Translators of Chinese poetry are tormented by how to render the term jiǔ 酒. The nearly universal English rendering of jiǔ 酒 in Chinese belles lettres is "wine". The problem is that "wine" is fruit based (usually grapes), whereas jiǔ 酒 is grain based. This is a topic that has come up tangentially on Language […]
Maintaining the theme of civility in this year's political campaigning, "Billionaire Mark Cuban rips Trump", CNN 7/31/2016: Your browser does not support the audio element. You know what we call a person like that, you know, the screamers, the yellers, the people who try to intimidate you? You know what we call a person like […]
Taylor Swift sings "shake, shake", but in Singapore and Malaysia, everybody is saying "shiok, shiok". Source: "Where or how did the phrase Shiok or Syiok used in Malaysia & Singapore originate?" (Quora, Feb. 2015)
Ben Mathis-Lilley, "Joe Biden Brings House Down at DNC With Raging Fireball of a Speech Highlighted by Use of Word 'Malarkey'", Slate 7/27/2016. Here's the passage: Your browser does not support the audio element. According to Merriam-Webster's Trend Watch, Malarkey rose to the top of our look-ups on the evening of July 27th, 2016, after Vice-President […]
No matter where I go these days, I hear young people shouting to their friends, "I'm playing Pokémon Go", which they pronounce "pokey-mon go". It would be an understatement to say that, for the past few weeks, Pokémon Go has been a veritable craze. Yet most people who play the game probably do not realize […]
It's no secret that I'm a great fan of the AHD: "The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition " (11/14/12) My devotion to AHD stems not just from its unparalleled inclusion of Indo-European and Semitic roots, but from its outstanding coverage of terms relating to Chinese languages and linguistics. It was already […]
Earlier this year, Language Log readers contributed to the elucidation of "South Asian wrestling terms" (3/1/16).
Blake Shedd sent along a series of forty pictures of plant identification signs from the botanical garden in the small southern Austrian city of Klagenfurt am Wörthersee. He was rather impressed that the botanical garden staff went to the trouble of including non-Latin / non-German names for the plants. And I was impressed at the […]
Anne Amnesia, "Unnecessariat", More Crows than Eagles, 5/10/2016: In 2011, economist Guy Standing coined the term “precariat” to refer to workers whose jobs were insecure, underpaid, and mobile, who had to engage in substantial “work for labor” to remain employed, whose survival could, at any time, be compromised by employers (who, for instance held their […]
Last Thursday, during LREC 2016, 16 participants from ELRA and LDC had a festive dinner at a restaurant named Na Burji. On the drive from Portorož, we had a discussion about what the restaurant's name means — our first guess, stimulated by the extreme switchbacks we traversed as the road climbed steeply from the coastal plain towards Nova Vas […]
"The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) added 19 Singaporean terms and 13 Hong Kong terms in its latest update." So reports BBC News in "Singapore terms join Oxford English Dictionary" (5/12/16) Here are the lists:
Following up on the issues raised yesterday in "Feelings, beliefs, and thoughts", it might be helpful to explore the etymology of the various verbs that people commonly use to express the epistemic status of their assertions. From their entries in the Online Etymological Dictionary, we'll learn that several common propositional attitude verbs have roots in sensation, motion and emotion, […]