Sue-lin Wong, "China Nov inflation edges up, but deflation risks dog economy", Reuters 12/9/2015. When I saw that headline, I wondered whether dog economy was a Chinese idiom for "recession". Or could the story really be about the economic sector dealing with dogs?
Of course what's really going on is that risks is a plural noun and dog is a verb, meaning "to bother or pester persistently".
During the past week, this phrase kept popping up on the Chinese internet, on WeChat, on blogs and microblogs — it was just everywhere (1,850,000 ghits), and people were wondering exactly what it meant:
zhǔ yào kàn qì zhí 主要看气质 ("main / primary — want — see — gas / breath / spirit / vital energy — quality / substance / nature")
I have intentionally not aggregated the syllables into words. The lack of a disambiguating context for this phrase — it tended to just show up by itself — permitted several different readings.
A few days ago, I expressed skepticism about a claim that "the human lexicon has a de facto storage limit of 8,000 lexical items", which was apparently derived from counting word types in various sorts of texts ("Lexical limits?", 12/5/2015). There are many difficult questions here about what we mean by "word", and what it means to be "in" the lexicon of an individual or a language — though I don't see how you could answer those questions so as to come up with a number as low as 8,000. But today I'd like to focus on some of the reasons that even after settling the "what is a word" questions, it's nearly hopeless to try to establish an upper bound by counting "word" types in text.
You ain't no Muslim, bruv! The phrase already gets more than 650,000 hits on Google in the UK, and the hashtag #YouAintNoMuslimBruv gets about 1,670,000. It is becoming a mantra, a talismanic incantation for conjuring up goodwill in a world where more and more attempts are being made to foment hatred between Muslims and everyone else.
Yesterday afternoon, Liwei Jiao went to a Chinese restaurant in South Philadelphia and ordered three dim sum dishes. Below is a photograph of the order taken down by the waitperson. The restaurant is called Wokano and it is located at 12th St and Washington Ave.
Earlier today, Victor quotes Jerry Packard quoting C.C. Cheng to the effect that "the human lexicon has a de facto storage limit of 8,000 lexical items" ("Lexical limits", 12/5/2015). Victor is appropriately skeptical, and asks for "references to any studies that have been done on the limits to (or norms for) the human lexicon". In fact there's been a lot of quantitative research on this topic, going back at least 75 years, which supports Victor's skepticism, and demonstrates clearly that Cheng's estimate is low by such a large factor that I wonder whether his idea has somehow gotten mangled at some point along the chain of quotation.
C. C. Cheng, emeritus professor of computational linguistics at the University of Illinois, estimates that the human lexicon has a de facto storage limit of 8,000 lexical items (referred to in n. 12 on p. 301 of Jerry Packard's The Morphology of Chinese: A Linguistic and Cognitive Approach [Cambridge University Press, 2000]).
Andrew Peters noticed an interesting aspect of the concise little figure in this article: "Evolution of the first person pronoun in Japanese spoken language" (click to nicely embiggen). It claims to show which pronouns were in use in various eras (Nara [710–794], Heian [794–1185], Kamakura [1185–1333], Muromachi [1336–1573], Edo [1603–1868], Meiji/Taisho/Showa [1868-1989], and postwar). What Andrew discovered is that the two casual masculine pronouns ore おれ (俺) (this may even sound rude) and boku ぼく(僕) are, respectively, the oldest and newest pronouns in use today.
Thanks to Bob Kennedy, I was able to find the full Jeopardy shows from November 23-24, and pull out the segments where the hosts "chats" with contestant Laura Ashby, whose in-game response's prosody ate the internet for a couple of days just before Thanksgiving ("Jeopardy gossip", 11/25/2015).
I'm pleased to be able to announce on Language Log the winner of the Literary Review's 2015 Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The award went to the singer Morrissey for his debut novel List of the Lost. And it seems to have been honestly earned. The judges cited this sentence:
Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza's breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra's howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza's body except for the otherwise central zone.
