Last week, a master's student went to the board to write the Chinese character for "nose" (bí 鼻), but forgot how to do so. There is no simplified version. The form of this character differs slightly between China and Japan: in China it is 鼻 and in Japan it is 鼻. Can you spot the […]
New article in Japan Times (1/21/22) by Eric Margolis: "Translator trip-ups: What do they mean for learning Japanese?" It is so rich in insights that I will quote from it liberally (well, the whole kit and caboodle, broken up a bit): In the recent issue of the literary magazine Monkey, which publishes new and old […]
Stimulating, substantial article by Chang Che in SupChina (1/13/22): "China looks to the Western classics". Here are the first three paragraphs: A block east of Tiananmen Square, in a classroom last July, Chinese school children were singing the nursery rhyme “Old McDonald Had a Farm” in Latin: “Donatus est agricola, Eia, Eia, Oh!” The students, […]
Norimitsu Onishi, "Using Harsh Language, Macron Issues a Challenge to the Unvaccinated", NYT 1/5/2022: Faced with a surge in coronavirus cases driven by the Omicron variant, President Emmanuel Macron of France said Wednesday that he wanted to “piss off” millions of his citizens who refuse to get vaccinated by squeezing them out of the country’s […]
From Chau Wu: I have always wondered about the deep gulf of variations in the sounds of "néng 能 -bearing" characters, that is, the variations in the onsets and rimes (shēng 聲 and yùn 韻): néng 能 n- / -eng (Tw l- / -eng) [Note: 能 orig. meaning 'bear'; nai, an aquatic animal; thai, name […]
One of the first Pekingese colloquialisms I learned (by now I know scores) was taught to me half a century ago by Iris Rulan Chao Pian (1922-2013), daughter of the distinguished linguist, Yuen Ren Chao (1892-1982). It sounded like "der", sometimes with a trill at the end, and meant "scram; skedaddle". Like many authentic Pekingese […]
The tiger is the coming year's representative in the sexagenary cycle, the 60-term cycle of twelve zodiacal animals combined with five elements / phases in the traditional Chinese calendar; currently used in Japan for years, historically also for days; widely applied in Chinese astrology. (source, see also here, here, here, and here) In Sinitic languages, […]
Two days ago, I met a person who had a thick white coating on their tongue. Wondering what it was called and its implications for health, I asked members of the e-Mair list about it. Here are some of the answers I received: Denis (Sinologist): Thick tongue coating, often due to lengthening of the keratinous […]
According to Christina Gleason, "What Does It Mean to Be Fae as a Gender?": While some people who are fae use fae/faer as their pronouns, I prefer to keep the she/her pronouns I’ve gone by my whole life. It gives me the joke that my pronouns are sidhe/her, where sidhe (pronounced she) is the Irish […]
Today, on #LinguisticsWithSlava The Russian word for a sports fan is "bolel'shchik." I'll explain in a minute. But first, did you know that for a long time Americans had no word for it? Sports fans appeared in the US in the 1850s, but the word didn't come about until early XX c.. — Slava Malamud […]
Making coffee this morning made me think about brewing — not the process, but the English verb brew and its semantic evolution. In particular, it made me wonder again about nativist versions of semantic atomism, which hold that word meanings are (perhaps structured) collections of innate atomic features. Versions of these ideas go back thousands […]
Following on the hoofs of "Sumomomomomomomomo" (11/17/21), here's another good one, from rit majors: (source)