Korean has accepted many English words into its vocabulary, including "hotdog" (except in the north, where it is forbidden). Now, with Korean culture and economy booming globally, it is not surprising that Korean language will be spreading too.
…According to the OED’s website on Tuesday, the words “noraebang,” “hyung,” “jjigae,” “tteokbokki” and “pansori” were also added in the December update.
…Dalgona, which entered the pop culture lexicon with the release of Netflix’s hit show Squid Game in 2021, is defined as a “Korean confection made by adding baking soda to melted sugar, typically sold by street vendors in the form of a flat disc with a simple shape such as a heart, star, etc., carved on its surface”.
When I got to the Latin, I was puzzled by whether I should leave "sit" in there or get rid of it. I knew it must be some form of the verb "to be", but I wasn't sure exactly what form and what function it played..
So I put "sit" in Google Translate Latin and pushed the translate button, but forgot that I had the "into" language set on Chinese. I was surprised / delighted / tickled when the Latin came out as Chinese "suí tā qù 隨它去" (lit., "let it go"). On the one hand, I was amazed by how colloquial it sounded, but, on the other hand, I thought it was a brilliant attempt on the part of GT to capture the grammatical sense of Latin "sit".
…an authenticated stream of events used to efficiently sync user updates (posts, likes, follows, handle changes, etc).
Many applications people will want to build on top of atproto and Bluesky will start with the firehose, from feed generators to labelers, to bots and search engines.
Cai Xutie was a Taiwanese woman who ran a family farm with her husband in a village near Jiayi in central Taiwan. She was a rice farmer and had never attended a public school. After her husband died in middle age, she sold some of the land, moved to Taipei with her children, and bought a modest apartment. Because of economic pressure, she helped to set up a number of revolving credit pools, which were used by economically disadvantaged people in the 1950s and 60s to obtain credit when they couldn't get it from banks.
It's a card game with a strange name. "Throwing eggs" is a shedding-type card game in which the players (2 pairs of 2 partners) try to get rid of all their cards before their opponents.
The characters in Guandan (掼蛋) literally mean "Throwing Eggs". The second character is a homophone of the character 弹, meaning bomb, which is also suggested as an origin for the game's name. An alternative name for the game is Huai'an Running Fast (淮安跑得快), referencing the city where the game originated.
I've overheard card players in the West refer to decisive card plays as "throwing a bomb", so the name makes sense after all, if you think of "dan" metaphorically.
Xinyi Ye, who sent this to me, thought the idea of multiple languages and the Tower of Babel in a game would be quite cliché, but this one is actually good. You will be surprised at what you see and hear.
Mark Metcalf called the conspicuous expression "cultural confidence" to my attention:
It's appeared in LL twice.
Apparently it has propaganda 'legs' and, of course, the blessing of Xi Dada – see the articles below. It has even showed up in numerous Jiěfàngjūn 解放军报 (People's Liberation Army Daily) articles in recent months.
Is it just another throwaway term or is it being used to push CCP members toward a particular goal?
Considered from another perspective, all this talk about instilling confidence could easily be interpreted to mean that CCP members don't have the desired level of cultural confidence ("Party" confidence?).
Indicates something far off, removed from both speaker and addressee. Contrast with それ(sore), indicating something removed from the speaker but closer to the addressee.
This is part of a long series of Language Log posts in which we pondered the phenomenal memorization skills of persons of Indian heritage (see "Selected readings" below).
So you know what's happening in the following astonishing video, let me begin by giving a basic definition, etymology, and explication of what happens in this intricate word game:
Antakshari, also known as Antyakshari (अंताक्षरी transl. The game of the ending letter) is a spokenparlor game played in India. Each contestant sings the first verse of a song (often Classical Hindustani or Bollywood songs) that begins with the consonant of Hindialphabet on which the previous contestant's song ended.
The word is derived from two Sanskrit words: antya (अन्त्य) meaning end + akshara (अक्षर) meaning letter of the alphabet. When these words are combined and an '-i' suffixed, the term means "The game of the ending letter". Due to schwa syncope in Hindi and other Indo-Aryan languages, Antyakshari is pronounced antakshri. A dialectical variation of the word is इन्ताक्षरी or intakshri.
Some funny things happen when one tries to straighten out the relationships among these three names for one of the world's most challenging board games.
First of all, if I put wéiqí 圍棋 / 围棋, the Chinese name of the game, into Google Translate (GT) and ask it to translate that into Japanese, out comes Iku 行く ("to go"), but if I ask GT to translate wéiqí 圍棋 directly into English, out comes "go", the English name of the game.
So that we don't get sucked more deeply into a quagmire of nomenclatural confusion, I will put some basic linguistic facts about these names here. It would be good for other Language Log readers to inform us how the name of the game is handled in other languages.
Over the years, I have come across the expression "red thread" in various and sundry circumstances. The latest instance was conveyed to me by the French journalist and documentary director, Philippe Grangereau. As we were working together on an illustrated piece of reportage about the Tarim mummies, he would remind me from time to time that everything that went into the text had to contribute and be related to what he called the "red wire" (speaking in English). The first several times Philippe used that expression I didn't know what he was talking about. Finally I asked him how to say it in French. When he told me "fil rouge", I knew right away that he meant "red thread", and that fit perfectly with my understanding of the need for all the elements in the text to be related to the central narrative thread that ran through it.
