With two audio recordings. If you want to hear them, click on the link embedded in the title.
…since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.
Imagine running propaganda and forgetting to blur the Top Gun logo. Peak CCTV. Even the Chinese can’t bear to see it! #TopGunpic.twitter.com/p0gs5X1MK7
— The Great Translation Movement 大翻译运动 (@TGTM_Official) September 23, 2025
Kim Jong-Un has a mission to eliminate bourgeois, foreign, and southern terminology. This story in the Daily Mail by Sabrina Penty, citing the Daily NK, is hardly scholarly, but it gives some examples, and there are other stories online. The Metro in the UK reported that "I love you" (discovered in a love letter during a routine Big-Brother check by the Socialist Patriotic Youth League) was subject to severe state criticism. "Hamburger" has to be called something else (dajin-gogi gyeopppang [double bread with ground beef]) in Korean. "Karaoke" is too Japanese (try "on-screen accompaniment machines" instead). But the most interesting ban was on the phrase "ice cream" ("aiseukeurim 아이스크림). Kim wants it replaced by eseukimo. But doesn't this show that the dear leader is weak on etymology? Isn't it transparently a Koreanized borrowing of English eskimo?
Currently working my way through an excellent book on Jūnshì lúnlǐ wénhuà 军事伦理文化 (The culture of military ethics) and started noticing that the author ping-pongs between Zhōngguó 中国 and wǒguó 我国 when discussing various aspects of the PRC's history and alleged achievements. Are you aware of any general guidance regarding how the decision is made to use one term or the other? Topical? Polical? Tone? I'll keep digging and let you know if anything jumps out at me.
BTW, one UVA colleague described how he had to teach first year PRC students that "my country" was not an acceptable synonym for China when writing literature essays.
Modal adjectives of non-epistemic necessity are very common in language corpora. However, such adjectives are expected to behave differently in context, and thus differences between them should be highlighted in dictionaries. Nevertheless, there are a few studies that have examined modal adjectives with respect to their associated constructions and meanings in English. More importantly, studies on equivalent Arabic modal adjectives are scarce. Hence, the present study is quantitative and corpus-driven utilizing monolingual (i.e., the arTenTen18 and the enTenTen18) and parallel (i.e., Open Parallel Corpus or OPUS for short) corpora. Further, it is based on construction grammar and frame semantics to explore Arabic and English words of necessity.
A sign just outside the driver's cab of a TRA (Taiwan Rail) aging diesel on the Pingxi Line that climbs along the edge of the Keelung River ravine, just outside Taipei.
On first blush, I thought perhaps the person pictured had a double chin, and by cropping the photo this way they were trying to hide it. On second blush, it was clear that they had misinterpreted the name of the famous 2nd c. statesman, general, and poet, Cao Cao 曹操 (ca. 155-220 AD).
A learned friend recently sent me a draft composition on medieval Chinese history in which he referred to "*" as an "asterix". This reminded me that ten years ago I wrote a post, "The many pronunciations of '*'" (12/17/15), on this subject and we had a lengthy, vigorous discussion about it.
Given that lately we've been talking a lot about Celts, Galatians, and so on, I think it is appropriate to write another post on Asterix the Gaul, that famous French comic book character, and how he got his name. Also inspired / prompted by Chris Button's latest comment.
I often hear "*" pronounced "asterix" or "asterick", and so on (e.g., "astrisk" [two syllables], esp. in rapid speech). It's hard even for me to pronounce "*" or type the symbol those ways, so ingrained is the pronunciation "as-ter-isk".
What with all the talk about Taiwanese and Gaelic swirling around Language Log recently, I was serendipitously surprised to find this in my inbox last week:
Randy Alexander is not a professional Sinologist, but when it comes to reading Chinese poetry, he's as serious as one can be. The following poem is by Du Fu (712-770), said by some to be "China's greatest poet". In the presentation below, I will first give the text with its transcription, and then Randy's translation. After that we will delve deeply into the grammatical exegesis of one line of the poem, the last.
…an article on philosophy / human rights and how a Chinese translation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (available online from Philosophy Now, 118 [February-March, 2017], 9-11, and also available here from the website of one of the authors) raises some questions of hermeneutics.
