Language Log

From Bob Ramsey: Ethnic Miao girls in traditional Miao costumes–in Sichuan, China

Even those who are not China watchers will remember the savage satire directed against the pathetic River Crab (= Harmonious Society) and the Grass-Mud Horse (= *uck your mother").  There's always something the censors have to block on the Chinese internet.  It wouldn't be the Chinese internet if a large part of it were not […]

"WHO — You cannot be Xi-rious! The WHO’s decision to skip the Greek letter Xi in its ludicrous naming system shows exactly who controls it", by David Spencer, Taiwan News, Contributing Writer, 2021/11/28: (source)

[This is a guest post by Penglin Wang] The Chinese transcription of foreign words has made a unique and valuable contribution to our understanding of linguistic situations in early Inner Asia, but it was sometimes inevitably fraught with logographic confusion and scribal errors. Even given quite advanced word-processing and printing in modern times, one can […]

[This is a guest post by W. South Coblin in response to these questions which I asked him about the distinction between qing 清 ("clear") and zhuo 濁 ("muddy; turbid") in Chinese language studies: 1. when and how it arose 2. how it functions within traditional Chinese phonology 3. how it correlates with concepts in […]

Sounds like fun, doesn't it? People actually did it in ancient India, and they still do it today. Here are some passages from the Wikipedia article about the Amarakosha, the most celebrated and most often memorized Indian thesaurus. Introduction The Amarakosha (Devanagari: अमरकोशः, IAST: Amarakośa) is the popular name for Namalinganushasanam (Devanagari: नामलिङ्गानुशासनम्, IAST: Nāmaliṅgānuśāsanam) […]

Jules Quartly (appropriate surname!) has an informative article on this subject in Taiwan Business TOPICS, "The True Story of Q" (1/21/20) — a takeoff from the most famous Chinese short story of the 20th century, "The True Story of Ah Q" (Ā Q Zhèngzhuàn 阿Q正傳 /  阿Q正传; serialized 12/4/21-2/12/22, published 1923).  Toward the end of […]

Lucas Klein and Nick Williams asked me about this interesting word:  落魄. It can mean either “free-spirited” or “downtrodden”, which appear to directly contradict each other, and it has at least three variant pronunciations (luòpò, luòbó, luòtuò).  Source Negative meanings:  "down and out; in dire straits; abject". Positive meanings:  "unrestrained; unconventional; untrammeled by convention; casual". […]

Echo Huang from Quartz (7/5/19) has written a fun and interesting article on Shanghai’s new waste sorting rules: "'What kind of rubbish are you?': China’s first serious trash-sorting rule is driving Shanghai crazy" Echo also has a related Chinese version. "Starting Monday (July 1), individuals and businesses in China’s financial capital who fail to separate trash […]

Some people freak out when early borrowings from one language into another are pointed out, as though it were an insult to the integrity of the recipient language, or that it somehow clashes with the sacred laws of linguistics. When looked at dispassionately, borrowing among languages is both normal and pervasive.  In this post, I […]

Jack Shafer, "Week 86: FBI’s Blockbuster Probe of Trump’s Loyalty Revealed", Politico 1/12/2018: Thanks to a redaction error made in a legal filing by convicted felon Paul Manafort’s lawyers, we learned that special counsel Mueller believes that former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort lied about passing, in spring 2016, political polling data to two Russia-aligned Ukrainian oligarchs he had […]

Scott Wilson has written an entertaining, and I dare say edifying, article on "W.T.F. Japan: Top 5 strangest kanji ever 【Weird Top Five】", SoraNews24 (10/6/16) — sorry I missed it when it first came out.  Wilson refers to the "Top 5 strangest kanji", but he actually treats nearly three times that many.  The reason he emphasizes […]

An anonymous correspondent asked: Are these actually related words, or just homonyms? p. 127 of  Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Quest for God: How the World's Greatest Conqueror Gave Us Religious Freedom: Male shamans were treated with cautious respect, but they evoked suspicion and even disgust. As one saying put it, “the worst of men become […]