Yesterday Nick Montfort returned to Penn to give a talk under the title "Lean Computer-Generated Poetry as Exploration of Language, Culture, and Computation". The talk was basically a commentary on (some of) the contents of his interactive website https://nickm.com/, so you can explore the same material yourself, minus the commentary.
Read the rest of this entry »
There have been a few LLOG posts focusing on Martin Luther King Jr. over the years, notably "Martin Luther King's rhetorical phonetics" (1/15/2007), "Celebrating the Linguistic Significance of Martin Luther King Jr." (1/17/2016), and "There is No Racial Justice Without Linguistic Justice" (1/15/2018).
Read the rest of this entry »
From a friend in Hong Kong:
The following pictures are from Shatin mall last night. They show people lining up to get individually calligraphed Chinese New Year’s couplets that take up the key slogan of the protests: “Restore HK’s glory: revolution for our times.” On the way up to mass today, we saw new slogans spray-painted calling for HK independence as “the only way out”. “It ain’t over yet.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink Comments off
I'm in Paris for the UNESCO International Conference Language Technologies for All (LT4All), which happens to coincide with another event in France, a national strike that (among other things) created a very long trip from the airport. In my hotel's elevator there was a sign whose first sentence taught me a couple of new words:
Ce Jeudi 5 Décembre aura lieu une grève interprofessionelle reconductible indéterminée.
There was also an English translation:
This Thursday, December 5th, will be an indefinite, renewable interprofessional strike.
Two of the best known displays of Chinese culture worldwide are the Lion Dance and Dragon Boat Races. The former, including the Chinese word for "lion", is actually an import from the Western Regions (Central Asia, or East Central Asia more specifically).
Compare Old Persian * (*šagra-) (sgl /sagr, sēr/) (> Persian سیر (sīr)). The Middle Persian word is cognate with Parthian (šarg, “Leo; Lion”), Khotanese [script (šarau, “Leo; Lion”), Khwarezmian شرغ (šrγ /šarγ/, “Leo; Lion”) and Sogdian (šrwγ /šruγ/) , ܫܪܘܮ (šrwγ /šruγ/, “Leo; Lion”)
Middle Persian:
Kipling-Disney: Shere Khan (" Tiger Lion" — from Persian and Mongolian)
Read the rest of this entry »
For nearly two years, we've been following the awesome Chinese toilet revolution. See especially the last comment to this post:
"Toilet Revolution!!" (11/26/17)
But see also the follow-up posts listed in the "Selected readings" below.
In its frenzied race to catch up with the past of privies, it would appear that China has decided to make a Great Leap Forward into the future of lavatories. So now we have the "waterless smart public toilet".
"Beijing's first waterless smart public toilet has been put into use", by Zhao Tong (People's Daily Online), October 29, 2019
Read the rest of this entry »
Every week I bring floral arrangements to the main office of the UPenn Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. This week, one of the vases will have two spikes of beautiful ornamental millet ("foxtail" is certainly an appropriate descriptor).
Millet has special significance for East Asia, since — along with rice — it is one of the earliest domesticated grains from that part of the world, dating back nearly 9,000 years ago. Moreover, East Asian varieties of millet had spread to the area around the Black Sea by about 7,000 years ago, affording evidence of very early trans-Eurasian cultural exchange (wheat came in the opposite direction, from west to east, around the third millennium BC). Before the introduction of wheat, millet was the original staple grain of North China. No wonder that the mythical culture hero Hou Ji 后稷 ("Lord Millet"), the god of cereals or minister of agriculture, had that name.
Read the rest of this entry »
So we learn from this article:
"Leprechaun 'is not a native Irish word' new dictionary reveals", by Nuala McCann BBC News (9/5/19)
Leprechauns may be considered quintessentially Irish, but research suggests this perception is blarney.
The word "leprechaun" is not a native Irish one, scholars have said.
They have uncovered hundreds of lost words from the Irish language and unlocked the secrets of many others.
Although "leipreachán" has been in the Irish language for a long time, researchers have said it comes from Luperci, a group linked to a Roman festival.
The feast included a purification ritual involving swimming and, like the Luperci, leprechauns are associated with water in what may be their first appearance in early Irish literature.
According to an Old Irish tale known as The Adventure of Fergus son of Léti, leprechauns carried the sleeping Fergus out to sea.
A new revised dictionary created from the research spans 1,000 years of the Irish language from the 6th to the 16th centuries.
A team of five academics from Cambridge University and Queen's University Belfast carried out painstaking work over five years, scouring manuscripts and texts for words which have been overlooked or mistakenly defined.
Their findings can now be freely accessed in the revised version of the online dictionary of Medieval Irish.
Read the rest of this entry »
From June Teufel Dreyer:
When I went to the supermarket yesterday for my weekly sashimi fix, I noticed that the preparer seemed to have cloned herself. It was her brother (the preparers wear caps concealing their hair and the two looked virtually identical). Sister was instructing brother on exactly how I like the sashimi in a language that sounded unfamiliar. Ever curious, I had to ask. “Zo,” she replied “Z, O.” I looked it up this morning, discovered that these Chin tribes are related to the Naga who, with the Mizo, were part of a longstanding effort by the Chinese to torment the Indian government.
Sometime when there aren’t other customers waiting—this may never happen—I’ll ask how she and her brother got to Miami and my neighborhood Publix store.
Read the rest of this entry »
A cartoonist and her collaborator have been arrested in China for being "spiritually Japanese" (jīng Rì 精日). They have also been accused of "insulting China" (rǔ Huá 辱华). The latter term is transparent, and I've been hearing it a lot for the last couple of decades, whereas the former term is morphologically more difficult to understand (lit., "spirit Ja[pan]") and is new to me.
Read the rest of this entry »
Hanasaki, a curious term, depending on how you read and interpret it: "flower blooming" > "scab"
A Japanese correspondent asked me the following set of questions (below, after the page break) about the name of a Yosakoi-Sōran dance group. I'm not sure what the meaning of "Yosakoi" is, other than that it is the designation of a festival in Kochi Prefecture where this type of dancing originated in the early 90s. I've watched a few videos of Yosakoi-Sōran dance and find it fascinating and stimulating because it is extremely energetic and combines traditional Japanese dance moves with contemporary Western-influenced street dance routines. It is accompanied with rhythmic beating of naruko 鳴子 ("clappers") and repeated shouts of "sōran そうらん" (with a long "o", i.e., "ō"). I'm not certain what that means either, since there are many homophonous expressions with quite different meanings; one that might be applicable here is 騒乱, meaning "disturbance; riot; mayhem" for the uninhibited, sweeping gestures characteristic of the dance. More likely, though, it is derived from the chant of fishermen to encourage themselves as they went about their work of hauling nets, pulling ropes, and so forth, in which case it would perhaps mean roughly "that's right" or "like that".
N.B.: When the Japanese correspondent says "Chinese symbols", he seems to mean just "Chinese characters", i.e., kanji.
Read the rest of this entry »
