Language Log

From Anne Henochowicz: View this post on Instagram A post shared by 富孩警 (@richkids_english_police)

More than thirty years ago, I coined the term "round-trip word" (láihuí cí 來回詞) to signify a word that is used in one language, is borrowed by another language which attaches a different meaning to it, often one that is calqued from a third language, and then is sent back to the original language with […]

From a miscellaneous collection of Chinglishisms:

Have you tried the Google Translate app on your phone? It has a camera tool that automatically translates text that you point it to, but it looks like it needs some work for Mandarin… I tried to translate a bag of chinese rice crackers using google translate and these are some of the ingredients it […]

Chris Button says that he was looking at the oracle-bone form for wēi 危 ("precarious, precipitous; perilous; high; ridge [of a roof]; dangerous") and noticed that Huang Dekuan (2007 mammoth dictionary of ancient forms of characters) treats it as depicting a qīqì 欹器 ("tilting vessel" or "tipping vessel").  This was: …an ancient Chinese ceremonial utensil […]

The most recent Dinosaur Comics: The mouseover title: "sorry to any jabronis reading this who didn't know yet that they were jabronis. honestly though that's such a jabroni situation to find yourself in"

[This is a guest post by Rhona Fenwick] Though best-known for its titanic consonantal inventory, Ubykh also has an etymologically fascinating vocabulary, heavy with loans from a diverse array of sources. Many of these are drawn from the indigenous lexicons of its Circassian and Abkhaz sisters, but Circassian and Abkhaz both also acted as proxies […]

The other day, when we were discussing where Napa cabbage came from, Diana Shuheng Zhang mentioned to me that the Chinese word for "spinach", bōcài 菠菜, indicates that it came from Persia.  She's usually right about such things, and she was in this case too: From earlier 波斯菜 (bōsīcài), from 波斯 (Bōsī, “Persia”) + 菜 […]

How did he speak?  What did he speak?  When did he speak? There seems to be a lot of dissension, even among Iranists, concerning the basic facts of his life and times.  For the founder of a major religion, little hard evidence is available concerning the man and his message.  Of course, basic biographical data […]

[This is a guest post by Chau Wu, with additions at the bottom by VHM and others] On the akinakes* (Scythian dagger / short sword) and Xiongnu (Hunnish) horse sacrifice Chinese historical records suggest that the akinakes, transliterated from Greek ἀκῑνάκης, may be endowed with spiritual significance in the eyes of ancient Chinese and Northern […]

This is a passage from chapter 3 of Dan Brown's Digital Fortress (1998) Eventually one of them [VHM:  NSA cryptographers] explained what Becker had already surmised. The scrambled text was a code‑a “cipher text”‑groups of numbers and letters representing encrypted words. The cryptographers’ job was to study the code and extract from it the original […]

No, that is not a typo for "A woman". It is meant to be the feminine gendered equivalent of "Amen". Rep. Emanuel Cleaver closes Congress’ opening prayer with ‘amen and awoman’ By Emily Jacobs, New York Post   January 4, 2021 A House Democrat tasked with leading the body in an opening prayer for the new […]

From the time I began the systematic study of the language family in the summer of 1990, I have known that the word "laks-" ("salmon") is important for the early history of Indo-European, yet I felt that something was not quite right about the claims put forward in this article: "The English Word That Hasn’t […]