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 […]
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 […]
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 […]