Language Log

Another science card given out to first grade students in Shenzhen, China (see "Readings" below for the first one):

As I've mentioned before, Chinese feel that they have every right to experiment with English, make up their own English words, and compose their own locutions which have never before existed in the English-speaking world.  In recent years, they have become ever more playful and emboldened to create new English terms that they gloss or […]

I'm on the Amtrak train from Philadelphia to New Haven. Although I've ridden on trains hundreds of times all over the US and around the world, something just happened that I've never experienced before. The conductor was going through the entire car (and other cars too — with hundreds of people) asking each person politely […]

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Today's SMBC:

Science card given out to first grade students in Shenzhen, China:

From June Teufel Dreyer:

More in 2020 Dem polyglots: Here is @SenGillibrand , an Asian studies major, greeting @VOANews in Mandarin. pic.twitter.com/kdcr2hsL69 — Esha Kaur Sarai (@egkaur) April 6, 2019

For the first time in my life, I closely observed someone inputting Korean on a cell phone.  (I was sitting behind the person doing it on the train ride to the city this afternoon.)  Of course, I don't know exactly how it works, but what I observed was very interesting. First of all, the young […]

Mandy Chan saw this sign on Weibo (a major Chinese microblogging website) and challenged me to translate it:

An article I'm writing led me to wonder when the idea of a conversing automaton first arose, or at least was first published. I'm ruling out magical creations like golems and divine statuary; brazen heads  seem to have either been magical or created using arcane secrets of alchemy; I don't know enough to evaluate the legend […]

At the beginning of this week, we looked at a new term for "troll" in Chinese, and that led to a discussion of just what a troll is and how they behave "The toll of the trolls" (5/25/19). One of the things we found out is that trolls love to argue for the sake of […]

Yesterday, I was thinking of words to express "commotion", "(noisy) disturbance", etc.  "Hustle bustle" and "hurly burly" quickly came to mind.  Thinking analogically, "hubbub" also presented itself for consideration.  Tangentially, "hullabaloo", "hoopla", "hoo-ha", and, through a process of inversion, "ballyhoo" and "brouhaha" also tagged along, but were less convincing as support for a thesis that […]