Jake Eberts, "Why Do Analysts Keep Talking Nonsense About Chinese Words?", Foreign Policy 7/6/2021: Imagine that you are cornered at a party when the topic of race comes up. Your interlocutor tells you that, in the English language, “race” can refer to both a competition wherein one tries to outrun the others and a visually […]
[This is a guest post by Tom Mazanec] I recently became curious about the origins of the Cantonese word king1 gai2 傾偈 ("to chat"). Though I've never formally studied Cantonese, I'm picking up bits of it from my wife and in-laws, who moved to the U.S. from Guangzhou about 30 years ago and use Cantonese […]
A week or so ago, we looked at the phenomenon of "lying flat" (see under "Selected readings" below). Karen Yang writes from China: Hahahahha, tang ping ["lying flat"] was kind of a hot topic last month, for about one week. Maybe it’s because the College Entrance Exam was on-going, people tended to talk about life […]
The following article is so revelatory, at least for me, that I wish I could copy it entirely. Since that's not what we do at Language Log, I will just quote the opening portion (probably less than a quarter of the total essay), while pointing to a few additional highlights, and encourage others who are […]
As part of my run through the Western Regions (Xīyù 西域) of Pennsylvania, I wrote to Ed Shaughnessy asking him which town he was from, since I knew he came from somewhere around Pittsburgh, and it might be nice to be aware of where he grew up if I happened to run through that town. […]
A jumble of soccer talk and Confucian piety, with a splash of CCP ideology Week in China has an interesting article about a football flap that occurred recently in China: "Lost in translation: Cannavaro gets Confucian" (May 14, 2021; WiC 540) The story is quite convoluted and complicated, so we need to start with the […]
From my 10th grade high school world history class in 1959, I was intrigued by the evocative, mysterious Mamluks. I was impressed by their achievements in statecraft, art, architecture, and many other fields. Thus Mamluk is a word that is very well known in English, even to a rural highschooler in Osnaburg Township of Stark […]
Today the MIT Sloan Executive Education program sent me an email with the subject line "The Spirit of Hacking at MIT": While the terms hack and hacker have many shades of meaning, the hacker ethic has always been celebrated at MIT. Referring to a difficult, complex, and creative campus prank, hacking at MIT is everything from transforming […]
From Doonesbury 5/2/2021: Linguists have paid a lot of attention over the years to wanna-contraction, starting with George Lakoff's 1970 paper "Global rules" — see these lecture notes for a discussion, if you're interested. But gotta-contraction has gotten a lot less attention — 7 Google scholar hits vs. 658. The reason for this difference is simple: […]
Prefatory note: In this post, I take the noun "vaccine" as the basic word under discussion, but also consider other cognate terms ("vaccinate", "vaccination"). Here's a standard dictionary entry for "vaccine": n. 1. any preparation of weakened or killed bacteria or viruses introduced into the body to prevent a disease by stimulating antibodies against it.2. […]
Tim Leonard just came across this article from five years ago that hypothesizes a common origin for the names of the Red Sea, Black Sea, and (in Turkish) White Sea and Blue Sea: "It Works for the Turks: A Colour for Each Direction"Frank Jacobs, Big Think (3/6/16) Peter Golden has often talked to me about […]
From the latest updates to the online OED, new senses added to these words: Sinicism, n., sense 2: “A Chinese word, phrase, or idiom borrowed into, or introduced into a sentence in, another language.” Sinitic, adj. and n., sense B: “The languages of East Asia considered collectively; spec. the branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family […]