiction!

Seymour Darby,1 year ago: Apegklwbisoyn what word is this. The translation makes no sense. Movie is tough.

Dumol, 6 months ago: i dont really care if the english subtitle is incorrect.. it is in the one who watch the movie to understand…

Eric Acob, 1 week ago: OMG I'm not understand the language but tnx because I have a Subtitles

Eugene Espina, 7 months ago R.I.P. English….this translator deserves an award……reading the translation is the only way I could understand what is the movie all about. At this time I felt dizzy to understand

tyson, 9 months ago: These are the compelling last lines of this movie.

"Also you can kill."

"Storage!"

=================

For a classic case of this genre, see "Backstroke of the West" (1/15/17).

[Thanks to Victor Steinbok]

Hypothetical misnegation

2019-02-09T15:47:23Z

From Eoin Ryan:

I noticed this in an article on Salon.com, "Charter schools are pushing public education to the breaking point: Charters are driving Boston’s public education system to the financial brink" by Jeff Bryant, published on Friday, February 8.

The overall tenor of the piece, as the headline and subhead make clear, is that the way charter schools are funded in Massachussetts is sucking funding from public schools, with bad consequences throughout the state and especially in Boston. So, per the article, the charter school situation is not good in Massachussetts:

This is not to say Massachusetts might be doing a better job of managing the charter industry than any other state. Charters in Massachusetts are more regulated than they are in most other states, and their numbers are capped…

Or so says the text. But I think this should be "[]his is not to say MA might not be doing a better job", with a second "not". The construction with two "not"s is hard to parse (maybe I'm wrong that there should be a second "not"!), perhaps leading to a sort of "edito" based on the thought that so many "not"s can't be right, but the trickiness seems partly related to the presence of the "might".

What do you think?

(For more than no one doesn't want to read about misnegation, see here.)

English New Year's couplet

2019-02-08T06:32:57Z

From Zeyao Wu:

Unsquared transcription:

Eat well sleep well each every day

Good health good wealth all year round.

Around this time of year, Chinese traditionally liked to post "spring couplets" (chūnlián 春聯 / 春联) — a special type of "antithetical couplet" (duìlián 對聯 / 对联) — on the door posts of their homes or elsewhere as auspicious decorations. Here someone has fashioned a spring couplet from square word English calligraphy.

Spring couplets are typically heptasyllabic, and this one is heptagraphic. In other respects, though, it is atypical, since it doesn't have a quadrisyllabic capping phrase for the lintel and is not really antithetical in its structure. Moreover, it doesn't follow the usages of either of the two established versions of square word calligraphy (see "Readings" below). The sentiment, however, is certainly suitable for best wishes at the advent of the Lunar New Year.

Happy Year of the Pig, everybody!

Readings

"An Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy" (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Xu Bing (developed in 1994)

"Square Word Calligraphy" (Omniglot), David B. Kelley (new version, 2012)

"Chinese characters formed from letters of the alphabet" (8/20/14)

"Sinographic memory in Vietnamese writing" (4/16/14)

"The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation" (2/612)

"Book from the Sky" (1997)

"Book from the Ground" (12/5/12)

"Peppa Pig has been purged" (5/2/18)

"Peppa Pig uncensored — for now" (1/20/19)

Scalar implicature reversal of the week

2019-02-07T20:59:18Z

From "How to Complain at a Restaurant? Just Ask Our Critic", NYT 2/5/2019:

In general, the more specific your complaint, the more likely it is to be understood. The worst, most useless and potentially dangerous complaints are broad, sweeping condemnations.

“There is complaining that makes you think about what you’re doing, and there is complaining where everybody thinks they’re entitled to say anything,” said Rita Sodi, the chef and owner of the Tuscan restaurant I Sodi in Manhattan. “Saying, ‘This is terrible’ is not complaining. That is being rude. It’s like, ‘You’re ugly.’ It’s telling me that I’m ugly. It’s personal. It’s my food.”

Even when the person you’re grousing to did not cook your pasta personally, you should proceed gently, in nonconfrontational terms. It may be helpful to imagine that you are speaking with an air traffic controller trying to land 20 jets during a snowstorm; you would try very hard not to add to the overall stress level in the tower, even if your child was on one of those jets.

If it's not obvious to you what's gone wrong in the highlighted sentence, consider the alternatives

…even if the passengers on those jets were all strangers to you.
…especially if your child was on one of those jets.

This is the OED's sense 8.a. for even:

Used to convey that what is being referred to is an extreme case in comparison with a weaker or more general one which is stated or implied in the adjacent context. Now the prevailing use of the word in English.

As the cited gloss indicates, there's a directionality involved in the notion of X as an extreme case in "even X", so that "…even if your child was on one of those jets" assumes a gradation of passengers for whom you'd have different degrees of concern, with your child at an extreme of the concern scale.

But which extreme, and from what direction are we approaching it?

Normally "X (happens), even if Y", where Y is a point on some scale S, implies that X would also happen in some circumstance whose value on the scale S is less extreme than Y. But "less extreme" has to be interpreted in terms of the contextually implied direction of the scale.

For example, the 2016 NYT headline "Automakers Go Electric, Even if Gas Is Cheap" implies that the automakers would also go electric if gas were more expensive — and in fact would be naturally more likely to do so.

But if we predict that "Customers will buy more trucks, even if gas is expensive", the implied scale (price of gas) is the same, but the implied direction is reversed.

Returning to the cited sentence about restaurant complaints, and the hypothetical conversation with a harried air traffic controller: The contextual interpretation of the "even if" clause is that you would also be polite if the passengers on the jets were people that you care less about than your child — and that in fact you'd naturally be more likely to be polite in that case.

This set of issues was first (?) explicitly discussed in Larry Horn's 1969 CLS paper "A presuppositional analysis of only and even". See "What does even even mean?", 2/8/2011, for some further discussion.

You've probably noticed that it's really hard to explain the contextually implied meanings in this case — presumably that's why the writer and editors didn't notice the problem. In fact, as in the related problems of misnegation, it's kind of amazing that any of us ever gets this right.

[h/t John O'Meara ]

Dialect map

2019-02-07T11:54:39Z

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover text: "There's one person in Missouri who says "carbo bev" who the entire rest of the country HATES." alt="Carbonated Beverage Language Map"

The original (or at least one of them):

"Amarillo by Morning" sung by a Mongolian

2019-02-06T10:30:55Z

Mongolian gets 97 points for singing "Amarillo by Morning" on US TV show but didn't understand a word he was singing. His pronunciation was perfect.

[VHM: The YouTube video linked to here is currently unavailable, but our resourceful Language Log readers have elsewhere found this song sung by Enkh Erdene and others by him as well, some of them captioned. See the comments below.]

Title on YouTube: "Enkh Erdene: Monglian Singer With ELVIS Voice! Meet The Monglian Cowboy | World's Best 2019"

"Mongolian Singer Nails A Classic Country Song – Stunning", by Dale Mussen, WYRK (2/4/19):

Last night we were introduced to a singer from Mongolia who doesn't speak a word of English. He had an interpreter on stage with him as he spoke with show host James Corden. Then it was time for him to sing and I couldn't believe what I was hearing. And we found out he doesn't really know the meaning of the words he's singing, but considering where he's from his performance is stunning.

Brought lots of tears to my eyes. Incredible performance.

[h.t. Bathrobe]

Exploit Africa

2019-02-03T16:53:05Z

Happy and healthy year of the Pig!

kāituò 开拓 / 開拓 can mean "develop (border regions); break new ground; open up (new horizons); extend; expand; exploit"

Many more photographs of the pictured event may be found in this Chinese article.

[H.t. June Teufel Dreyer, Tansen Sen, and Jacob Rutherford]

How about some delicious roasted husband, dear?

2019-02-03T17:17:19Z

From Anand Mahindra's Twitter account:

https://twitter.com/anandmahindra/status/1090479366235213824

The name of the dish in Chinese is:

měiwèi kǎofū 美味烤夫
("delicious kǎofū 烤夫") — we'll figure out what kǎofū 烤夫 is below [hint: it's not "roasted husband", although that's what the literal meaning of the two characters is])

Here's a variation:

Source: "40 Most Bloodcurdling Chinese Mistranslations Ever! Warning: You Will Laugh To Death!", Seenox, 15th item; I've covered about half of these items on Language Log before. This magnificent time wasting compilation is mentioned by Geoff Pullum in "Mandarin Myths", The Chronicle of Higher Education (7/8/14). "Sixi roasted husband" is also mentioned here: "Tired of bad English tarnishing its image, China has new translation guidelines for signs", by Echo Huang (6/23/17), which links to this Weibo post.

The name of this latter dish in Chinese is:

sìxǐ kǎofū 四喜烤夫 ("four joys kǎofū 烤夫") — the "four joys" refer to four ingredients that go along with the kǎofū 烤夫; they are:

gān xiānggū, jīnzhēn gān, xiān sǔn, mù'ěr

乾香菇,金針乾,鮮筍,木耳

"dried (shiitake) mushrooms, dried tiger lily buds, fresh bamboo shoots, wood ear fungi"

Other similar ingredients could be substituted to make up the "four joys".

Do not confuse this "four joys kǎofū 烤夫" dish with sìxǐ wánzi 四喜丸子 ("four joys meatballs"), which consists of four meatballs in gravy.

Now it's time to figure out what kǎofū 烤夫 really means.

First let's get the orthography down. The full form of the term is 烤麩 (simplified 烤麸). People probably found the semantophore of the second character to be troublesome and time-consuming to write, so they just wrote 夫 for the sound. Unfortunately, one of the many meanings of 夫 is "husband", which is where the "roasted husband" comes in.

If we add kǎo 烤 ("roasted") to fū 麩, we get kǎofū 烤麩, which is “a spongy variety of fried wheat gluten used in Chinese cuisine”. Language Log readers will recall our recent post on "Seitan" (12/21/18), which is about a similar wheat-based foodstuff.

Such are the folkways surrounding characters and food in China.

[Thanks to Ben Zimmer]