I have no problem with this:
Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.
Reading University researchers claim “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years. Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.
The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct—citing “squeeze”, “guts”, “stick” and “bad” as probable first casualties.
My problem is here:
The work casts an interesting light on the connection between concepts and language in the human brain, and provides an insight into the evolution of a dynamic set of words.
“If you’ve ever played ‘Chinese whispers’,” [Professor Pagel said,] “what comes out the end is usually gibberish, and more or less when we speak to each other we’re playing this massive game of Chinese whispers. Yet our language can somehow retain its fidelity.”
Isn’t a bit racist to call Chinese “gibberish”? The game begins with English and ends with complete nonsense, Chinese. Now that ain’t right.
who the fuck has ever called it Chinese Whispers?
I’ve only ever heard it called telephone…..
Ricky Gervais on the subject of “Chinese Whispers”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTiLgS1gT…
First word to go should be “tax cut”.
Seriously.
Wow… the topic is a weighty one, worthy of discussion and debate.
And you get stuck on whether or not it’s appropriate to use the word “Chinese.” Yeah, i’ve heard it called that. So what?
This is political correctness taken to a retarded extreme.
What’s that? I can’t say “retarded” anymore? That’s right, because it might offend… retards.
Fine then, it’s lame. Oh… wait, sorry handicapped people.
How about gay? Oops. Sorry homosexuals…
Is there a word for how to describe how irritatingly stupid this kind of mincing words is?
I like that you don’t bother to say where those block quotes came from, if anywhere
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archive…
Yeah, the name is pretty racist (though I’ve never actually heard anyone call it that, it’s always Telephone), and as we all know, Charles knows a lot about racism.
…for fuck’s sake. Yes, it’s a historically racist title. A quick google search shows that the researchers didn’t come up with it. Give ’em a break.
In the software field, the historical idea of “faking” an automaton by using human labor is still known as a “mechanical turk.” Is it racist? Probably. But it’s an established term, and everyone immediately knows what you mean by it.
C’est la vie.
I have the same problem when my grandpa refers to a “jew harp” there is almost no chance that the name of that object isn’t derogatory.
You’re a bit racist Charles.
Americans all call the game “Telephone”. Mr. Mudede is apparently link-impaired and couldn’t be bothered to cite the story. It’s from the BBC.
Colonialist is as colonialist does, sir.
It’s called the Arab Telephone.
jew harp, I think, comes from “jaw harp”
Did anyone ever play “German Spotlight”? A germanophile (?) once called me on that one – “What, because Germans are only good at shooting people?”
@4, the word “lenny” works for me.
“Chinese Whispers” is just what us Brits call “Telephone”. Nothing more or less than that. Now that I’m an enlightened traveler, I agree that it is pretty bad! It helps to remember that while Britain is fairly multicultural the chinese population is close to nil.
Now, the thing that gets me over here is the drink the ‘Irish Car Bomb’. To anyone who grew up on the other english speaking side of the atlantic, that is fairly outrageous. And there’s plenty of Irish folk round here, so no excuse 🙂
@14 there is a very good excuse for the Irish Car Bomb – centuries of English oppression!
Begins with English and winds up as nonsense?
I think “Mudede whispers” would be a more appropriate name.
Charles, check out this cartogram of the phenomena: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/02…
Quoted from the link:
“When a Hellenophone has trouble understanding something, his or her preferred languages of reference, as far as incomprehension is concerned, are Arabic and Chinese. And while for Arabs the proverbial unintelligible language is Hindi, for Chinese it’s… the language of Heaven.
“For Romanians, the ultimate in incomprehensibility is Turkish, for the Turks its French and the French consider Javanese the acme in huh?”
@15 Fair play 🙂
But I wouldn’t advise ordering one of those in an Irish pub any more than a british one.
I can’t see this as anything but your recreational outrage. The game has, it would seem, changed name in the decades since this professor was young enough to be playing it.
@16 FTW
At they didn’t call it ‘Oriental Whispers’
I once was roundly chastised for ordering an Irish Car Bomb in a NYC bar. The bartender said with some vitriol “No, we don’t serve them, but I could make you a Pakistani Bus Bomb”.
I’d call it “Hustler” from now on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN6kwxMYE…
Does this mean I can’t order a Grasshopper anymore?
And since when did English become Chinese?
Heh, heh, 16, so true!
Hey #4, 1990 called, it wants its anti-PC rant back.
Hey Charles, the word “gibberish” likely has racist origins too.
My dad was from Gibber. Screw all you racists.
Hey #26, the Jerk Store called and it said they’re running out of YOU!
Seriously, Seinfeld-era jokes? Who’s really living in 1990?
@29: I slept with your wife.
Um Charles, I love ya, man, but nowhere in that quote does Professor Pagel equate Chinese with gibberish. He says that if you’re playing a certain game (the name of which, though inappropriate, is incidental) “what comes out the end is usually gibberish”.
1. Yes, the name “Chinese whispers” is offensive.
2. Before you go citing these factoids to your friends: Just because the article has numbers in it doesn’t mean it’s true. If there’s any good science in the research, neither the BBC article nor the U. of Reading press release that it’s based on is reporting it in any comprehensible way. The press release doesn’t seem to mention any published version of the research, so it’s a little hard to tell. However, the BBC article, in particular, does a poor job of presenting the research as linguistically plausible.
The blog “Language Log” has an ongoing thread on bad science journalism, especially where language-related, and is particularly fond of picking on the BBC– I wouldn’t be surprised if a post on this article showed up there pretty soon.
Oh, wait– Language Log *has* commented on this one:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=…
In part:
“The press release is rather misleading in several ways, most strikingly by talking about retention of cognates over time without mentioning the sound changes that may make them unrecognizable to ordinary speakers after a few hundred years, and will almost certainly do so after a few thousand years, much less 10,000 or 30,000 years. And the press release also makes it seem as if the scientists have “been able to go back almost 30,000 years” in reconstructing Indo-European, which is almost certainly not what they are claiming.”
@4: What about “irritatingly stupid”?
Seriously, though, there’s always “inane,” “fatuous,” and if you take five seconds to look in a thesaurus I’m sure you could find even more. Come on.
I don’t think it’s any more racist than saying “It’s Greek to me” or the term “greeked text” that graphic designers use to mean gibberish unreadable text used when making a layout.
On behalf of Dutch people, I would like to lodge a formal complaint. We do sometimes pick up the tab, you know.
@35: “Greeked text”? Bit weird. Isn’t the text usually Latin?
Do they play Chinese Whispers squinting their eyes and wearing fake buckteeth?
@14 – the percentage of the UK population with Chinese ancestry is about 0.7%, in the US, it is 1.2%.
Until now, I’d never heard the game called anything other than Chinese whispers. Had a professor at Reading University referred to it as ‘telephone’ most of the people reading his article wouldn’t have understood what he was talking about. Which I guess is kind of fitting in a way.
Jesus. Fucking. Christ. This is the stupidest point I’ve every seen someone try to make on this excuse for a blog. Can you understand Chinese? No? (I can. some of the time.) Then to you, and almost every other english speaker, it is a series of meaningless utterances, i.e. gibberish. How about the saying “it’s all greek to me.” Is that racist, or just saying that you don’t understand greek? What if he’d called the game “Swedish Whispers”? Still offended.
@ 4: Lenny, you said “mincing”, heh, heh, heh.
Hey, there’s a joke from first season (I think)of “The Sopranos”. Uncle Junior (titular head of the crime family) says, “Did you hear about the Chinese Godfather? He made ’em an offer they couldn’t understand!) Best wishes 🙂
@35: “it’s greek to me” comes from shakespeare, and refers to fact that greek at the time was the language of the intellectuals and inaccessible to the hoi polloi.
@39: I think the point is that there’s a difference between identifying actual gibberish (in the game, English that’s in error and confused) and acknowledging a real language, with order and vocabulary that you don’t have the faculty to understand, but which does mean something to someone who speaks it.
Basically, calling the game “Chinese Whispers” is to say that Chinese, spoken correctly, is equivalent to a fucked-up, stupid version of English, which is, yeah, a little insulting.