Language Log

I received the following message from David Moser on 6/2/11, but it got lost in my inbox until just now when I was able to retrieve it while cleaning out a bunch of old and unwanted messages:

Wow, talk about digraphia!  I just got this text message on my cell phone here in Beijing:

Michael Robinson sent in the following photograph of a restaurant which I believe is in the Inner Richmond section of San Francisco:

A year ago, I wrote "Zhou Youguang, Father of Pinyin" (1/14/14) to celebrate Zhou xiansheng's 108th birthday and his many accomplishments in language reform and applied linguistics.  Included in that post were a portrait of ZYG in his study and numerous links concerning the man and his works.

Nathan Hopson found this poster hanging up all over student bulletin boards at Nagoya University in Japan:

The following diary entry by an elementary school student is making the rounds in the Chinese media and in the blogosphere:

From Victor Steinbok:

Hong Kong movie star Chow Yun-fat has fallen afoul of the authorities on mainland China for supporting the Occupy Center democracy protesters.

It's interesting to see how the media report what he said about having his films banned on the Mainland.

"'I'll just make less then': Actor Chow Yun-fat responds to alleged PRC ban for supporting HK protests"  (10/27/14)

Chow Yun-fatt shows why he is a #HK screen god. Asked abt being banned on Mainland: "I'll just make less then" pic.twitter.com/sIhXGbfyEo

— Yuen Chan (@xinwenxiaojie) October 27, 2014

The Shanghaiist report was picked up by reddit and other outlets: "Banned from mainland China? Chow Yun Fat doesn't care" (10/27/14)

Tom Mazanec sent in the following ad that he saw in a Guangzhou (China) apartment complex:

Bryan Van Norden is a Visiting Professor at Wuhan University this semester, and he ran across an interesting bit of language play. Below is a still (taken with his cell phone) of a television commercial currently running in the PRC. It is for a watermelon juice drink. As you can see, the tag line is a bilingual pun, substituting guā 瓜 ("melon") for "God."

From Arun Tharuvai, via his Twitter account, we find that Intersecting Bubbles has this brief but fascinating post on a multilingual notice:  "Shell Petroleum thinks that Hindi is English written in the Devanagari Script ".

Ken Mallott found a Chinese use of a Japanese word in a way that surprised him.  He explains that he's an Orioles fan, and in 2012 they signed Taiwanese pitcher Wei-Yin Chen (陳偉殷), who apparently has quite the following back in Taiwan. His fans have taken to posting Chinese messages in traditional script on Facebook before 殷仔's starts, encouraging their fellow supporters to get up early to watch him pitch.

The following address plate is affixed to the outer wall of Ai Weiwei's studio in Beijing:

Reader Jean-Michel found an odd example of a Sinographic typo and it's got him stumped. This has to do with the Korean Blu-ray release of "As Tears Go By," the 1988 debut feature by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai.

In Chinese the film is known as Wàngjiǎo kǎmén 旺角卡門 ("Mongkok Carmen") after the Bizet opera (though the resemblances are very superficial). What is strange, however, is that the Korean Blu-ray art, as illustrated below, initially gave the characters as Wàngjiǎo xiàwèn 旺角下問.