They're trying to make sure that the moderators are ultimately not fair to my father during the debate and all of them understand that hey you're part of the left and the media has been her number one surrogate in this without the media uh this wouldn't even be a contest but the media has built her up they've let her slide on every you know indiscrepancy on every lie on every you- D N C uh you- in- game trying to get Bernie Sanders out of the thing I mean if Republicans were doing that they'd be warming up the gas chamber right now
The following sentence can be found (as of 15 September 2016) in this Wikipedia article about the effects of rape on the victim:
Sometimes in an effort to shield oneself from believing such a thing could happen to their loved one, a supporter will make excuses for why the event occurred.
The clash in pronoun choice (the switch from one to their) makes this clearly anomalous. What exactly could have led to its being written? I think at least two unease-promoting factors are involved.
I received an exciting email this afternoon from Perry Alexis, the chief accountant for the Warren Buffett Foundation. It seems I have been picked to receive a $1,500,000 donation — not a grant for research or anything, but a donation. And I notice it came from an email address in Kazakhstan.
The blurb for the movie Arrival, due to open in November:
When mysterious spacecrafts touch down across the globe, an elite team, lead by expert linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams), is brought together to investigate. As mankind teeters on the verge of global war, Banks and the team race against time for answers – and to find them, she will take a chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly humanity.
Last week, a magazine writer asked me for a linguist's perspective on first-encounter communication strategies. She posed a set of interesting questions, starting with this:
An alien is standing in front of you, apparently peaceably. What is the first thing you try, in an attempt to communicate with it? Is a greeting important? Are there any underlying rules for communication across cultures (and language barriers) that govern your decision?
A careful statistical examination of words from 6,000+ languages shows that humans tend to use the same sounds for common objects and ideas, no matter what language they’re speaking.
If you attend Chinese sporting events, you will often hear fans exhort their team to jiāyóu 加油. Should you ask them what that means, they might reply "add oil", which would undoubtedly leave you feeling rather puzzled. From the context, functionally you know that it must mean something like "go!". But how one gets from "add oil" to "go" remains something of a mystery. Cf. the comments to "Non-translation" (7/24/16).
For a linguist, at least if the linguist is me, it is a thrill to cross for the first time the northern border that separates Austria from Czechia. Immediately after crossing the border last Sunday, my train stopped at Břeclav, and I was able to hear over the beautifully clear announcement PA system my first real-context occurrence of one of the rarest sounds in the languages of the world.
After reading the the latest series of Language Log posts on long range connections (see below for a listing), Geoff Wade suggested that I title the next post in this series as I have this one. If there ever was an occasion to do so, now is as good a moment as any, with the announcement of the publication of Chau Wu's extraordinary "Patterns of Sound Correspondence between Taiwanese and Germanic/Latin/Greek/Romance Lexicons, Part I", Sino-Platonic Papers, 262 (Aug., 2016), 239 pp. (free pdf).
The latest quarterly update to the online Oxford English Dictionary includes a metalinguistic term all too familiar to Language Log readers: uptalk, defined as "a manner of speaking in which declarative sentences are uttered with rising intonation at the end, a type of intonation more typically associated with questions." It's high time that the OED created an entry for the word, given that it has had a significant media presence (for better or for worse) ever since it burst on the scene in 1993.
At my hotel here in Brno, Czechia, the shampoo comes in small sachets, manufactured in Düsseldorf, labeled with the word denoting the contents in a long list of suitable European Union languages. I can't tell you which languages they picked, for reasons which will immediately become apparent. Here are the first four:
Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" is destined to become one of the lasting catchphrases of the campaign season.
Clinton's use of the phrase (which she says she now regrets*) appeared in a speech delivered at a fundraiser on Friday night:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.
