Language Log

source:  Taobao 淘寶

This is also linguistically fascinating because it shows ‘fuck’ being used as a loanword (fake 法克) in Mandarin! The loanword is so entrenched nowadays that it has it‘s own baidupedia entry… 😅 1/ https://t.co/TVxEmev6iA pic.twitter.com/UKBx3CiO26

— Egas Moniz-Bandeira ᠡᡤᠠᠰ ᠮᠣᠨᠢᠰ ᠪᠠᠨᡩ᠋ᠠᠶᠢᠷᠠ (@egasmb) April 25, 2023

Annie Gottlieb asks:

One image evokes the other:

pic.twitter.com/yBBzkwPyTm

— Jonathan Gray 🐼 (@jwyg) April 8, 2020

A stylish clothing company comes up with sexy new shoes worthy of an elf or a pixie, and look at their ad:

Alex Baumans writes:

Perhaps no news to you, but I just discovered that the new Range Rover model is called the Velar. I wonder if the Uvular will be next.

To be followed by the Range Rover Pharyngeal and the Range Rover Glottal. (Or maybe a hybrid version called the Range Rover Labiovelar?)

And Jeep could fight back with the Jeep Ergative and the Jeep Grand Optative…

Nathan Hopson saw this sign on the ferry from Hong Kong to Macau.

In The Japan Times (9/12/16), Mark Schreiber writes:  "Can Japanese speakers really read Chinese? It depends on what you mean by ‘read’".

At an excellent restaurant in Leipzig last night the server quickly identified me as an Auslander whose German might not be up to grasping every nuance of the menu, so I was given an English menu as well. (It was a bit humiliating, like having a bib tied round my neck. I have tried to explain elsewhere why my knowledge of German is so shamefully thin and undeveloped despite my having once spent 18 months living in the country.) On the English menu was a dish at which I raised a native-speaking eyebrow: Frankish little shovels, it said. And since there is no limit to my dedication as a linguistic scientist, I ordered the dish just to see what these little shovels were like.

Back in mid-December, 2013, I started assembling materials for a post about the differences between Chinese and Japanese writing.  I think that someone (I forget who) sent me a couple of links that stimulated me to think about this topic, and then I added some things of my own.  That was about as far as I got, though, so the would-be post was filed away in my drafts folder until I stumbled upon it today.

Is it just me, or does "Sepp Blatter" sound like the name of an alien creature in a Star Wars episode or some other sci-fi story? Put together the sep of (e.g.) septic tank of corruption and the blatter of Douglas Adams's ravenous bugblatter beast of Traal and you've really got a name that phonologically conjures up a monstrous creature from beyond.

Advertisement at a train stop in Oslo:

Photograph courtesy of Alexy Khudyakov

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and countless other social networking services and video / music sharing sites are blocked and banned in China (presumably because they would otherwise contaminate the minds of China's citizens and lead to social unrest, as has apparently happened in the Middle East).  But all such banned and blocked services and sites have their heavily policed and controlled Chinese knockoffs, so life goes on, after a fashion.