Advanced English Skills

Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub bugger off to go away ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Word of the Day Word of the Day: staggering This word has appeared in 611 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence? ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Language Log The true identity of the first Chinese translator of Lady Chatterley's Lover There has long been a suspicion that the first Chinese translator of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928/1932), Ráo Shùyī 饒述一, about whom next to nothing is known, was actually the scholar and theoretician of aesthetics, Zhū Guāngqián 朱光潛 (1897-1986). To give a little bit of background about the nature of the two translations of the novel, here is the abstract of a recent scholarly article comparing them: This article discusses how sex-related content is rendered in two Chinese translations of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover: Rao Shuyi (1936) and Zhao Susu (2004). It is found that Rao's translation features explicitness, flexibility and Europeanization, while Zhao's translation features conservativeness and domestication. And the observed features in the two translations regarding sex-related content are explained from perspectives of social and historical background, translation purpose and intended readership, and patronage. Index Terms–Lady Chatterley's Lover, translation, sexuality Zhu, Kun. "The Translation of Sex-related Content in Lady Chatterley's Lover in China." Theory and Practice in Language Studies, vol. 10, no. 8, Aug. 2020, pp. 933+. Gale Literature Resource Center. For those who are interested, the title of D. H. Lawrence's novel  in Chinese is 《Chátàilái fūrén de qíngrén 查泰萊夫人的情人》. Decades ago, I was aware of this controversial mystery over who the first Chinese translator was, and I poked around a bit to try to solve it, but got nowhere fast.  Furthermore, my mentor, Patrick Hanan, who was extremely learned about Chinese esthetics and esoteric fiction, though he solved many other problems surrounding the authorship of Chinese literary works, to the best of my knowledge never attempted to figure this one out.  So I have decided, rather than flailing around undertaking deep research on Zhu Guangqian, to put it to the collective readership of Language Log, where surely there are others who are far more qualified to work on it than I, including my close friend and colleague, also surnamed Zhū 朱, namely, Zhū Qìngzhī 朱慶之. Selected readings * "Linguistic divergence and convergence" (4/17/18) — Lady Chatterley's Lover, which despite its reputation has more in it about linguistic ideology than about sex * "'We are all the other now'" (11/8/12) — [(bgz) OED has the sexual euphemism from 1922, in two quotes from Joyce's Ulysses: "They would be just good friends like a big brother and sister without all that other" and "Bit light in the head. Monthly or effect of the other." It's also in Lady Chatterley's Lover: "She loved me to talk to her and kiss her… But the other, she just didn't want."] * Roger Shuy, "Code-Switching in Lady Chatterly's Lover", York Papers in Linguistics 1980. [h.t. shaing tai] ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub put on (3) to present an event such as a concert, a seminar, a sporting tournament, etc. ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Idiom of the Day keep in step with the times To be, strive to be, or appear to be contemporary, fashionable, and/or relevant in modern times. Watch the video ➖ @EngSkills ➖

limpid

Word of the Day buoyancy Definition: (noun) Irrepressible liveliness and good spirit. Synonyms: irrepressibility. Usage: With his natural buoyancy of spirits, he began to hope again. Discuss ➖ @EngSkills ➖

mably now required by the journal's editors: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/FishermanCrocAI.png I'll leave it to the commenters to explore the appropriate English pronunciations of Benggwigwishingasuchus eremicarminis — but you get a free subscription to LLOG if you can remember all 30-odd characters of the name, after a short period doing something else… ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Language Log "Fisherman Croc's desert song"? Shannon McDonagh, "'What the Hell Is This?': Crocodile-Like Fossil Rewrites Triassic History", Newsweek 7/11/2024: The groundbreaking discovery of the Benggwigwishingasuchus eremicarminis reveals the presence of waterside crocodile-like creatures around the globe during the Middle Triassic. Broadly known as pseudosuchian archosaurs—four-legged, carnivorous beings with an armadillo-like coating—these creatures are now known to have existed coastally between 247.2 million and 237 million years ago. This proposed revision to Triassic history didn't startle me, due to my lack of relevant background assumptions about the distribution of crocodile-like creatures during that period. But the species name Benggwigwishingasuchus eremicarminis did catch my attention. The paper announcing the discovery helps a bit — Nathan Smith et al., "A new pseudosuchian from the Favret Formation of Nevada reveals that archosauriforms occupied coastal regions globally during the Middle Triassic", Biology Letters 7/10/2024: Abstract: Recent studies suggest that both stem- and crown-group Archosauria encompassed high ecological diversity during their initial Triassic radiation. We describe a new pseudosuchian archosaur, Benggwigwishingasuchus eremicarminis gen. et sp. nov., from the Anisian (Middle Triassic) Fossil Hill Member of the Favret Formation (Nevada, USA), a pelagic setting in the eastern Panthalassan Ocean characterized by the presence of abundant ammonoids and large-bodied ichthyosaurs. […] Etymology: The generic name combines ‘Benggwi Gwishinga’ from the Shoshone term for ‘catching fish’, with ‘suchus’, the Greek term for Sobek, the Egyptian crocodile-headed god. The specific epithet combines the Latin ‘erema’ and ‘carminis’, meaning ‘desert song’, and honours Elaine Kramer and Monica Shaffer, and their love of the palaeontology, museums, and opera of the southwestern USA. The binomen is intended to translate roughly as ‘Fisherman Croc's desert song’. That reveals some of the morphological analysis, though not the Shoshone morphosyntactic details, nor the appropriate pronunciation for the phrasal borrowing into English, The Shoshoni dictionary at the Shoshoni Language Project lists both benggwi and gwishinga as meaning "fish", in the Duckwater Shoshone language: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Shoshone1.png http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Shoshone2.png I'm guessing that the first of those words means "fish" as a noun, and the other means  "catch (fish)" verb. The source "Harbin 1988" is cited in the references as "Harbin, Theresa, Annette George, and Ricky Mike. 1988. The Duckwater Shoshone language and Culture Curriculum. The Duckwater Shoshone Bilingual Curriculum Development Team". I haven't been able to find a copy of that material, but an Eastern Shoshone Working Dictionary confirms that guess (even though the Duckwater Shoshone tribe is identified as a Western Shoshone group), giving bêngkwi glossed as "fish" and gwêshi glossed as "entangle", with a derived form gwêshigkeN glossed as "trap, catch, ensnare, net, entangle": http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Bengkwi.png http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/gweshi.png There's a final non-linguistic mystery in the etymology of Benggwigwishingasuchus eremicarminis, namely the identity of the two people given credit for the "desert song" part of the name: The specific epithet combines the Latin ‘erema’ and ‘carminis’, meaning ‘desert song’, and honours Elaine Kramer and Monica Shaffer, and their love of the palaeontology, museums, and opera of the southwestern USA. They're not among the paper's authors ("Nathan D. Smith, Nicole Klein, P. Martin Sander and Lars Schmitz"). Nor are they mentioned in the paper's acknowledgements. An interesting note: the paper contains a brief section denying AI assistance, presu[...]

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