Language Log

An interesting malapropism:

Announced only yesterday, Alibaba has a new robot delivery vehicle for the last mile:

I assigned this book to my class on the Silk Road: The Silk Road:  A Very Short Introduction, by James A. Millward (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013) I noticed that it bore the following dedication, one of the most peculiar and eye-catching I've ever encountered: For Herrgottsbescheisserle and all their cousins It looked German, but […]

Bruce Finley, "Wildfire haze, record heat and pollution combine to make Denver air quality dangerous for all", Denver Post 8/25/2020: Colorado public health officials issued a special “multiple pollutants” alert through at least 4 p.m. Tuesday. Health authorities focused most urgently on the harm from inhaling tiny “particulates” spreading in the smoke from burning forests […]

"What 'Ancient' Chinese Sounded Like – and how we know" (YouTube 7:56) Source

There's a Reddit page with this title:  "Fully anglicised Japan, based off actual etymologies, rendered into plausible English".  Feast your eyes: (source)

The title and the following observations come from Rebecca Hamilton: I was reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water: on Foot to Constantinople, as I convalesce from COVID-19 (I've had a hard time of it), and I stumbled upon an aside he made about the French "hongre," meaning "gelding," as does the […]

Jim Unger sent me this mystifying note (7/25/20): The other day, my wife called my attention to the fact that the ‘organ theory of the emperor’ (Tennō kikan setsu), for which Minobe Tatsukichi (1873-1948) was prosecuted in the 1930s, is written 天皇機関説.  This is odd since ‘organ’ in the medical sense (the apparent source of […]

In reacting to the fierce denunciation of Xi Jinping by Cai Xia (see bibliographical note at the bottom of this post), Conal Boyce mused: Mind-boggling material. I had to do a double-take on the passage you show that contains both chǔn and jiāhuo (蠢家伙 ["stupid guy / fellow"]).  And sure enough, in the video, she […]

I recently learned a new word:  nurdles. These are plastic resin pellets, typically 1-5 mm in size, created as an intermediate stage in plastics production. Losses in production and transportation apparently  make them a major contribution to marine pollution. I learned this word from reading about two environmental activists in Louisiana who have been charged […]

From the time I started learning Chinese more than half a century ago, I had a hard time lining up the many Chinese terms for different types of citrus with the corresponding words in English.   For example, I always wanted to call oranges "júzi 橘子", but it is technically (botanically) more correct to call […]

There are scores of words in Sinitic languages that regularly get translated into English as "barbarian".  One of the most conspicuous and pervasive is hú 胡, which we have often discussed on Language Log, perhaps most extensively and intensively in "The bearded barbarian" (8/26/15), with detailed etymological, orthographical, morphological, and philological notes. The term came […]

From David Brophy: I’ve often wondered why the Uyghur word for carrot is sewze, etc., which comes from P. sabz “green”. I know carrots range from orange to yellow, and maybe occasionally purple, but I’m pretty sure there’ve never been green carrots. It's a good question.   One thing I do know is that, whenever I […]