Language Log

Wondermark for 11/25/2021 — deriving "rappers", from "wrappers" and their "candy shanties" on the Hersey Chocolate assembly line: Mouseover title: "People will claim lots of things to impress some random moron."

From Zihan Guo: A Japanese expression I came upon in a reading from Takami sensei's class reminded me of the "om" you mentioned weeks ago in our class. 阿吽の呼吸（aun'nokokyū あうんのこきゅう）   It refers to the synchronization of breathing of sumo opponents before a match. I read about this in an article about an interview with a […]

Given this: "Measure words for robots" (9/4/21) and this: "Arigatō" (9/3/21), I could not help but think of this:

When I checked into a hotel on the east side of Pittsburgh yesterday afternoon, the manager told me he was from "Buckanen", West Virginia.  I just assumed that he was using some local variant of "Buchanan", and it sounded very unusual to me, since the only pronunciation of "Buchanan" I've ever heard is /bjuːˈkænən/.  When […]

My brother Denis and I have long been intrigued by the use of the prefix yǒu 有 ("there is / are / exist[s]") in a wide variety of circumstances in Old Sinitic:  e.g., before the word for family temples (yǒu miào 有廟), before the names of barbaric tribes (yǒu Miáo 有苗), and before place names […]

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. […]

[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 […]

[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 […]

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 […]

This is something I wanted to write about back in mid-July, but it fell victim to my backlog of thousands of e-mails.  Now, slowly, slowly, slowly, I'm catching up, and I find that it's still a worthy topic to post on. "‘China, master copycat’: uproar in Indonesia at Xinhua’s batik claim" Xinhua released a video […]

I've long been deeply intrigued by the word "macaque".  It's an odd-looking term with a murky history, but somehow it just seems to fit the creature that it designates. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed.: French, from Portuguese macaco, of Bantu origin; akin to Kongo makako, monkeys : ma-, pl. n. pref. […]

A couple of decades ago, in response to a long-forgotten taxonomic proposal, I copied into antique html Jorge Luis Borges' essay "El Idioma Analítico de John Wilkins", along with an English translation. This afternoon, a reading-group discussion about algorithms for topic classification brought up the idea of a single universal tree-structured taxonomy of topics, and […]

I was thrilled when I came upon this 3:04 YouTube video by chance on the morning of the mid-Autumn festival (October 1):