Language Log

Here are two successive sentences from The Wizard of Oz, presented in two different orders:

1. "How strange it all is! But, comrades, what shall we do now?"
2. "We must journey on until we find the road of yellow brick again," said Dorothy, "and then we can keep on to the Emerald City."

The first order (in blue) is easier to construe as a coherent sequence, because in that order, sentence 2 answers a question posed by sentence 1. The version in red could be rescued by a more complicated set of contextual assumptions or a more complicated theory of the interaction — but in fact it's the blue version that's the original.

The company Oatly claims to have created a new Chinese word for plant-based milk by placing the grass radical above the character for milk:

Two days ago, I called the attention of friends and colleagues to this recently published book:

Jewish Refugees in Shanghai, 1933-1947: A Selection of Documents (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018.

At 717 pages and with 184 primary documents in German, English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Chinese, and Russian, this big volume was edited by Irene Eber (1929-2019), who passed away a few days ago.  Here's a short (7:26) video telling how she became a Sinologist.

Paul Battley spotted this nice specimen of digraphia written inside the glass of one of those soft toy grabber machines in Taipei last week:

Another science card given out to first grade students in Shenzhen, China (see "Readings" below for the first one):

As I've mentioned before, Chinese feel that they have every right to experiment with English, make up their own English words, and compose their own locutions which have never before existed in the English-speaking world.  In recent years, they have become ever more playful and emboldened to create new English terms that they gloss or define in Chinese.  Here are ten such new English terms, or perhaps in some cases I should say modified English terms, together with their Chinese explanations:

I'm on the Amtrak train from Philadelphia to New Haven. Although I've ridden on trains hundreds of times all over the US and around the world, something just happened that I've never experienced before. The conductor was going through the entire car (and other cars too — with hundreds of people) asking each person politely and calmly, "Last name on your ticket?"

Whereupon each passenger said his or her name. Since the names were of all kinds of nationalities and variant spellings, in most cases he had to follow up by asking them to spell their name. Every single passenger did so, politely and clearly, and the conductor typed their surnames into his handheld electronic device.

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Today's SMBC:

Science card given out to first grade students in Shenzhen, China:

From June Teufel Dreyer:

More in 2020 Dem polyglots:

Here is @SenGillibrand , an Asian studies major, greeting @VOANews in Mandarin. pic.twitter.com/kdcr2hsL69

— Esha Kaur Sarai (@egkaur) April 6, 2019

For the first time in my life, I closely observed someone inputting Korean on a cell phone.  (I was sitting behind the person doing it on the train ride to the city this afternoon.)  Of course, I don't know exactly how it works, but what I observed was very interesting.

First of all, the young woman's phone had a special feature I've never seen in any other type of inputting.  Namely, she could use a little, built-in, popup, electronic magnifying glass to hover over a particular syllable block that she had composed to inspect it carefully to see that she had formed it correctly.  She did this fairly often.

Next, she seemed to spend a lot of time typing and retyping individual syllable blocks to make sure she got them right.