Questionable English translation of Karl Marx's words

[English version follows]

马克思关于家庭的一段中文翻译：
“那时就可以看出，妇女解放的第一个先决条件就是一切女性重新回到公共的劳动中去；而要达到这一点，又要求个体家庭不再成为社会的经济单位。”（《马克思恩格斯全集·二十一卷·二、家庭》
https://www.marxists.org/chinese/marx-engels/21/005-03.htm

这句话的英译可能有误：
"Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02d.htm
其中汉译的“妇女”是英译的wife（妻子），汉译的“个体家庭”是英译的monogamous family（一夫一妻制家庭）。难道恩格斯在主张废除一夫一妻制家庭？多年来，讲英语的网民似乎的确有这样的看法，甚至维基The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State条也有这样的倾向。

看看恩格斯的德语原文：
"Es wird sich dann zeigen, daß die Befreiung der Frau zur ersten Vorbedingung hat die Wiedereinführung des ganzen weiblichen Geschlechts in die öffentliche Industrie, und daß dies wieder erfordert die Beseitigung der Eigenschaft der Einzelfamilie als wirtschaftlicher Einheit der Gesellschaft."
http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me21/me21_036.htm
其中汉译的“妇女”、英译的wife是德语的Frau，这个德语词兼有“妇女”和“妻子”两个意义。虽然在这段以上的文字中可译作“妻子”，但在这句话中译为“妇女”更恰当。更重要的不同之处在于Einzelfamilie，英语直译即single family或individual family、汉语“个体家庭”，但marxists.org网站收录的英译为monogamous family，意思就非常不同了，可以认为是严重的误译。另外，德语Vorbedingung直译是“先决条件”，英译为condition而不是precondition则稍有偏差。至于德语Industrie被汉译为“劳动”还是“事业”无关紧要。

总之，这段话的汉译高于英译。汉译中唯一可商榷的是头两个字“那时”，也许是“那么”（德语dann，英语then）的笔误。

English version

Frederick Engels' Einzelfamilie was translated as 'monogamous family'. I don't think that's right. The German original is

"Es wird sich dann zeigen, daß die Befreiung der Frau zur ersten Vorbedingung hat die Wiedereinführung des ganzen weiblichen Geschlechts in die öffentliche Industrie, und daß dies wieder erfordert die Beseitigung der Eigenschaft der Einzelfamilie als wirtschaftlicher Einheit der Gesellschaft."

The English translation on the fairly authoritative or at least frequently cited website Marxists.org is

"Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society."

I think the German word Einzelfamilie should be translated simply and literally as 'single family' or 'individual family'. Engels was proposing that we not treat each family as an economic unit. It's possible that a careless English reader of the above translation would focus on just the phrase "abolition of the monogamous family" and assume that Engels was advocating abolition of monogamous families (and therefore calling for polygamy). That would be a gross misunderstanding of Engels. The word 'monogamous' or its noun means something totally different.

Also, the German word Frau in this context means 'woman' more than 'wife'. But that's a minor point.

Correcting a petition

以前写过一篇Incorrect English in a petition to the White House（或见微博），其中我对一篇请愿书做了改病句、改错词。最近读到内容相似的一篇请愿书，英语相对好很多。文章如下，我的评论在括弧中。

Sun is the sole suspect in a notorious （比上一篇请愿书用famous好多了） and high-profile poisoning case in China. In 1994/1995, Tsinghua University （上一篇该词的首字母误写为小写u） student Ling Zhu was repeatedly poisoned with thallium （上一篇该词的首字母误写为大写T） while she was studying at the university. Sun （此处缺逗号） who was （省略who was更好，因为后面主句动词又用了was） Zhu’s roommate in the dormitory, was the only individual with both access to the toxin and a motive. This act resulted in catastrophic consequences for Ling Zhu, leaving her paralysed with brain damage. Zhu has （简单过去式应略去has） died on 22 Dec 2023 （此处缺逗号） which now makes Sun a murder suspect.

Due to Tsinghua University's inaction and Sun's politically powerful family, key evidence vanished, and （此处缺定冠词the） investigation tamed. （暂未搜到tame的这种用法，也许是澳洲英语？我会用stalled） This unsolved case has evoked considerable public outrage and sympathy for Zhu's family over the past 30 years.

Sun later escaped to the U.S and in 2013, following the U.S. Chinese community's discovery of her presence and （and应改为逗号） a petition was launched with over 151,000 people. （people改为signatures或people's signatures更好）

Sun is now residing in Australia with companies and multiple estates jointly owned by her and her husband Feiyu Xie whom she supposedly divorced.

I appeal for a thorough investigation into whether Sun had provided false information when obtaining Australian visa and if （此处缺she） had arranged a fake marriage with Mr. Kosloski to obtain Australian residency. If warranted, Sun should face deportation. Australia is a nation known for its beauty and integrity, it is no long （应为longer） a dumping ground for convicts! We must not allow individual （应为复数individuals） with such a past in our precious country.

As demonstrated by the public’s voice. We （除非是固定惯例，否则句号应为逗号，We应为we） call for Sun to return to China and face justice.

... If you have additional information and would like to report Sun, you can email andrew.giles.mp@aph.gov.au or via Minster （应为Minister） for Immigration

Oxford comma (牛津逗号)

牛津逗号（Oxford comma），又称连续逗号（Serial comma），是指如果并列三个或更多的名词，在倒数第二个名词之后添加逗号。例如
France, Italy, and Spain
假如省略这个逗号，就写成
France, Italy and Spain
两种写法都不错，但牛津逗号现在越来越流行，尤其是在美国。《牛津书写风格手册》曾建议使用，因此得名。

为什么牛津逗号值得推荐？因为英语里有同位语短语或词组，它与前面的名词也是用逗号与它隔开。同位语词组由两部分组成，中间用一个逗号。有三个或更多的名词时使用牛津逗号有助于将它与同位语词组区分开来。例如
（1）We invited the rhinoceri, Washington, and Lincoln.（“我们邀请了犀牛、华盛顿和林肯。”）
如果不用牛津逗号
（2）We invited the rhinoceri, Washington and Lincoln.（“我们邀请了犀牛，即华盛顿和林肯”，或“我们邀请了犀牛、华盛顿和林肯。”）
语句（2）有两种解读，如果读者习惯了牛津逗号的书写并且以为作者在他的写作中也遵守这个规则，读者就会理解为“我们邀请了犀牛，即华盛顿和林肯”，就是说将Washington and Lincoln（“华盛顿和林肯”）看作是复数的rhinoceri（“犀牛”）的同位词组而对它具体列举说明（好比I have two sons, John and Jack中的John and Jack）。这种理解并非完全无理，因为有可能犀牛饲养员或动物园的确有两只犀牛，还给它们分别取名为“华盛顿”和“林肯”。

但牛津逗号并不解决所有问题，例如
They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid, and a cook.
无论如何这句话都有两种理解：
“他们和贝蒂、一个女佣和一个厨师一起去了俄勒冈州。”
“他们和贝蒂（一个女佣）和一个厨师一起去了俄勒冈州。”
为避免这种语义模糊性，语句必须改写。一个好的作者或作家必须随时提醒自己，写出的语句是否会被误解。当然，故意造成歧义而产生一种特殊的修辞效果则另当别论。

Shall or will?

When I learned English thirty plus years ago in China, we were taught to say "I shall", "we shall", and "you will", "he/she/it will". That is, "shall" for the first-person verb and "will" for the second- and third-person. But coming to the US, I realize "shall" is rarely said. It is said if the speaker intends to emphasize his (her) point and in that case it's not limited to the first person. I just came across the renowned English language linguist David Crystal's The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language where (on p.224) he says "[m]odern usage does not observe this distinction. Indeed, it may never have existed in the language, but only in the minds of grammarians anxious to impose order on a 'messy' area of usage". Wasn't that enlightening, especially the latter statement! I don't know if the English textbooks in China still recommend that usage. It misled a generation of English learners back then. One coworker of mine who came to the US from southern China in the 1970s still says "I / we shall" today, though this is a fellow that couldn't care less about English, judging by his frequent spelling errors and strong accent in spite of his 40+ years living in the US. Fortunately, no other rules made up by the prescriptive grammarians came into the textbooks we were using, such as the no split infinitive rule (i.e. avoid saying "to fully understand"). Apparently the English educators in China did keep an eye on the actual usage of the language in English-speaking countries.

Phonetic symbols /i/ and /u/ in some dictionaries mislead English learners

Many English dictionaries published in China use /i/ and /u/ symbols to represent the sounds /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ respectively. As a result, some learners mistakenly think the vowel in, for example, bit is just a short version of that in beat.

复旦大学葛传椝主编的《新英汉词典》于1975年首次出版，在随后的拨乱反正、科学的春天和改革开放初期发挥了不可估量的作用。随后多次的修订版增删了许多词汇，并对词汇例句做了很大的改变。但词典在词汇注音上没有变化，它采用的注音方式不经意地对学习者造成了一些负面影响。

《词典》声明“用国际音标注音，采用宽式注音法。音标注在本词后，放在方括号内”。所谓宽（broad）、窄（narrow）式注音并无严格的定义，两者分别相当于说宽泛、严格的注音。[1]但《词典》至少有两个元音的标注是误导的，/i/和/u/。

在《词典》中，/i/是比如bit（“一点”；“比特”）的元音，而/i：/是比如beat（“打”）的元音。[2]从符号看，后者似乎只是前者发音的延长。但实际上，bit中元音的发音部位也与beat的元音不同，正确的音标符号是/ɪ/，口腔中比/i：/的发音部位略低、略靠后、嘴形略大，介于/i/与/e/之间。从维基“次闭前不圆唇元音”网页看，上海话“一”即发此音。（会上海话的网友可帮助验证！）

另外，《词典》标记比如book（“书”）的发音为/buk/，boot为/bu：t/，使学习者以为后者中的元音/u：/与前者元音/u/的唯一区别是音长。但事实上，book的正确发音是/bʊk/，其中/ʊ/比/u/发音部位略低、略靠前、嘴形略大。

如果你读book为/buk/，就会给人留下有外国口音的印象。如果读bit为/bit/，在缺乏上下文的情况下还是会被人以为在说beat。[3]只有借助上下文听者才能听懂你说的是bit，但会感觉你有口音。

用/i/代替/ɪ/、/u/代替/ʊ/注音似乎是许多在中国出版的英语词典的惯例。由于这种惯例可能影响学习者对/ɪ/和/ʊ/发音的掌握，词典编撰者有必要纠正。

注：
[1]注意，所谓宽、窄这种分法并不对应音素、语音转录（phonemic / phonetic transcription）注音的区分，后者有严格的定义。
[2]国际音标中有专门的符号表示长元音，这里用冒号代替以便更好在网页中显示。另外这里用斜杠而不用方括弧，但斜杠在此并不代表音素转录。
[3]在英、美英语中，没有唯一通过音长以区别两个词的例子。但在澳洲英语中存在，如full和fool、pull和pool完全靠元音长短区分，见维基Australian English phonology条。

Study time: vocabulary vs. grammar

Steve Kaufmann is an undisputed celebrity in the language study community. According to Wikipedia, "[a]s of 2023, he has an understanding of 20 languages, to varying degrees". In his blog, he says "Vocabulary is much more important than grammar. The grammar you acquire gradually as you become familiar with the language, with the words, but first of all you need words." This caused much debate in the Facebook "Polyglots (The Community)" group. Most comments disagree with him. To find out whether this disagreement is genuine, I started a poll in the same group.

"For all the languages you're studying, given 10 hours dedicated to vocabulary and grammar, what is the average ratio of time of your study in these two areas? It's true that oftentimes there is overlap. What is polled here is a subjective one. So just give a rough estimate."

After a few days, there are 42 votes. The following is the result, shown as ratio of vocabulary:grammar study time, and percent of the responses

8:2  30%
9:1  20%
10:0 15%
7:3  11%
5:5   9%
4:6   8%
1:9, 3:7, 6:4 2%
2:8   1%

We can see that for instance nearly 1/3 of the language learners spend 8 out of 10 hours studying vocabulary and 2 hours studying grammar, while 1% of the people do exactly the opposite. This result shows that the polyglots taking this poll definitely spend more time studying vocabulary than grammar. If this time distribution implies relative importance, it is clearly consistent with Mr. Kaufmann's opinion that vocabulary is more important than grammar.

This poll is followed by 26 comments. Some interesting findings from them are:

(1) If the learner is a beginner in learning a specific language, he or she spends a significant amount of time studying grammar. The vocabulary:grammar study time ratio could be 5:5 or even lower. But as study progresses, the ratio gradually increases.

(2) This poll is about the learner's current state, averaged over all the languages being studied if multiple. One interesting example is a Portuguese learner who says 10:0 when studying Spanish (no need to study grammar as the two languages are so much alike on that), 8:2 when studying English, and 7:3 when studying Swedish. So I did an average for him, which is (10+8+7):(0+2+3)=25:5=8.33:1.67 or about 8:2. He agreed.

(3) Different languages require different ratios. For example, Chinese is generally considered to demand an extraordinary amount of time on vocabulary but very little time on grammar, unlike say Latin, Ancient Greek, or Sanskrit. Since many languages are studied and polled about, there won't be bias introduced by any specific language. And if a learner is studying multiple languages, he's supposed to enter his average.

(4) Some people say they don't study either because their study is completely immersion. That is unusual for an adult learner. But lack of urgency, prioritizing fun well above everything else, and having a childlike curious mind make this option possible.

Back to Kaufmann. We can reasonably believe that he is at an advanced stage on all or most of the languages he knows. As said above (see (1)), at this stage, the vocabulary:grammar ratio tends to be high, leading him to make that remark. Why do people show their disagreement with him? It's possible that most people have the tendency to misread "X is more important than Y" as "X is important but Y is not". This tendency is especially common when people read an online article about health or medical science. Secondly, people disagree with somebody else by interpreting the latter's words as a universal rule, to make it more criticizable. If one of the languages you're studying takes more time on grammar than vocabulary, even if you're studying multiple languages for which this ratio is averaged to be in favor of vocabulary instead, you still disagree by ignoring the average.

Grammatical particle 把 in Chinese and word order

According to Wikipedia, 42% of world languages follow the subject-verb-object (SVO) order, and 45% follow the SOV order. In a Facebook group, someone said that Chinese is SVO in general, but changes to SOV if the object is a prepositional object. Two examples are given

(1) 我把手机忘了 ("I forgot the cell phone"; very literally "I 把 the cell phone forgot")
(2) 一本书从桌子掉下来 ("a book falls from the table")

I agree that sentence (1) follows the SOV order, as 把 shifts the object 手机 to before the verb 忘. But 把 is not a prepositon. It is a grammatical particle, which has no meaning whatsoever, unlike a preposition. A grammatical particle, e.g. 把 in Chinese and to (as in to do) in English, only serves certain grammatical purposes and if omitted would render the sentence ungrammatical unless other adjustments are made.

On the other hand, sentence (2) is not SOV, because 从桌子 ("from the table") cannot be the object acted upon by the verb 掉 ("fall"). Instead, it is an adverbial clause. In fact, it is wrong to consider any prepositional object (which may be better called prepositional phrase) an object in a sentence. Contrast that with a noun phrase (NP), which bahaves like a noun and can be the subject or object in a sentence, because the last element of a NP is its "head"; "a big boat" still refers to a boat. But in a prepositional object, neither the preposition nor the noun following it can serve as the "head". Omitting either one would make the sentence ungrammatical and meaningless.

Chinese particle 把 moves the object of a sentence to the position before the verb, but no such construct exists in English. This explains why foreigners learning Chinese say 我拿书过来 ("I bring the book over") more than 我把书拿过来.

(中文版)

Translation of a few function words (几个“虚词”的翻译)

* 作时间副词的“最近”：recently（或lately）仅用于过去。一个较常见的错误是将表示“不远将来”的“最近”也译为recently，此时正确的用词是soon、in the near future、甚至now、currently等，或不译，如“我最近在搬家”（Currently I'm moving），“我最近准备买辆车”（I'm thinking of buying a car），“他最近要结婚”（he's going to get married soon / in the near future；但soon更常见）。更多可见http://yong321.freeshell.org/english4chinese/zuijin-is-not-always-recently.html

* “虽然/尽管”：although和though没有词义上的区别，有文章绞尽脑汁找区别，没必要。它们只在文体上有点区别：前者更正式。另外，in spite of和despite也是“虽然”，但后面接名词而不是从句；despite更正式但稍微更不常见。有文章说in spite of和despite后不能接动名词（如in spite of being a manager），但这常见于英语母语者的文章，包括一些较正式的，因此不能算错，也许有些考试会认为错，建议避免。另外，从句用了although或though，主句起首不能用but（对应汉语的“虽然……但是……”），很多中国人和有些南亚、西亚人常犯这种错误；老式英语中会出现主句以yet起首，可以用，尤其在从句较长时，但不能用but。

* “直到”：until和till没有词义上的区别，有文章绞尽脑汁找区别，没必要。它们只在文体上有点区别：前者更正式。英语是世界上十几大语言中唯一对这个词赋以特殊含义的语言：在until/till的时间点后，语句所述状况翻转而不是维持不变，如The scientists had not found a solution to the problem until 1970意味着科学家在1970年终于发现了这个问题的解决方法，而汉语或其他很多（不敢说所有）语言直译对应的语句“直到1970年科学家没有发现这个问题的解决方法”意味着在1970年他们仍然没有发现。更多可见http://yong321.freeshell.org/english4chinese/whats-special-about-english-untiltill.html

* 做时间副词的“很少”：很多人想到seldom，但据Google ngrams图，这个词两百年来使用频率一直在下降，1950年左右被rarely超过。建议用rarely，或not often，如he rarely goes biking / doesn't go biking that often。注意：如果seldom或rarely用于句首（常见于正式文体），句子要倒装（如rarely / seldom did the parliament elicit sharp reactions from...），但如果后面加个逗号停一下就最好不要倒装了，否则听起来有点哽咽。

* 疑问词“第几”：英语（和其他几种语言）中没有。详见http://yong321.freeshell.org/english4chinese/has-no-english-equivalent.html

* “当然”：英语of course或certainly语气一般较强（如"You can swim?", "Of course [I can]"）。汉语“当然”也常用于语气较弱、较缓和的语句中，如“明天每个人都必须到办公室，当然你事先请假了可以不来”(Everybody must come to office tomorrow. But of course you don't have to come if you asked for leave earlier)，用of course对译不错，但如果语气平和点像汉语那样，可不译或译为obviously，或要正式一点说needlesss to say.

* “很”：汉语中的“很”不一定是英语的very，如“他很好”既可以真是说“他非常好”但也可能是“他好”的一种更通顺的变体。更多可见http://yong321.freeshell.org/english4chinese/empty-word-very.html 英语中用very很多的名人首推特朗普，他还喜欢联用如I will very, very probably do it。但大家知道他的manners of speech are unrefined, uncouth, below standard. Don't learn English from him.

* “曾经”：疑问句、否定句中可用ever，如Have you ever been to New York? I've never been（“你曾去过纽约吗？”“我从未/不曾去过”）。但肯定句中的ever就不是“曾经”了，而是老式英语中的“一直”、“永远”，如it was ever thus（总是如此）。“我曾去过纽约”（I've been to New York / I went to New Work before），英译不能用ever，但可用once，如once I had a car accident.

* last与“上个”：last Thursday字面意思是“上个星期四”，但严格地说它指最近过去的星期四；假如今天星期五，它其实指昨天而不是上个星期的星期四。但如果你问英语母语者，他们有时也觉得含混。建议只在不会有混淆的情况下这样用last，如今天是星期天至四的某一天，否则就分别说Thursday last week、the past Thursday（但今天是星期五的话还不如说yesterday）。详见http://yong321.freeshell.org/english4chinese/last-january-vs-january-last-year.html

Debate about dropping English as a mandatory course

The debate in China about keeping or dropping English as a mandatory course in middle school and high school has been going on for at least two decades. The support of keeping English is based on the fact that English is the de facto lingua franca in the world, although, contrary to a common misconception in China, English is not a mandatory course in all countries; among the 41 where it is not are France, Finland, and Poland. The opposing side claim that some college majors such as Chinese philology or research of ancient Chinese archives require no or very little English in future studies or work. Both sides got the basic facts correct and have strong arguments, leading the debate to a deadlock, while the government takes no action in changing the current policy that happens to be what the supporters want.

In fact, the solution is a simple one: attach a weight that varies between 0 and 100% depending on the major, to the English test score on the college entrance exam. For example, since high-impact work on Chinese philology is still mostly written in Chinese, the Ministry of Education or individual universities or colleges can assign a value of 0 or slightly higher to this weight. (If the weight is only 5%, who is willing to take time to study English? Well, imagine a high school student who grew up bilingual or speaks English as the first language.) For the major of ancient Chinese history, how about 20%? For modern Chinese history, 80%? Obviously, for any major other than these or a specific foreign language other than English (say, Spanish), the weight should be 100% or close to that. Assignment of the weight should be exclusively the work of the professionals and practitioners in this field, free of any lobbying influence from the general public and interference from politicians.

There are still lots of debates or disputes in the world that are zero-sum or nearly zero-sum. A relatively good solution is one that seeks compromises among contenders and balances their degree of satisfaction, to achieve an approximate equilibrium in this satisfaction. The advantage of my solution is that both sides are somewhat satisfying with it and complain the least, and the satisfaction and complaint are about the same in intensity on both sides.

Note: By no means am I suggesting categorically dropping English as a mandatory course. That would lead to total ruin of our future generation. It's the undeniable fact that some Chinese students are so incapable of a foreign language in spite of an extraordinary amount of time of study and that English is truly nearly useless in certain fields of study as of 2022 that prompts me to propose this practical and realistic solution for this year and some years in the future.

(The Chinese version of this article is scattered in Weibo 2022-11-06 and 2022-10-07 postings.)

dastardly

安倍晋三遇刺身亡，美国田纳西议员Steve Cohen称刺杀行为是a dastardly act，日本首相岸田文雄对刺杀行为的说法被英译为dastardly and barbaric。英语词dastardly不很常用，它兼有“怯懦”和“邪恶”的意思，似乎没有合适的汉语词同时体现这两个意义，有些词典译为“卑怯”，但这并不很恰当，因为其中的“卑”可能是“自卑”（如茅盾《烟云》“我的自杀是逃避，是卑怯”），但dastardly一定是对他人造成伤害的“卑鄙”、或更准确地说“邪恶”、“坏”。

许多不大常用的词或词组常让人想到历史上的名篇，如作“二十”解的score让人想到林肯的《葛底斯堡演说》（Four score and seven years ago[八十七年前]），ask not让人想到肯尼迪的就职演说（Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country[不要问你的国家能为你做什么——问你能为你的国家做什么]），而dastardly让人想到罗斯福在珍珠港袭击后到国会做的宣战演讲，称日本的袭击是unprovoked and dastardly attack[无端和卑怯的攻击]。今天，田纳西议员选用dastardly大概是巧合，但在他是巧合，在他的读者却产生了有历史意义的联想；英译岸田文雄选用这个词也有同样的效果。词汇本身是无辜的，只是它曾经被某个名人用于某个有名的事件而多生了一层与词义完全无关的阴影、或光环，迫使小心的后人在遣词造句时多一点考虑，如果你不想考虑，读者也许会考虑。

Use International Phonetic Alphabet to help improve pronunciation

In my last posting, I said "成年后学外语，口音几乎不可能完全消除，略带外国口音不是坏事，但如果华人希望更好地与人交流、或从政、或跻身公司高层，减少口音即使不是必须的，也是有益的。它需要仔细听、模仿、学习，和长时间不懈的努力" (It is almost impossible to completely avoid having an accent if you learn a foreign language as an adult. A slight foreign accent is not a bad thing, but if you as a Chinese want to better communicate with people, take on a career in politics, or climb the corporate ladder, reducing the accent is beneficial, if not necessary. It requires careful listening, imitation, learning, and long hours of unremitting effort.) Honestly though, careful listening and imitation may not bring you forward as much as you want. But as an adult, if you're moderatly interested in linguistics, carefully studying International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA may benefit more. IPA has the ambition of recording with distinct symbols all sounds of all human languages in the world. But for us, we only need to focus on the sounds and symbols used in the English language for the purpose of improving English pronunciation. For example, if you have a hard time pronouncing bug as /bʌɡ/ and always, like many Chinese learners do, mispronounce it like /baɡ/ (where /a/ is the same sound as the vowel in Chinese character 爸), you can check vowel chart of IPA, and find where /a/ and /ʌ/ are. You can see that to move from /a/ to /ʌ/, all you need to do is move the location where the sound is produced back (toward the throat) and up a little. But a better description of this method is recently described in three online articles, which I highly recommend

Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (Part 1)
(Part 2)
(Part 3)

IPA is not widely used in American education. Chinese learners may know some symbols to the extent of pronouncing the words by the symbols correctly most of the time. But the vowel and consonant charts are not part of the curriculum and so subtle differences between similar sounds are not fully grasped. The three articles above will hopefully make up for this deficiency.

Words often mispronounced by Chinese learners

以前讲过中国学生或华人最容易读错的英语字母N，应读/ɛn/，但中国人读作/n/，或/ɛ/变得很弱。这里讲几个容易读错的词：

* southern：它的第一音节元音是/ʌ/（即cut的元音），不是/aʊ/，虽然south中的元音是/aʊ/。的确有词典说加拿大或苏格兰方言有读southern为/ˈsaʊðɚn/的，但这绝不是主流，反而是在移民中才经常听到。

* clothes：知乎上查到说这个词“英音[kləʊ(ð)z] 美音[kloðz] 结尾是THZ不是S”。这个说法基本正确，但在美国，其中的元音应为/oʊ/，不是/o/。其实在英语里单独成为音节的/o/音（不是双元音的一部分）并不常见。

* town：读为/taʊn/，但很多华人读为/taŋ/（汉字“唐”音）。其实发/aʊn/音不难，可先发/aʊ/再紧接/n/即可。类似的词还有down、downtown、gown、renown等。

* bowl：读为/boʊɫ/，但很多华人会省掉/ɫ/，结果与bow发音相同。如果你能正确念people（注意不可念作/'pi：pəʊ/），为什么不能念bowl呢？

* idea：应读为/aɪˈdiə/，但很多中国人会在末尾加上儿话音，好比是在念一个写为idear的词。至少在idea单独用时（如I have no idea)，加儿话音是不对的。

还有一些词念错是因为幼年时生活的方言区缺少这个音而成年后又不曾努力纠正：一位原籍四川的朋友来美30年始终不分life与knife、light与night，一位在北京出生长大的朋友多年念/v/为/w/。但更多的人有口音是因为不注意区分相近的音，如读cut为/kat/而不是/kʌt/（所有语言都有/a/音，因此很容易用作替代），或忍不住在单独存在的辅音后添加元音，如读big为/'bɪɡə/或/'biɡə/（汉语中没有单独存在的辅音）。

成年后学外语，口音几乎不可能完全消除，略带外国口音不是坏事，但如果华人希望更好地与人交流、或从政、或跻身公司高层，减少口音即使不是必须的，也是有益的。它需要仔细听、模仿、学习，和长时间不懈的努力。

Chinese-English coincidence of words

Apart from onomatopoeias, borrowed or transliterated words, or cognates [note], what are some English and Chinese words that happen to have the same meaning and similar pronunciations? I can think of two, Chinese "石头" and English stone, Chinese "苦力" and English coolie (note: coolie is from Hindi and Urdu, not Chinese). When I posted this message to Weibo, one user contributed Chinese "费" and English fee, another "屎" and shit, and "好诶" and hooray (which partially meets the requirement). For these linguistic coincidences and surprises, there is even a Facebook group dedicated to these amusing findings.

___________________
[note] A pair of cognates are two words that are in two different languages but descend from the same word in their common parent language. Since English or any Indo-European language and Chinese are not even in the same language family, it's difficult to say there exist any true cognates, while borrowings or loan words are abundant. An interesting case is the very old borrowing, for which cognation may be justified if the term is loosely used, is the Chinese word "蜜" ("honey") and this word in a Romance language, such as French or Spanish miel. "蜜" is said to be a loanword from Tocharian, a branch of the Indo-European language family. (The latest research may be the 2017 article The Word for ‘Honey’ in Chinese, Tocharian and Sino-Vietnamese, by K. Meier, M. Peyrot.)

Chinese translation of a history professor's summary poem

At the end of Dr. James C Davis's The Human Story, a great overview of world history, he wrote a four-line poem that summarizes his positive view of the human history:

The world's still cruel,
That's understood.
But once was worse,
So far so good.

Here's a Chinese translation:

世界依然残酷，
世人无不了悟。
但它曾经更恶，
到如今还不错。

(My translation was first posted on weibo. My review of the book is on Goodreads.)

Mutual intelligibility to distinguish between language and dialect: case of Chinese and Cantonese

Sometimes it is debatable to say that two language varieties are two different languages, or that they are two dialects of one single language. It comes down to the concepts of "language" and "dialect". Among various criteria to distinguish between a language and a dialect, mutual intelligibility may be the most popular one, and appears to be easy to follow. But is it really easy?

1. First of all, we have to absolutely refrain from any political and nationalist influences if we are determined to adopt the mutual intelligibility criterion. They are not conducive to a technical or linguistic study. Although non-linguistically based definitions serve other, pragmatic purposes, they are not part of the following discussion.

2. Mutual intelligibility requires mutual understanding of the speaker or author. One-way or uni-directional understanding may only serve as an intermediate step in measuring the degree of understanding.

3. Mutual intelligibility itself does not stipulate the modality of the source language production. It is generally interpreted as understanding of speech. But that's only because the majority of world languages use the alphabetic writing system so that speech and written text are generally consistent. (There is the concept of orthographic depth, which measures this consistency.) But in case of the character-based writing system, strictly applying the mutual intelligibility criterion requires separate analyses with regard to modality, one for speech, the other for writing. In the case of Chinese and Cantonese, it is generally agreed that a person speaking a variety of Chinese (typically Mandarin) with no ability in Cantonese and a person speaking Cantonese with no ability in the Chinese variety that the other person speaks cannot verbally communicate. Therefore Chinese and Cantonese are said to be different languages in terms of oral mutual intelligibility. From this point to the end of this blog posting, let's discuss written mutual intelligibility only.

4. To test whether two language varieties are languages or dialects of one language, we must not fall for the fallacy of contrived test materials cherry-picked to prove a pre-supposed conclusion. This practice is particularly widespread when people, not just language amateurs but also professional linguists, argue for the two-language-verdict of Chinese and Cantonese. The correct test should be based on a very large language corpus. In giving materials to volunteers in a test, the sentences must be randomly selected from a comprehensive corpus, ideally the whole Internet content, probably supplemented by some text commonly produced but rarely uploaded to the Internet. Notably, in case of Cantonese, if the test materials contain a higher ratio of Cantonese-specific characters and words than average, the test is biased and becomes invalid.

5. To check for percentage of understanding of the materials given in the tested language, the multiple choice questions should have a relatively high number of choices (at least 4), to avoid random-guess correctness.

So far I have outlined an experiment to check whether Chinese and Cantonese are languages or dialects by strictly applying the mutual intelligibility criterion. We can see that the result is not a Yes or No, but a percentage, unless you arbitrarily declare that above a certain cut-off value they are dialects and below that they are languages.

I personally only know Chinese, specifically its Mandarin and Sichuanese dialects, and don't know Cantonese at all. In terms of written mutual intelligibility, I don't know how much percentage of an absolutely randomly selected Cantonese document I can read and understand. If I may hazard a guess, I would say at least 70%, i.e. I can answer 7 or more out of 10 reading comprehension questions correctly. But without such an experiment, it's only a guess.

6. To make this discussion complete, we have to prevent one trivial trap in applying the mutual intelligibility criterion, which we must consider to be a necessary but not sufficient condition. We cannot conclude that language varieties A and B are dialects as long as they meet the mutual intelligibility requirement. The missing condition that must also be met is that A and B are under one genus as defined by Dryer and Haspelmath. As other scholars have done, we add this condition to preclude the obviously incorrect but otherwise possible conclusion that, for example, Chinese and Japanese become two dialects of one language because a Chinese and a Japanese can communicate by writing. We avoid this specious claim by realizing that Chinese and Japanese are not closely related, or specifically, not of one genus in language classification. (When using Dryer and Haspelmath's Genealogical Language List, we should, for the purpose of strictly applying the mutual intelligibility criterion to distinguish languages from dialects, disregard the fact that they list Cantonese under the heading of Chinese.)

Summary It is possible to strictly apply the mutual intelligibility criterion to determine whether Chinese and Cantonese are two languages or dialects. Due to the unique writing system, this criterion must be separated into oral and written intelligibility. Thus, in terms of oral mutual intelligibility, Chinese and Cantonese can be said to be two languages. In written mutual intelligibility, the decision can only be made after an actual experiment and after setting a cut-off value for intelligibility.

2021: The Year of "牛"

Of the twelve Chinese zodiac animals, some are translated into English as various names, such as 羊 as "sheep", "goat" or "ram", 鸡 as "rooster" or "hen", and when a year falls on such a zodiac animal, there is invariably a debate as to which English word is the best fit. Other animals are much less debated. For instance, nowadays 牛 is almost always translated as "ox".

So another question arises, Why is "ox" preferred to, say, "bull", "cow", "buffalo", or "cattle"? In fact, such translations did exist, but they gradually died out over the past decades, specifically since 1960's or 1970's according to Google Ngram. The reason for "ox" to eventually come to the top is not easy to explain, as is the case with many things in human languages. Let's break up the question a little bit. To be precise, an ox is a castrated male cattle, a bull is an uncastrated one, and a cow is a female. I think the reason why the word "cow" is not chosen, in spite of its higher usage frequency, is that in the western zodiac, there is the Taurus, which is male, and that word and its referent probably had some influence on the early choice of word for the Chinese zodiac animal 牛. Next, let's analyze the choice between "ox" and "bull". According to an Internet user who answered the question I posted to a Facebook group, an ox is a bovine trained as a draft animal, as stated on Wikipedia. Similarly, a 牛 in the mainstream traditional Chinese culture is also a draft animal, not one as the source for food (beef, milk, etc.). In this sense, English "ox" is the more appropriate translation than "bull".

Back in 2015, I blogged about the English word for 羊 as the Chinese zodiac animal, and I proposed the idea that to eliminate the ambiguity in the Chinese word or character, we simply find the biological name at the lowest level in taxonomy under which the species the various English names refer to are. For example, a sheep belongs to the genus ovis, which belongs to the subfamily caprinae, and a goat belong to genus capra, which belongs to subfamily caprinae. Therefore, the best word to translate 羊 is caprinae. Well, it is best only if we can ignore the ignorance of the general public. But generally that's not a very good idea. Fortunately, in the case of 牛, the word "cattle" seems to cover both "ox", "bull", "cow" or even "buffalo", and "cattle" happens to be a common word that even an ignorant John Doe knows the meaning of. So I think "cattle" is the best translation for 牛. But it's too late to promote this because the English-speaking people have already been saying "ox" for Chinese 牛 for 50+ years.

English teacher's accent (英语老师的口音)

Facebook一语言学习群有人说他在法国一所小学教英语。学校招了一名印度裔英语老师（英语是她的母语），他是这名新老师的领导。学校其他老师向他抱怨说新老师的口音对小孩是个问题，特别是发r这个音时。他认为这些老师不对，因为他认为习惯不同口音是非常好的一件事。（他说“i dont want to be angry. I want to make them understand the wonderful benefit of learning from different accents. Do you have any suggestions?”）

这个讨论目前已有近百条评论，绝大多数都赞成这位领导的观点：接受多种口音是对的，印度英语也是英语，而那些抱怨的老师有错，有些评论甚至称那些老师是种族主义者。极个别的评论指出小学生口音尚未固定，这个阶段学会英国或美国英语的口音有必要，年龄稍大一点再接触其他口音不迟。但这些极少数的评论基本没有点赞，或被其他人指责。

我对此没有评论，只是建议这名法国老师到语言学群再去问一下，那里大部分群员是语言学家或语言教育专家，可能会给出更全面和专业的回应，通常还附带相关论文题目或链接。不过，我私下还是有自己的想法：假如是为我自己的小孩，如果有选择，比如五个英语班，老师分别来自美、英、苏格兰、澳、印，其他方面相当，那我会选前两个班之一。这不是歧视澳大利亚、印度或苏格兰英语，更不是贬低那三个地区的文化和人民，而仅仅是希望孩子今后的口音能被世界上最大多数人最容易地接受，以方便交流，而与此同时，我们仍然可以培养儿童对各种族裔和文化的包容甚至喜好，而将选择学习的口音与对多种文化的包容对立起来才是片面和狭隘的。其实，假如我们做统计，或平均看，学英语后需要用到英美口音的时候一定多于用到印度口音的时候，而且印度人能完全听懂英美人，但反过来却不是，这就足够成为为自己的孩子选择英美口音的理由了。

（又见微博讨论，如有网友问“如果学中文请东北河南天津河北陕西这些地方的老师授课，真的不介意？”）

First floor vs ground floor 楼层的称谓

美国英语称底楼为first floor，往上依次是second floor、third floor等，英国英语称底楼为ground floor，往上是first floor、second floor，至今仍然如此。欧洲各国遵循英国惯例，世界很多地区也是如此。但在拉丁美洲，楼层的编号采用英、美两种惯例的都有，决定于哪个国家，似乎看不出规律，可参见维基Storey条，但维基关于墨西哥是错的，他们用美国惯例。（注：说英国或美国惯例只是方便称谓，并不表明某地区的惯例的来源是美国或英国。）

历史变迁
一位澳大利亚网友说，大约5至10年前，新建的房子开始用美国的称谓，所以他们经常搞混。瑞典网友说他们那里规则不统一，是一片混乱。而从前作为英国殖民地的新加坡先前采用英国惯例，1980年代改为美国惯例，以便与其他亚洲国家协调。

“一国两制”
越南北部采用美国惯例，南部用英国惯例，但越南人之间交流并不会混淆，原因是北越人说Tầng即“层”而南越人说Lầu即“楼”，他们从用字就可以判断说话人用的是哪种惯例。

亚洲
印尼、菲律宾采用美国惯例。印度受英国殖民影响无疑用英国惯例，香港也是。新加坡、越南见上述。其他如日本、韩国等都用美国惯例。

中国
汉语似乎从来就说：底楼、底层或一楼，往上是二楼、三楼等等，即跟美国惯例相同，这应该是汉语本身的惯例而不是受了美国的影响。古代当然没有居住或办公的高楼，但有供眺望观景的高塔（也叫做楼），或佛塔，中国古籍中指塔的某层时大概都说“层”而不说“楼”，“层”当然是从一而不是零数起了。现代汉语“层”、“楼”两字可互换通用，“楼”无疑是被当作“层”的同义词使用，那么就碰巧跟美国而不是英国惯例相同了。

评价
如果我们咬文嚼字，英国惯例其实是不合逻辑的，底层叫ground floor（直译：“地楼层”），上一层叫first floor（“第一楼层”），既然底层用了floor这个词，就认可了它也是众多floors之一，但为什么它在floors集合中没有序数呢？如果你有三个儿子，老大可以叫大儿子，后面两个当然叫二儿子、三儿子而不可能叫第一儿子、第二儿子，无论老大多么特殊。所以，将“地楼层”与“第一楼层”分开是强词夺理的。这个惯例的起源暂不清楚，但英国殖民者来到北美后采用了我们熟悉的美国惯例无疑是更合理的。由于英国在历史上的影响，世界上采用英国惯例的国家更多，但以人口数量论，由于中国的惯例与美国相同，世界上用英国惯例的人即便包括印度人在内也可能更少。

参考：
https://facebook.com/groups/generallinguistics/permalink/10158626955249346/
https://facebook.com/groups/839957606051774/permalink/3308810692499774
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storey#Numbering

"drawing" and "painting"

On Weibo or Microblog, the Chinese social network, the blogger 芝加哥艺术博物馆 (Art Museum of Chicago) made a posting about Claude Monet, and quoted him say "I never had one [studio] and personally I don’t understand why [people] would want to shut themselves up in some room. Maybe for drawing, sure, but not for painting" (my bold text), and offered a Chinese translation as "我从来没有过画室，我也不明白为什么要把自己关起来。也许是为了绘画，但不是为了绘画". Other than missing "people", the English quote is grammatically correct, and more or less faithful to the original quote in French.[note]

But the confusing part of the Chinese translation is 绘画. Its first occurrence is for "drawing", the second for "painting". What's the difference between drawing and painting (or dessiner and peindre in French)? Drawing is more about creating art with dry or somewhat dry materials, with a pencil, pen, charcoal, etc. Painting, which reminds us of painting a room or a car, is more about creating art with wet materials, including paint and acrylic. Secondly, drawing focuses on the outline while painting on colors. Lastly, drawing is traditionally black and white while painting must have various colors. These differences I list here are obviously not hard and fast rules, especially in modern art. (Note: Monet died about a century ago.) You can find other people's opinions with a Google search.

What about the Chinese words for "drawing" and "painting"? The Wikipedia page for drawing has its Chinese page titled 素描, literally "black-and-white outline", and that for painting has the Chinese page 绘画. This latter Chinese word is translated as both "drawing" and "painting" in English. Etymologically, both 绘 and 画 emphasize drawing more than painting. But as we discuss earlier, it's wrong to find the modern meaning in the original meaning of a word; we should only find its meaning as the word is used today. On the other hand, 素描 precludes the possibility of colored outline, which, needless to say, was indeed rare in Monet's times.

So, how do we translate Monet's words into Chinese, making a distinction between "drawing" and "painting"? Unfortunately, in spite of splendid Chinese culture and civilization, the vocabulary of the Chinese language is not rich enough to expose this nuance in what Monet tried to convey. A less than perfect translation of his words, judging by the context, may be "(关在画室里)打画稿可以，画一幅画不行" (literally, "(shutting oneself up in a room/studio), making a sketch is OK, making a painting is not OK"). This is a roundabout way to paraphrase Monet and it depends on my understanding of his attitude toward nature and his personal way to represent nature. Until we artificially designate one Chinese word for "drawing" and the other for "painting", the sentence cannot be literally translated. If we do go for 素描 for "drawing" and 绘画 for "painting", the Chinese reader will definitely get confused, unless a translator's note is given to that effect.

________________
[note] "Mon atelier ! Mais je n'ai jamais eu d'atelier, moi, je ne comprends pas qu'on s'enferme dans une chambre. Pour dessiner, oui : pour peindre, non" (source: Wikipedia. Note there is no word for "maybe" as in the English translation, which misses the word "studio", and renders "oui" as "sure" instead of "yes".

Do not use etymology to determine current meaning of a word

It may sound obvious. When you want to know the meaning of a word, you look it up in a dictionary and check the definitions, probably with some examples. Only if you're interested in its origin will you check its etymology. But in reality, we see that a lot of people trying to explain the connotations or nuances of meanings of a word resort to etymology. For example, in my 2017 blog 自由: "freedom" or "liberty"?, I criticized those who rack their brains trying to come up with certain semantic differences between freedom and liberty while there is none (although which word is more customarily used in which set phrase exhibits a difference in frequency).

Recently, in a Weibo posting, a Chinese blogger tried to justify his translation of draconian as "惨无人道" ("inhumanely atrocious"). He was reading the following passage of an MIT Technology Review article Every country wants a covid-19 vaccine. Who will get it first?,

"By then, though, China had a different problem: not enough covid-19. Its draconian lockdown measures had quashed the virus at home so effectively that doctors couldn’t find patients to fully test their vaccine on."

His comment is, "这里特别用到一个极其恶毒的词语叫draconian，可以翻译为惨无人道" ("An extremely vicious word is used here called draconian, which can be translated as inhumanely atrocious"). When other readers pointed out to him that his understanding of this word was incorrect, he justified his interpretation by finding the origin of draconian, which is the Athenian lawmaker named Draco, known for making harsh laws.

So much for this story. Let's re-read the renowned linguist Thomas Pyles's frequently quoted statement that "[t]here is a widespread belief, held even by some quite learned people, that the way to find out what a word means is to find out what it previously meant — or, preferably, if it were possible to do so, what it originally meant--a notion similar to the Greek belief in the etymon... such an appeal to etymology to determine present meaning is as unreliable as would be an appeal to spelling to determine modern pronunciation." (The Origins and Development of the English Language, 1964 ed., pp304-5). Not heeding this warning, we would say calculate only if we were to count pebbles because calculate comes from Latin calx ("stone"), and we would either quarantine potential SARS-CoV-2 virus carriers for 40 instead of 14 days or flatly refuse to use the word quarantine because the word inherently meant "forty".

Linguists' responses to school dismissing professor saying 那个 in communication class

A filler word in a language is uttered when the speaker hesitates in speech. While most languages have eh, ah or m, some languages have their language-specific words. For example, some English speakers say you know for this purpose, and Chinese may say 那个 (pronounced like naygher or nagher without the trailing rhotic vowel; pinyin: nèige or nàge). According to Los Angeles Times, University of Southern California business school professor Greg Patton gave 那个 (nèige) as an example of a Chinese filler word in his business communication class and was dismissed by the school who listened to the complaint of certain African American students in his class. The following are a few most like'd comments on this news in the Facebook Linguistics group:

* What a ridiculous thing. An inoffensive word in another language sounds close to an offensive word in your native language and so you get the professor fired? Perhaps those students need to learn some tolerance about linguistic differences.

* I can't be the only one to whom this part of the identity movements in the US feels very much like a toxic and bigoted form of American cultural colonialism, where certain groups within the US try to force their form of cultural ethics onto the rest of the world?
How is it reasonable for Americans (or more generally, mono-lingual English speakers) to demand respect for their own culture or ethnicity, but demand other cultures to adapt themselves to their own highly culturally-specific standards? How is it acceptable in the English-speaking academic world to demand non-English speakers to adapt their native language "because it sounds offensive" to an outsider?
-- * [my follow-up comment] (if we expand this topic a little bit) These students' complaint and the school's decision about the professor who indicated the usage of the word in clear context will have an effect of alienating Chinese Americans who overall supported the Black Lives Matter movement, which, like any movement, ought to recruit as many supporters as they can. These two things should be separated. But unfortunately humans are human.

* [me to another commenter] You mean he should have chosen another filler word? In Chinese, eh or its variant ah is pretty much the only other one. But 那个 is so common and distinctive in Chinese not mentioning it can be considered a fault in teaching. By the way, the fact that there're 10,000 characters in Chinese is irrelevant to what filler words exist in Chinese.

Other comments:

* The fact that the professor introduced that it was another languages’ conversational manager word and then said he word makes all the difference. If these students conversed with someone in a Chinese dialect, would these students try to get the Chinese student expelled?
* My best friend, who is Black, visited China on a short term abroad in a business course in school. He obviously heard this term used as it is part is casual language. Should he have been angry with the tour guides, restaurant employees, etc? He told me he was initially confused and even worried that it was meant to be hurtful but after the linguistic meaning was explained to him it all made sense and he no longer felt any distress. Why didn’t this help the USC students? I feel for them but I also feel for the professor.
* I remember in grad school a Colombian woman gave a teachimg presentation in spanish and used negro in reference to black people. It is the correct term for the color in spanish and many people in central and South America use the term for their skin color as well. But i heard audible gasps from listeners in the room. Thankfully, everyone had what I felt was enough maturity to realize it was not a slur she was using, but a word in another language. I think someone asked her privately afterwards about the use, but nothing else ever came of it.
-- * [a follow-up comment] maturity and cultural understanding make a big difference)
* the student response feels extreme from my perspective as a white linguist who also teaches communication, but I also think it would have been better if he could have chosen a different example or given a call out th…
-- * [a follow-up comment] How would a teacher of philosophy teach about Kant in the USA?
-- * [a follow-up comment] What example would you use? In 10+ years as a Chinese speaker, I’m not sure I’ve heard any other word in Chinese used in that way.
* What would happen if the Professor was Chinese and explained the same thing?
* Ugh... it’s never ending with stupid people
* as a member of the human race who can think I can logically deduce that the professor did not mean to use the N word.
* I thought I had seen stupidity at its lowest level. I was wrong.
* Monolingual people problems!
* This is bullshit. America, land of the contextually dead.

Tones are better immune to interference

A Chinese American person recently told me she had better listening skills in Chinese than English (note: not listening comprehension, but just listening, or speech sound recognition). It's surprising because she was born and grew up in the US, never living in a Chinese speaking country except for short periods. She admitted that her conclusion may have a confounding factor that both her parents are Chinese immigrants and speak clear Mandarin to her at home. I told her that her better listening may be related to the fact that the tone of Chinese, or any tonal language for that matter, offers a high interference immunity. This means that the listener can discern the speaker's tone even if there is ambient noise, if the speaker does not utter syllables clearly, or if the distance between the speaker and the listener significantly reduces the sound volume. Under less optimal conditions, if different tones of a sound in the language alter the meanings of the sound, there will be less loss of information carried to the listener because the tone is more immune to interferences than other phonemic features of the sound.

So, the tone of a language is a desired feature. But why is that only some languages are tonal? According to this 2015 article Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots, tonal languages are generally distributed in humid regions of the world, while non-tonal languages are in arid or dry regions. To produce tones, the human organ requires a favorable ambient environment, and "very cold/dry regions apparently serve as barriers to the spread of (complex) tone".

Adjective in the form of the past participle of an intransitive verb

First, a few grammatical terms. Everyone knows what an adjective is, like "big" in "a big car". Past participle (PP hereinafter) is a form of a verb that you use after "have" to indicate a completed action, like "opened" in "I have opened the door". A verb is intransitive when it is not followed by an object, like "happen" in "The incident happened", although it can be followed by a complement indicating time, place, etc. A transitive verb is followed by an object, like "hit" in "He hit him".

Sometimes the PP of a verb can be used as an adjective, like "opened" in "the opened jar", referring to the jar that was opened (by somebody), which is slightly different from "the open jar", where the speaker emphasizes the state of the jar more than someone's opening action.

All is fine if the verb is transitive. That is, there is no problem in using PP of a transitive verb as the modifier of a noun (nominal modifier), serving the function of an adjective. But can PP of an intransitive verb do so? The answer is sometimes but not always. We can say "an expired license", which is the same as "a license that has expired". The phrase "the disappeared man" seems to be acceptable, referring to the man that has disappeared, not necessarily implying that the man was forced to disappear by e.g. abduction. (The verb disappear does have the rare transitive sense of "to make vanish" according to Wiktionary, but we don't discuss it here.) On the other hand, we cannot say *"a come guest" (* means incorrect) and have to say "a guest that has come".

An interesting question is, How do we know when the PP of an intransitive verb can be used as an adjective or nominal modifier? I posted a question to the Facebook Linguistics group. One reader, apparently a linguist, referred me to the concept of "unaccusative verb". According to Wikipedia, "an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose grammatical subject is not a semantic agent. In other words, it does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action of the verb." Let me paraphrase. Just because a word (or phrase) is the grammatical subject in front of a verb doesn't always mean it actively (主动地) takes the action indicated by the verb. For example, "The window broke" doesn't mean the window wanted to break and therefore broke. It broke probably because someone broke it, or the bad weather caused it to break. This is different from "A guest comes" because the guest can walk and take action by himself and comes. Note that in linguistics, "accusative" refers to the relationship between the verb and its immediate action on its direct object; it has nothing to do with the action of accusing someone doing something bad, although "John accuses Jake" does have the accusative action in it ("accuses Jake").

The article goes on to say "[u]naccusative past participles can be used as nominal modifiers with active meaning", and gives a criterion to identify such verbs. For example, in the archaic sentence "He is fallen/come" (which means He, usually referring to Jesus, has fallen / come), because "is" instead of "has" is used, both "fall" and "come" are unaccusative. Well, obviously, in Modern English, only "a fallen tree", not *"a come visitor", makes sense. So I'm afraid we can only say some unaccusative past participles can be used as nominal modifiers or adjectives. The article lists 6 groups of unaccusative verbs given by Perlmutter (1978). But I don't think all are fit to be used as nominal modifiers. Specifically, I would say (a) and (c) won't work (e.g. *"the happened event"). In (f), only "survive" works.

For native English speakers, this is a non-issue because which intransitive verb can and which cannot be turned into PP and act as an adjective naturally comes to the mouth or pen (nowadays keyboard). For English learners, it may be more fruitful to just learn them by reading and listening than by studying the grammatical rule. Nevertheless, the linguists' effort to decipher the underlying grammatical rule is intriguing to the curious mind.

"self-driving" vs "self-driven", "self-limiting" vs "self-limited"

In English, the compound adjectives <NP>-<V>ing (noun or noun phrase followed by verb in its -ing form) and <NP>-<V>ed (noun or noun phrase followed by verb in its -ed or past participle-like form) imply different relationships between <NP> and <V>. Specifically, in the former case, <NP> is the object[note] of the action <V>, while in the latter, <NP> is the agent of <V>. For example, "man-made" implies that man makes (whatever follows), as in "a man-made satellite". If you were to say "man-making", it would denote something that makes man or a human!

But this analysis seems to break when the first element is the word "self". A Google exact phrase search for "self-driving car" currently returns about 6,980,000 results and a search for "self-driven car" returns about 540,000. While the latter -ed form is less than 10% of the -ing form, most articles appear to be written by native speakers, suggesting that both forms are accepted (but people may be subconsciously treating "self" as an object more than an agent?). After all, it makes sense because "self" means, well, self; there's no need to distinguish between agent and object.

The recent coronavirus causes pneumonia that is self-limited, according to China’s National Health Commission. So, let's check "self-limiting disease" vs. "self-limited disease", a term referring to a disease that runs its course without medical treatment (treatment may speed up the process, but that's a separate point). "Self-limiting" is slightly more popular than "self-limited", 118,000 vs. 105,000 on Google. Indeed, when the <NP> is "self", either the -ing or the -ed form of the verb is accepted.

_________
[note] A more technical term for "object" here is "patient", not in any way related to a sick person in a hospital.

What's special about English "until"/"till"?

英语介词until（till）即使不是在人类所有语言也至少是最普遍的十几种语言中非常独特的词：它具有一种语义上的状态反转。以下是我在Facebook语言学群中发的帖：

English "until"/"till" has a side effect of reversing the state. For example:
"The scientists had not found a solution to the problem until 1970."
(informally, "did not find")
It implies that the solution *was* found in 1970. I don't know if there's a linguistic term to describe this state reversal. But in many other languages (probably Spanish, German, Chinese, Hindi, Persian, etc.), the word generally translated as English "until" does not seem to have this implication. This lack affects the English writing of the people speaking those languages natively. For example, a Persian scientist wrote (mcijournal.com/article-1-62-en.pdf): "Microgravity has different effects on normal and cancer cells, but the related mechanisms are not well-known till now." He didn't mean to say the mechanisms are (finally) well known now; by "till now", he meant "so far" or "even as of today", a continuation of the state of "are not well known".
This implied reversal of state of English "until" seems to be more obvious if the sentence is negative.

I'd like to know
(1) whether there's a linguistic term for this semantic reversal of state implied by English "until";
(2) whether it's correct to list Spanish, German, Chinese, Hindi, Persian as the languages (maybe all languages except English?) in which a simple equivalent of English "until" does not have this semantic reversal.

(见facebook.com/groups/generallinguistics/permalink/10157494708249346/及讨论)

在此我提出这句英语
"The scientists had not found a solution to the problem until 1970."
暗示科学家们终于在1970年找到了对这个问题的解决方法，而该语句的西班牙语、德语、汉语、印地语、波斯语的直译不具有这个隐含意义。比如汉语“科学家们直到1970年没有找到对这个问题的解决方法”，一般会被理解为1970年仍然没有找到，即这个没有找到的状态持续存在，但在英语中却从没有找到反转为找到。该Facebook群的成员来自世界各地，大多数是语言学学者或学生，整个群能读懂的语言估计至少有二三十种吧，没有人对我列出的几种语言提出实质性的异议，还有人补充缺乏这种状态反转的语言，例如有人指出意大利语等。至于是否语言学中有无术语描述我暂命名为semantic reversal of state的现象，多人提出几个概念（presupposition、telicity等），但我认为都不能完全符合。因此，我暂时得出结论：英语的until或till是人类语言中罕见或唯一具有语义的状态反转属性的用于表达时间延续到某点的介词。
（顺便说一句，我与那位讲波斯语的伊朗生物学家email联系，确证了他本来的确是想说“the related mechanisms are not well known so far”。）

Word order flexibility

According to Wikipedia, about half of the world's languages take subject–object–verb (SOV) as the primary word order of a sentence, while one third follow the subject–verb–object (SVO) order. English and Chinese belong to the SVO category; e.g., in "She loves him" or "她爱他", if any of the three words or characters is re-positioned, the meaning of the sentence will be altered or be completely lost.

Recently I was reading the very entertaining tale of Phyllis and Aristotle. Legend has it that "Aristotle advised his pupil Alexander to avoid the king's seductive mistress, Phyllis, but was himself captivated by her. She agreed to ride him, on condition that she could play the role of dominatrix." (summarized by Wikipedia) On the Wikipedia page, the Old French verse that told this story ended with Aristotle excusing himself to Alexander, saying

Amour vainc tot, & tot vaincra
tant com li monde durera

with Modern English translation as "Love conquers all, and all shall conquer / As long as the world shall last".

English readers don't need to be fluent in French, much less Old French, to identify the French words corresponding to the English words; e.g. amour "love", vainc "conquers" (think of vanquish), tot "all" (think of total), etc. But what's troubling to me is that the second part of the first line, tot vaincra, is translated as "all shall conquer". The English word conquer is a transitive verb, i.e. it must be followed by an object. It took me a while to realize that "all shall conquer" actually means "(love) shall conquer all". The original author of the verse didn't write "& vaincra tot" simply because the inversion that places vaincra at the end makes it rhyme with the last word of the second line, durera ("last"). But an average English reader having no knowledge of French will have difficulty understanding "all shall conquer". So I edited the Wikipedia page to read "and shall conquer all". A few months later, someone disagreed and changed the translation back, saying it's poetic English.

I took this issue to a language forum and asked for people's opinions. As expected, most forum members agree with me. One even says he initially thought "all shall conquer" meant "all will fight back", which is a totally wrong interpretation. But one member, apparently a native Frenchman, disagreed with me and said the reader should adapt to the text of the author and the translator should respect the style of the author. Others disagreed with him, and my response was that "the adaptation should not go so far as to rendering the 'translated' text incomprehensible in the target language". I have no doubt that his mother tongue influences his appreciation of English speakers' low tolerance of flexible word order. If he were to translate the Old French verse into Chinese (suppose he knows some Chinese), the Chinese verse would probably read "爱征服一切，一切征服", the latter part of which likewise makes no sense to a native Chinese speaker.

In Romance languages such as French or Spanish, the primary word order is also SVO. However, occasionally we see sentences whose constituent is moved to a different position than the SVO rule would stipulate. (E.g. "Ont été reçus Pierre, Paul et Marie", possibly in response to "à Qui a été reçu ?") Native speakers are used to these sentence structures and can understand the meaning based on context and/or the idiomatic nature of such expressions. As far as I know, there is no metric or index in linguistics to measure the word order flexibility of a language. We know that highly inflected languages such as Latin and Russian have fairly flexible word order. But English and Chinese would be quite low on this metric, while various Romance languages are probably in the middle. Sentences such as "That I know", or "那个我知道", of an apparent OSV order, are exceptions, and their OVS variants, i.e. "That know I" and "那个知道我", are completely prohibited or meaningless, even though it may be understood in French in a certain context.

Mutual intelligibility in writing only

Mutual intelligibility is one important way to differentiate a language from a dialect, in spite of some complications. One such complication is the separation between writing and verbal intelligibility in the language varieties spoken in China; people in many regions of China may pronounce the same characters so differently that they can communicate with each other only by writing and not verbally. How do we define or measure mutual intelligibility in writing only (MIW hereinafter) in general? Here I describe an experiment that may serve as a starting point. Two people with high school or more education who natively speak language varieties A and B, respectively, but not both (if A and B are different), are subject to a test. Each person reads 100 sentences in normal speed randomly selected from the entire corpus of Modern A or B. (As an approximation to the entire corpus, take the Internet and book content indexed by Google as an example.) Each sentence is followed by 10 interpretations given in the language variety the other person understands, and he (she) chooses the correct one (10 choices instead of 4 or 5 just to reduce the random guess correctness). Then repeat the test switching the two people along with their respective language variety. If >=50 sentences are correctly understood, A and B are excluded from MIW. If it's <50, they are further subject to a test in which 100 sentences selected from the entire corpus are shown in writing. If >=90 sentences are correctly understood, we consider varieties A-B a case of MIW.

Thus, Sichuanese-Mandarin will be disqualified because they can be verbally communicated (and of course with written script). But Shanghainese-Mandarin, Hunanese-Mandarin, Shanghainese-Hunanese are good examples of MIW. Cantonese warrants more discussions. It's obvious that the Cantonese-Mandarin (or -Shanghainese etc.) pair has no verbal MI. There are grammar particles, pronouns and some common words unique to Cantonese. When a literate person who natively speaks Cantonese but has not learned the written Chinese in the way Chinese is taught in mainland China writes in Cantonese, can the writing be understood with >=90 correctness by one speaking Mandarin only? Suppose the content is absolutely randomly selected from the entire Cantonese corpus, and is not purely colloquial and definitely not contrived to contain a disproportionately high ratio of Cantonese-specific markers or characters. I don't know the answer, and an actual experiment is needed. One example of such a written script in Cantonese is a Wikipedia page. I personally don't know Cantonese and I may or may not be able to correctly answer 90 out of 100 questions in a reading comprehension test. Note that Cantonese is special in that many native Cantonese speakers do read Chinese text proficiently, although mandarin or other Chinese dialect speakers don't read Cantonese text (such as that Wikipedia page), creating asymmetric intelligibility, which is quite common in the world. Thus, when these two people try to communicate by writing, the preferred script they choose will be Chinese, not Cantonese. In discussing MIW, we should define two levels, one only allowing the written script to be the textual representation of the spoken language (e.g. Cantonese text for Cantonese speech), the other allowing the two people to choose whatever their preferred script is. Technically, we should limit MIW to the first case.

According to Wikipedia, Icelandic-Faroese and German-Dutch are MIW pairs. (The article also lists French-some Romance languages but does not give a good reference to support it. To my knowledge of a few Romance languages, this pair is invalid.) Based on a posting in Facebook Linguistics group, the following are additional language varieties that are candidates for MIW:

* Scots-English
* Many languages in South Asia with Sanskrit roots
* Swiss German-Standard German
* Hanoi Vietnamese-Southern Vietnamese (but highly disputed in the Sinosphere group whose members are mostly Vietnamese)
* Danish-some other Scandinavian languages

Note that I'm dealing with MIW between language varieties, a concept encompassing dialects within a language as well as languages, styles, registers, etc. While MIW within a language may not be limited to Chinese, it's probably safe to say the Chinese language has the most MIW pairs among its dialects, due to the dissociation between the pronunciation and the written form.

"below" is not an adjective

In a technical discussion forum about databases, someone posted an off-topic message: "to all Oracle staff, this phrase is not English: 'follow the below steps' How does this slip into Oracle Support tech note documents". Indeed, the English word "below" should not be used as if it was an adjective (see e.g. Wiktionary). But I've seen this incorrect usage for 20+ years especially in the IT industry. In the beginning, it mostly occurred in messages written by people with Indian-like names. Nowadays, Chinese or other ethnicities as well.

In any case, instead of saying "the below steps", we should say "the following steps", or "the steps below" (implying "located" before "below"). I'm guessing the adjectival usage of "below" is probably due to influence from the antonym "above", which *can* be used as an adjective as in "the above steps".

In light of the descriptivism vs. prescriptivism debate in which the latter has slowly lost ground in the past century, some people may argue that as more and more people start to use "below" as an adjective, this usage may eventually become accepted; after all, language evolves with the way it's spoken by the people. In fact, Merriam-Webster has already acknowledged this usage, after adverb, preposition, and noun. But for now, the majority of the native speakers and no other English dictionary consider this usage acceptable. It's wise to be standard-compliant and stop saying "the below steps".

(A good discussion is found on Daily Writing Tips.)

Basic Chinese Characters

I finally finished my little book Basic Chinese Characters. It contains 2500 commonly used Chinese characters selected by the Ministry of Education of China, with pinyin and definitions manually added by me. The book sorts the characters by frequency usage according to Google's estimate of occurrences of each character on the Internet (a method only I used and probably I invented). Some more descriptions of the book, plus sample pages, are at yong321.freeshell.org/bcc/. The book is available on Amazon as an e-book.

The book is in the format of character - pinyin (tones marked with numbers) - definition. For example,

1-99
二 er4 two
三 san1 three
四 si4 four
六 liu6 six
七 qi1 seven
零 ling2 zero
本 ben3 notebook; (measure word for books etc.); 本来(lai2) originally
日 ri4 sun
所 suo3 (function word, roughly “that which”); 所以 therefore; bureau
下 xia4 down, below; to go down
...
1200-1299
止 zhi3 to stop
脆 cui4 brittle, crispy
诞 dan4 birth
碍 ai4 blocking, hindrance
散 san4 to scatter, to disperse; scattered, loose (w.p. san3)
兽 shou4 beast
逝 shi4 to drift away; 逝世(shi4) to pass away, to die
猪 zhu1 pig
暂 zan4 temporary
腊 la4 preserved meat

Free offer If you as a reader of this blog are interested in this book, for a limited time, I can selectively offer this book for free on one condition and one wish. You must not share my book with anyone else. If your friend would like a copy, please have him or her contact me directly. But since there is no technical way to enforce this requirement, I can only trust you as on a verbal agreement. In addition to this requirement, I sincerely hope you can write an honest review and post it to the Amazon.com website, or if not feasible, on Goodreads. You can request a free copy by sending me an email at yong321@yahoo.com. It would be nice if you could tell me one or a few book reviews you previously wrote on Amazon.com.

Irrespective of any interest in the book, if you have any comments, suggestions, or corrections, please let me know. They are highly appreciated.

Ludwig Feuerbach and the End/Outcome of Classical German Philosophy

The 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx (May 5, 1818 - March 14, 1883) is coming soon. This great thinker is one of the very few that have had profound influence over human history. His numerous works, along with those of his close friend and also great thinker, Friedrich Engels, have been translated into dozens of languages and meticulously studied around the world. This short posting is about one single word in the title of Engels' book, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.

In the 1980's, I read about disagreement with the Chinese rendering of the word, “终结” (literally "end", "termination"), in a Chinese article. If my memory serves me right, the author of the note was 朱光潛, a renowned scholar and philosopher in China. He argues that, as the original German title "Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie" uses the word "Ausgang", literally "exit" or "outcome", there's no reason to change it to "end" in English or “终结” in Chinese, which is obviously different in meaning. Since both Wikipedia and Marxists.org use the word "end" in English and only a small number of websites on the Internet use the word "outcome", I had some email exchanges with a knowledgeable volunteer on Marxists.org, Ben, partly duplicated as follows:

Ben:
it always struck me as strange that this has always been translated as "end" - maybe it was a result of a certain "Stalino-Hegelian" teleology, which infected the movement in the 20th century? 'Ausgang' would probably be better translated as 'denouement' (as in a novel or play) or, as you suggest, "outcome".
Communist greetings

Me:
If it was the result of "Stalino-Hegelian" teleology, why would scholars in the English world be affected, as would the Russian and Chinese translators, which is understandable? British or American translators don't need to go through Russian and Chinese sources to do the German-to-English translation.

Ben:
I think it is worth bearing in mind that the project of translating Marx and Engels into English was also overseen by mainly Soviet funds and Soviet-type scholars. I am not suggesting that they have not done an outstanding job (of course they have!) but am merely pointing out that ideology and outlook cannot *but* find reflection in translation work and rendering somebody's thoughts into another language.
Communist greetings

Me:
I wanted to confirm that Russian translators were responsible for the popular English translation "end" but couldn't find definitive evidence. According to the translation by Foreign Language Press in Beijing, this 1976 English translation in China is based on the 1951 edition by Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow. Then I found an earlier one, published in 1946, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, by Progress Publishers, which according to Wikipedia "was a Moscow-based Soviet publisher founded in 1931. It was noted for its English-language editions of books on Marxism-Leninism".

As we can see, in the English translation as early as 1946, the Moscow edition already used "end" for "Ausgang", as if Engels was announcing the death of classical German philosophy. A good description is in fact given by the last link, i.e. "Engels considered this something of a summation or closure of the post-Hegelian criticism Marx and he had initiated in The German Ideology 43 years before." Note that the words "summation", "closure", although not literally matching "Ausgang", are a good paraphrase of it.

The Wikipedia page also gives the title translation in other languages. French uses "fin", Portuguese "fim", Japanese "終結", and Russian "конец", all meaning "end". It's a small surprise that all these semi-official translations in various languages somewhat deviate from the German original.

A few word-play jokes

First, a translation of a poem (ci-poem to be exact) by Ms. Li Qingzhao (李清照, 1084 – ca 1155/1156), a poet at the turn of the Northern-to-Southern Song dynasty.

李清照《永遇乐·落日熔金》
落日熔金，Sunset of molten gold
暮云合壁，Evening clouds of enclosing jade
人在何处。 Where am I standing?
染柳烟浓， Mist coloring the willows thickens
吹梅笛怨， Flute plays “The plum of melancholy”
春意知几许。 How's the springtime coming?
元宵佳节， The joyous Festival of Lantern
融和天气， in this clement weather
次第岂无风雨。 “Will it not be windy and rainy soon?”
来相召、香车宝马，谢他酒朋诗侣。 “Sorry”, said I to my wine-and-poetry friends, who came to invite me for an outing, in their fragrant BMW

Second, a list of words offered to "improve" English vocabulary, with a caution to the readers when I posted it to Weibo. And the "facts" stated therein are not to be trusted.

English vocabulary (non-)study
英语词汇的（非）学习
Learners of limited vocabulary should wear gas masks to avoid poisoning.
词汇有限的学习者须戴防毒面具

* infantry:
In the mid-20th century, the first public child care facility in the US was established in the suburb of Chicago, Jenkins Infantry, named after the owner Mary Jenkins.

* indefatigable
At the end of the 3-month clinical trial, 35% of the volunteers presented no change in either the body-mass index or the normalized adipose quantity. These indefatigable participants were advised to join a more aggressive weight watch program.

* bruxiathesaurus
A group of international paleontologists recently discovered never-seen-before dinosaur fossils, tentatively named bruxiathesaurus, on the evidence that these creatures apparently would grind their teeth while sleeping. Bruxia or bruxism, grinding or clenching teeth at night, is common among homo sapiens. This is the first time dinosaurs are found to have this behavior.

* infarction
Some patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) try to “hold in” flatulence. There is no controlled study on either any benefit or harm done by this practice of infarction.

The Multilingual Idioms List

Linguaholic created a crowdsourcing project, The Multilingual Idioms List. I think two things are new in this project.

• As far as I know, there was never a dictionary that pairs idioms and only idioms from different languages. It's true that numerous dictionaries of idioms for a specific language have been published. The explanations or definitions of the idioms may be in the same language as the idioms, or in a different language. When they are in a different language (called target language for the sake of argument), more often than not a matching idiom in the target language cannot be found, and a wordy explanation is provided. The Multilingual Idioms List project handles this situation differently: leaving the entry blank on the target language side. This is actually a good thing. It either positively acknowledges such lack, or catches readers' attention and waits for other native speakers to find a good idiom in later times.
• The List is multilingual, not limited to two languages. Unlike any published dictionary of idioms where the source and target languages differ, the contributors, or in a sense lexicographers, of the crowdsourcing List are not language professionals. This is not a big problem since the List is not a highly technical dictionary. The big advantage, on the other hand, is that the contributors are almost all native speakers. This is significant because good or even correct usage of idioms is very much dependent on real life experience in the language environment. Being native may be more relevant to this project than being professional if being both is not possible.

Today, I made a small contribution to the List, by adding the column Chinese (since no one before me had done that), and providing a dozen or so idioms, as follows:

a bitter pill	不得不吞的苦果
a piece of cake	小菜一碟
Achilles' heel	软肋
add insults to injury	雪上加霜；往伤口上撒盐
an arm and a leg	倾家荡产
beat around the bush	拐弯抹角
best of both worlds	两全其美
bite the bullet	硬着头皮上
burn the midnight oil	开夜车
cast in stone	板上定钉
cat nap	打个盹儿
from A to Z	从头到尾
from scratch	从零开始
have eyes in the back of one's head	眼观四路，耳听八方
hit the road	上路
let the cat out of the bag	抖包袱
kick the bucket	见阎王
off the hook	如释重负

In Chinese, there are different types of idioms. 成语 (literally probably "solidified or invariable phrases") are more formal and literary, mostly of four characters, such as "自相矛盾" ("self-contradictory"), "纸上谈兵" ("talk of military strategy (only) on paper"). 歇后语 (literally "sentences said after taking a rest") are colloquial proverbs, such as "和尚打伞，无法无天" ("A monk holds up an umbrella. No hair|law. No sky.", or "The dharma is obscured and heaven blocked."). Obviously some idioms are in neither category, and yet are expressions that cannot be literally interpreted, such as "硬着头皮上", literally "go ahead with hardened scalp", which I consider matching "bite the bullet" in English.

I can think of one improvement that may be made on the current List. It would be nice to provide a place to enter the literal translation of an idiom and optionally a brief explanation. For instance, I would love to add that the Chinese idiom "软肋" for "Achilles' heel" literally means "soft rib" because the rib bone is relatively weak and fragile, and that "雪上加霜" for "add insults to injury" literally means "add frost on top of snow", a phrase that may not need an explanation. With these additions, the List would be more fun to read. So for instance, we'll know that instead of "beat around the bush", the Chinese "make turns and scratch corners" ("拐弯抹角"), and the French "turn around the pot" ("tourner autour du pot") instead. While English-speaking people consider Greek a difficult language ("It's all Greek to me!"), the Chinese language is regarded by by far the most other peoples; "Chinese" occurs 24 times out of about 100, compared to 12 for "Greek", on the Wikipedia page for Greek to me. Through this List, we know a little more about different cultures. But technical limitation for the List is understandable; it is in the format of a spreadsheet, where adding two more columns (literal meaning and explanation) for each language would make the list too hard to read. Other options include adding comments to the spreadsheet cell, where the comments are not shown unless the mouse is over the cell.

Overall, this is a great project. I hope they'll set up a Wikipedia page, with versions in many different languages contributed by the same volunteers that build the List.

Chinese translation of a poem by Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931) was an accomplished Lebanese poet. His well-known poem On Children

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. 

has been translated into Chinese as follows:

你们的孩子，都不是你们的孩子
乃是生命为自己所渴望的儿女。
他们是借你们而来，却不是从你们而来
他们虽和你们同在，却不属于你们。 

or in another version:

你的儿女，其实不是你的儿女。
他们是生命对于自身渴望而诞生的孩子。
他们借助你来这世界，却非因你而来，
他们在你身旁，却并不属于你。

The second line, plainly paraphrased, means that the children are the offspring or outcome of the longing of Life for itself. Here Life acts as an entity as if it exists in space and time. It tries to find itself, and in the process, are born the children who appear to belong to you, the addressee of the author. The Chinese rendering of this abstract description, "生命为自己所渴望的儿女", is a grammatically perplexing one. Let's build up from the basics. "他所渴望的是工作" is "What he longs for is a job". Based on that model, "自己所渴望的" must mean "what (someone/something) he/she/it-self longs for", or here specifically, "what (something) itself longs for". (I added "someone" or "something" solely to work around the problem that the word he/she/it-self alone cannot stand alone.) Now, if we substitute Life for this something, therefore, "what Life itself longs for" or "生命自己所渴望的" in Chinese, that doesn't match the original meaning; the author intends to say the children are the outcome of the longing, not of what Life longs for. Life longs for itself and this longing process begets the children. Unfortunately, the translation "生命为自己所渴望的儿女" is not saying the same thing, either. In fact, it says something a native Chinese speaker has trouble understanding. I can't even think of a good literal translation of this ambiguous and possibly ungrammatical phrase. In contrast, the second translation, "他们是生命对于自身渴望而诞生的孩子" is a good one, thanks to the extra word "诞生" added by the translator. Literally it says "They are the children born out of Life's longing for itself", which is remarkably close to Gibran's original.

The third line is deceivingly simple. What does the author exactly mean by "through you but not from you"? The first Chinese translation, "他们是借你们而来，却不是从你们而来", uses "借" (v. "to borrow"; prep. "with the help of") for "through", and "从" for "from". The second translation, "他们借助你来这世界，却非因你而来", uses "借助" ("with the help of") for "through", and "因" ("because", "because of", "due to") for "from". Both translations interpret "through you" as "with the help of you". The first literally renders "from", while the second changes it to "because of". I checked the translations of this line into a few other languages. For example
Spanish: Vienen a través vuestro, pero no de vosotros.
French: Ils viennent à travers vous mais non de vous.
German: Sie kommen durch dich, aber nicht von dir.
Italian: Tu li metti al mondo, ma non li crei.
Only the Italian version does not literally translate the prepositions "through" and "from" in the original poem. Instead, the sentence means, plainly put, "You put them into the world, but do not create them."

The Italian rendering, in my opinion, has gone a little too far from the author's possibly deliberate wording that borders on mischievous play of words. Similarly, the Chinese translations, which change the author's "through" to "with the help of" and (in one case) "from" to "because of", would be frowned upon by the author. We know that unlike scholarly translation which should be literal, some or even a great deal of flexibility is allowed in translation of literary especially poetic works. But the Spanish, French and German translations I found all stubbornly stick to the literal mapping of the two prepositions. My take on this is that if the original poem can be understood in its original language and also in the translated language with literal translation, no word change should be made, and I believe that is exactly the case here. We can make sense of "They come through you but not from you" if we use a good analogy. Imagine the scene in which bright sunlight shines through the window and comes into the room. This sunlight (the children in Gibran's poem) comes through the window glass (you) and yet it is not truly from the window or glass, but from the sun. In this interpretation, the light travels literally through the glass, without the help of the glass (contrary to both Chinese interpretations), without the glass somehow putting the light down into the room (contrary to the Italian interpretation), and having no cause-and-effect relation with the glass (contrary to the second Chinese translation). The light belongs to the sun because the sun created it. The light can come into the room simply because only the window out of the whole external wall is transparent. Gibran's "through you but not from you", when likened to "through the window glass but not from the glass", is a clever play of the prepositions and yet makes perfect sense. There is no need to replace them unless misunderstood. The best Chinese translation may simply be a literal one, "他们通过你而来，却不是从你而来". If needed, a translator's note can be provided to help the reader. Anything else will likely tarnish the beauty of this line.