The question of language survival in Taiwan is far more complex than whether Taiwanese (and Hakka and Cantonese) will die at the hands of Mandarin. Helen Davidson probes the real situation in: "Healing words: Taiwan’s tribes fight to save their disappearing languagesThe island’s Indigenous people are in a race against time to save their native […]
Yesterday I got a strange email message, apparently from American Express. The first strange thing: gmail showed it with no Subject and no content: But then it got stranger…
Atul Gawande, "Why doctors hate their computers", 11/5/2018, underlines the often-noted difficulty of working with badly-designed software: I’ve come to feel that a system that promised to increase my mastery over my work has, instead, increased my work’s mastery over me. I’m not the only one. A 2016 study found that physicians spent about two […]
From Geoff Pullum's 10/21/2004 LLOG post: My student Nick Reynolds reports on a beautiful example of singular they found in an exchange of graffiti. Someone had scrawled this on the wall: Vote Arnold 4 prez — recommending a vote for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as President of the United States. Someone else, mindful perhaps of Schwarzenegger's […]
In recent days, many people have called to my attention the phenomenon of tǎngpíng 躺平 ("lying flat") in the PRC. At first I thought it was just another passing fad of little significance, but the more I hear about it, the more I realize that it is a viral trend having potentially unsettling consequences for […]
生育还是生肓？ pic.twitter.com/GBPx07QSaT — Chenyu_Liang (@chenyuliang) May 31, 2021
It rained for the last two or three days, so someone wrote me a note saying she was looking forward to "ameagari no aozora 雨上がりの青空" ("blue sky after the rain"). I knew what she meant, but when I started to analyze the semantics of the verb, I was drawn into a vortex of uncertainty about […]
From a Telegram channel on an Instagram site (canto_calligraphy): View this post on Instagram A post shared by Cantonese Calligraphy 粵書 (@canto_calligraphy)
Below is a guest post by Devin Grammon and Anna Babel. Both linguists and non-linguists commonly use the term “native speaker” to describe someone who grew up speaking a particular language and who is fully proficient in that language. Often, we invest native speakers with authority regarding how someone should speak a language – for […]
As part of the run-up to the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that will take place in July, scenes like this are increasingly common on the streets of the PRC:
"We Need To Get Real About How the Pandemic Will End: Even more transmissible new variants means that more people will get infected or vaccinated, and that's how it will all end". By Zeynep, Insight (5/28/21): [A]s far as I can tell from vast amounts of trial and real life evidence, every single vaccine out […]
In War on the Rocks (5/26/21), Tim Ball has an informative, thought-provoking article: "Talking the Talk: Language Capabilities for U.S. Army Special Forces". It begins: In the mid-2000s, a series of U.S. Army Special Forces recruiting posters began appearing on Army installations across the country. One particular poster prompted more than a few eye rolls […]
[This is a guest post by Bob Ramsey] Writing from the Age of the Gods (Jindai moji)