Long ago (half a century), I had occasion to translate the word "masochism" into Chinese. At that stage, I wasn't even sure what "masochism" itself meant. Supposedly it was "the madness of deriving pleasure from pain", I guessed especially sexual pleasure — something like that. Wanting to give the most accurate possible translation into Chinese, […]
[first draft written June 9-10, 2025 in Bemidji, Minnesota, where the famous giant statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox stand next to beautiful Lake Bemidji*] During my peregrinations in upper midwest USA, I noticed a proliferation of place names beginning with "mi-". Because there are 10,000 big and little glacial lakes up […]
This will be a long post because it brings together much newly accumulated historical, archeological, and linguistic research that has the potential to change our conception of the course of development of medieval Eurasian civilization. We begin with a pathbreaking article by Neil Price: Vikings on the Silk Roads: The Norse ravaged much of Europe […]
A couple of relatively recent English compounding forms are getting more common in the media: X-pilled and X-maxxing. "The Man Who ‘A.G.I.-Pilled’ Google" "Red-pilled culture is corroding young men’s brains" "This mom ‘de-pilled’ her teen son. What is that and why are people praising her?" "Are you pope-pilled? Here's your guide to the 2025 Conclave." […]
On March 27, horrificgoth posted on tumblr (crawls on all fours with blood drenched on me) I have to do arts and crafts resulting in 56,876 notes so far. One of them, posted Saturday 5/10 by Seebs, was i’m more mad about this than i might otherwise be because someone pointed out the “-ench” suffix […]
I recall that when I began learning Mandarin, one of the things (!) that troubled me greatly was why the word for "thing" was written with the characters for "east" and "west": dōngxi 東西. My classmates came up with all sorts of outlandish, speculative explanations for the supposed etymology. All along, I suspected that the […]
I was going very slowly down the stairwell of my house, especially slowly because I was carrying something bulky. As a result, my left elbow was sticking outward, protruding toward the wall. When I was about halfway down, my elbow scraped against a pointed metal picture hanger, and it hurt like the dickens. As soon […]
IA sent me this article (in Chinese) about a new translation of George Orwell's 1984. It begins: Yīngguó zuòjiā Qiáozhì Ōuwēiěr de míngzhù `1984' chūbǎn yuē 75 nián, jìnrì yíng lái shǒubù Táiwén bǎn. Yìzhě Zhōu Yíngchéng shuō, zhè shì tuīdòng `Táiyǔ zhèngchánghuà'de chángshì, ràng Táiyǔ mǔyǔzhě bùbì tòuguò Zhōngwén yìběn, yě néng jiēchù shìjiè jīngdiǎn […]
This morning, I received the following interesting message from Adam C.: Back in 2019 you wrote a Language Log post about the word ASMR being ported to Japanese, and as I research the phenomenon itself I frequently encounter the same English version in videos by Japanese and Korean speakers. (Russians, unsurprisingly, use ACMP.) So […]
Someone complained in an inappropriate and non sequiturish place that AIO (Artificial Intelligence Overview) did not definitively solve the difficult problem of the seeming non-Sinitic etymology of Japanese waka 若 ("young; youth") that he posed to it. Cf. Wiktionary: Japanese Noun 若(わか) • (waka) "my lord" (towards a young master or a young heir)
I've lost a considerable amount of sleep over these two words, not just because they both have nine letters and look almost the same, differing only by a single consonant, but even more so because, while they both signify something bad or undesirable about the way situations unfold or how people behave toward others, they […]
Francesco Perono Cacciafoco, an associate professor of linguistics at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, called my attention to this article he wrote for The Conversation (1/26/25), "Finding ‘Kape’: How Language Documentation helps us preserve an endangered language". He and his research team are currently doing intensive fieldwork on the languages of the remote Indonesian island of Alor, which […]
When you queue up, do you "stand in line" or "stand on line"? This question was prompted by Nick Tursi who remarked: Two of my colleagues are both from Brooklyn. They frequently say standing / waiting “on line” rather than “in line” when referring to queueing