Even if you don't know any Cantonese but listen carefully to people speaking it, you probably can tell that it has an abundance of particles. For speakers of Mandarin who do not understand Cantonese, the proliferation of particles, especially in utterance final position, is conspicuous. Non-speakers of Cantonese, confronted by all these aa3, ge3, gaa3, […]
I find Japanese pronunciation to be straightforward and easy. But, for some reason, many people murder Japanese words borrowed into English. Take "karaoke", for example. I hear Americans pronouncing it as something like "carry Okie". How did that get started? You can listen to the Japanese pronunciation here. Cf. the UK and US pronunciations here.
In a workshop over the weekend at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, one of the presentations was based on a paper by Dan Kahan et al., "Culturally antagonistic memes and the Zika virus: an experimental test", Journal of Risk Research 2017. The abstract starts this way [emphasis added]: This paper examines a remedy for a defect […]
This is a guest post by Stephen Goranson. The source of “copasetic,” meaning “fine,” has been sought in Yiddish, Hebrew, Creole French, Italian, Chinook, and in a putative assurance from an accomplice of a thief in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago that the house “cop’s on the settee.” But, probably, a novelist coined the word. […]
Adam Wren, "'I'm Still All Trumped Up'", Politico Magazine 2/13/2017: On the first Saturday of Donald Trump’s presidency, as protesters and marchers stormed the nation’s capital and cities around the country, Dick and Jane Ames threw a party. […] “Oh, Trump—I’m still all Trumped up,” Jane, a retired insurance broker, told me, reveling in the memory […]
Here and here are links (South China Morning Post [SCMP] and the Chinese website of a German radio channel) re yesterday’s surprising statement by Judge HE Fan of China’s supreme court calling President Trump a "public enemy of the rule of law". The story is being well covered by the international media (NYT, The Independent, […]
In Appendix C of The True History of Tea, a book that I wrote with Erling Hoh, I showed how all the words for "tea" in the world except two little-known Austro-Asiatic terms can be traced back to Sinitic. The three main types of words for tea (infusion of Camellia sinensis leaves) may be characterized […]
From Bill Thomas via John Rohsenow:
This post intends to take a deep look at the words for "dog" in Japanese, "inu" and "ken", both written with the same kanji (sinogram; Chinese character): 犬. I will begin with some basic phonological and etymological information, then move to an elaboration of the immediate cause for the writing of this post, observations from […]
My son sent me this wonderful, learned post called "The best bits" from the "Old European culture" blog (12/7/2015). It begins: Offal, also called variety meats or organ meats, refers to the internal organs and entrails of a butchered animal. The word does not refer to a particular list of edible organs, which varies by […]
Many of the debates over Chinese language issues that keep coming up on Language Log and elsewhere may be attributed to a small number of basic misunderstandings and disagreements concerning the relationship between speech and writing.
Lisa Feldman Barrett has an article on "The Varieties of Anger" in last Sunday's NYT. Most of it consists of reflections on pre- and post-election anger in our society. But Barrett has one paragraph in which she makes some rather dubious claims about the number of words for “anger” in several languages: The Russian language […]
Helen Wang writes: I have a question – what's the etymology of the English word "mouthfeel"? In the last few weeks in the UK I have heard the word "mouthfeel" several times, spoken very naturally as though it's an established English word. I was surprised because I remember kǒugǎn 口感 (lit. "mouth-feel") as being "untranslatable" […]