Much like what happened to Sinosplice a while back, Sinoglot has been hacked. In fact it was the exact same hack that hit John’s site.

The hack is the eval(base64_decode javascript injection that you may be familiar with if you’re a web developer. It is fairly benign, as hacks go. You’ll notice it as a user when your browser is suddenly redirected to a website in Russia which you had no intention to visit. Otherwise it’s business as usual.

What does this mean for readers?
It’s Saturday and a busy one at that. Steve and I are working to contain the problem and get clean installs of WP and other CMSs up, stripped of the offending files. The source of the problem, again mirroring John Pasden’s case, seems to be an outdated WP install that got left on the server.

Again, this hack operated by inserting a Javascript redirect into php files, so there should be no risk to people reading the site. If you’re concerned, just make sure your anti-virus software is up to date.

We will probably not be migrating to another server, as that won’t prevent future attacks. Instead we’re re-installing the different content management systems. As a result there may be some down time this weekend.

Fortunately, we were able to find the problem, so now it’s just a matter of repairing the damage done. Unfortunately, those repairs are time consuming. Please bear with us as we get this all cleared up. We thank you in advance for your patience.

It’s hard to research 方言. You want to talk to someone from outside Yangzhou about their 语言, about whether or not it’s 吴语. The term 吴语 inevitably causes confusion, and so you specify, but not by using the one thing you know would get to the point most quickly. You know you could just rephrase it as 吴方言 and that’d make things perfectly clear. But you resent the term 方言. So you say, “No, you know, 吴国的语言” but of course that doesn’t help either. “上海话，苏州话，温州话等。都是吴语” you say. “Ohhh. You mean 吴方言!” your interlocutor says.

So you give in. Maybe you argue that 方言 can be 语言 too. You tell him that in Tang times, 维语 was called a 方言, and that at times even English was called 方言 in official texts. But probably you don’t. Probably you just accept it and move on, knowing from experience that there’s little point in arguing this point.

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I saw this while filling out a scholarship application recently. The whole application is bilingual, and at one point they get to 語言能力, Language Proficiency. I think secretly they’re hoping to catch liars or people who are trying to inflate their abilities with the ‘comprehension’ section.

“Yeah I know you understood what I just said, but did you get it, man?”

Note that it’s actually 聽. The other sections are more appropriately named on the form, but I could imagine someone who either was just starting out with Chinese or who didn’t know 繁體字 thinking that this was rating their overall understanding of the language.

For example how my Korean and Spanish are both total crap and I couldn’t hold a decent conversation in either language to save my life, but I still more or less know what’s going on around me when in Korea or Spain. Then again, maybe that makes ‘comprehension’ a perfect translation for 聽。