My reaction to the current controversy over Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarisms is to observe again that the relevant policies are a tangled and incoherent mess. I first wrote about this back in 2006 — and as it happens, that post compared the work of a different university president with the treatment of a Harvard undergraduate […]
We have seen ChatGPT tell stories (and variants of the stories it tells), fancify Coleridge's famous poem on Xanadu, pose a serious challenge to the Great Firewall of China, mimic VHM, write Haiku, and perform all manner of amazing feats. In a forthcoming post, we will witness its efforts to translate Chinese poetry. Today, we […]
[This is a guest post by Martin Woesler in response to this post: "German lexicographic richness" (10/11/21)] Let me share the language feeling of a German with you. As you may have assumed, if a German explains feelings, he does it with a set of rules: German wordcraziness rule # 1: Yes, there is a […]
Illustrating Ben Tarnoff's 11/11/2022 NY Review of Books article "In the Hothouse", Paul Klee's 1922 painting Die Zwitscher-Maschine ("The Twittering Machine"):
In the previous post ("Oil: a partial paradigm" [6/19/22)]), we have been discussing the origins and ramifications of the derivation of the word "oil" from the ancient Greek word for olive. The last comment (before I wrote this post), by Coby, states: "Spanish also has the word óleo, which can mean either oil paint or […]
As a published translator myself, I certainly strive to make my translations worthy of being considered as art. But it isn't always an easy task. Witness "The Tricky Art of Translation and Maria Dahvana Headley’s Modern Beowulf", CD Covington, Tor.com (Mon Feb 7, 2022): It’s not very often that a thousand-year-old poem has a new […]
Stimulating, substantial article by Chang Che in SupChina (1/13/22): "China looks to the Western classics". Here are the first three paragraphs: A block east of Tiananmen Square, in a classroom last July, Chinese school children were singing the nursery rhyme “Old McDonald Had a Farm” in Latin: “Donatus est agricola, Eia, Eia, Oh!” The students, […]
If you want to get an idea of what preoccupies Chinese people, one good way is to take a gander at current lingo. SupChina provides a convenient compilation from two authoritative sources. In the past, I've been disappointed by many Chinese words of the year lists because they seemed to have been blatantly chosen by […]
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. […]
"Altaic: Rise and Fall of a Linguistic Hypothesis", NativLang (9/28/19) — video is 12:29; extensive discussion after the page break
Many people have been asking me about the use of the term Guóyǔ 国语 ("National Language") for "Mandarin" in Xinjiang today. Here's an inquiry from Peter Moody: I have encountered what seems to be an anomaly in contemporary Chinese usage, and have been assured that you are among those most capable of addressing it. I […]
Today in Seth Cable's seminar on Montague's Universal grammar, he gave out a problem set that included the task of adding "Neither Mitt smokes nor Barack smokes" to the little fragment of English that had been developed. And in the discussion of the problem set, it turned out that I was the only one in […]