I'm in Frankfurt for a week, and a stroll through the Weihnachtsmarkt last night with Caroline Féry and Ede Zimmermann reminded me of something I've wondered about for a long time: Why was German Brezel borrowed into English with an initial 'p'?
Ryan Kilpatrick has an interesting article in Hong Kong Free Press: "Taiwan city promises to ‘correct’ simplified road sign after public outcry" (12/7/15) It includes this photograph, which illustrates some of the problems:
From Matthew Yglesias: A few of us at work were talking about why it's adviser and protester but professor and and auditor and after bullshitting around for 10 minutes I thought "maybe I should ask a linguist." Have you ever blogged on this? I don't think that we have, though you can find well-informed discussions […]
I spotted this photograph in an article that I'll describe below:
Peter Reitan, previously involved in "Solving the mystery of 'off the cuff'" (2/21/2015), has now pointed us to an improved history of monkey wrench. His email: Your Language Log post of March 22, 2009 about "Monkey Wrench" mentioned the traditional folk-etymology associated with the term; namely that it was widely believed to have been invented by a […]
A question from Mark Seidenberg: Is the English phono- morpheme etymologically related to Phoenicia/Phoenician, i.e., the corresponding Phoenician words? I have looked at the OED and other sources and I cannot connect the dots. The Phoenician word for “Phoenicia” has a couple of conjectured etymological bases unrelated to sound or voice. The Greeks then had […]
The first comment to my post on "Multilingual voting signs" (11/9/12) was by Alinear, who stated that cǐ chù 此處 ("this place") sounds like Cantonese to him. As a matter of fact, as reader ahkow pointed out in the second comment, cǐ chù 此處 ("this place") is simply the literary / classical Chinese way of […]
Until two days ago, I had never heard of this word — even though I knew about Punch and Judy shows. From Wikipedia: A swazzle is a device made of two strips of metal bound around a cotton tape reed. The device is used to produce the distinctive harsh, rasping voice of Punch and is […]
Most of what is said below applies mainly to South Korea, since Hangul-only writing has been even more deeply entrenched in North Korea than in the south.
Ben Zimmer mentioned to me that he was on the Slate podcast Lexicon Valley talking about the origins of the word "gringo":
Over at Spicks & Specks, Greg Pringle has a virtuoso post on "The Bell Miner: How orthography and ornithology catalysed a new folk etymology" (8/9/15). It's about an Australian honeyeating bird — Manorina melanophrys — that used to be called the Bellbird, but was renamed Bell Miner through association with the South Asian bird called […]
It's a bit of a mystery how and why "outsiders" (wàidìrén 外地人) are referred to by Shanghainese as "hard disks / drives" (yìngpán 硬盘). Intrigued, I asked around, and here are some of the replies I received.