A friend points out to me that according to this Abe Books description of a hardback copy of Jane Jacobs' classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, on the back cover it is reported that Toronto Life made the following assertion: Jane Jacobs has become more than a person. She is an […]
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An important rallying cry and usage distinction made by allies of undocumented workers in the current cultural battle over immigration in the United States is Elie Wiesel's assertion above: "No human being is illegal." In the quote, Wiesel gives examples of the kinds of adjectives that he feels can denote properties of people (fat, skinny, […]
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[Prefatory note: The Chinese author of this guest post, TCI (encrypted acronym to protect her identity) holds a humanities M.A. from a top tier American research university which she attended from 2016 to 2018. She has been employed for several years as an adviser to students in China who desire to study abroad (especially the USA) […]
Recent article in Scientific American: This Ancient Language Has the Only Grammar Based Entirely on the Human Body An endangered language family suggests that early humans used their bodies as a model for reality By Anvita Abbi on June 1, 2023 From just a small handful of Andaman Islanders, the last speakers of their languages, […]
Enlightening article by Peter Backhaus in The Japan Times (6/9/23): "Za grammar notes: How to properly handle the 'the' in Japanese" Japanese seems to be able to assimilate any English word, including the ubiquitous definite article "the", which is unlike anything in Japanese itself. If there’s something like a Murphy’s Law for syntax, the name […]
Article by Vivian Salama and Jared Malsin in WSJ (11/27/22) Turkey’s Push to Change How the World Pronounces its Name Causes a Flap In part weary of bird comparisons, the country wants everyone to say ‘Tour-key-yeh.’ The rebranding has been a head-scratcher for many people. In truth, I don't blame them, especially not since so […]
When I learned Mandarin half a century ago, it was a matter of faith, rectitude, and integrity that one should pronounce 說服 ("persuade") as shuìfú, not shuōfú, because when 說 is used with the meaning "convince; persuade", its pronunciation should be shuì, not shuō, which means "say; speak; explain", the more usual reading. Now, however, […]
It's well known that Jane Austen's novels made extensive use of italics to mark prosodic focus. Here's the first example from Pride and Prejudice, which occurs in the eighth sentence of the work, on p. 2 of the 1813 first edition: "Do not you want to know who has taken it?" cried his wife impatiently. […]
Helen Barrett, "‘Ça plane pour moi’ was a burst of Belgian punk with a dark twin", Financial Times 6/1/2020 [emphasis added]: Meanwhile, the perennially lucrative “Ça plane pour moi” may not be all that it seems. Bertrand mimed it in TV studios, but whose is the bratty voice on the record? It is a question […]
The particle "ge 個/个" is one of the most frequent characters in written Chinese (12th in a list of 9,933 unique characters). It is generally thought of as a classifier, numerary adjunct, measure word. Indeed, it functions as the almost universal, default classifier when you're not sure what the correct / proper measure word for […]
Previously: Robocalls, legal interpretation, and Bryan Garner The precursors of the Scalia/Garner canons In my last post, I talked about the precursors of the canons from Reading Law that are the primary subject of this series of posts. As I explained there, the Last Antecedent Canon and the Nearest Reasonable Referent Canon are adapted from […]
A few weeks ago, Mark’s post “Lawyers as linguists” alerted me to Facebook v. Duguid, a case now pending before the Supreme Court, which grabbed my attention for several reasons. First, the case presents an interesting linguistic issue. Second, the parties on both sides have framed their linguistic arguments in terms of three of the […]
I was just thinking how important cows (and their milk) are for Indian people and was surprised that's reflected in such a fundamental word for a family relationship as "daughter" — at least in the popular imagination. Even in a scholarly work such as that of D.N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow (New […]