From Charles Belov: While restaurant hunting in the East Bay, I happened upon these dishes with the intriguing English names of "Mr and Mrs Smith" and "Boiled Omasum with Chili Pepper." Omasum turns out to be an obscure name of a variety of tripe, but I'm puzzled as to how the Smith family made it […]
[This is a guest post by Douglas Q. Adams] For over a hundred years now linguists have known of a small Indo-European family comprised of two closely related languages, Tocharian A and Tocharian B, in the Tarim Basin of eastern Central Asia (Chinese Xinjiang). Tocharian B speakers occupied the northern edge of the Tarim Basin, […]
Peter Golden sent me the following video, "Luisa Tam says: Let's put more HK English on the map", South China Morning Post (10/23/18):
I just learned via the mosling mailing list that a Russian team has established a multilingual corpus of toilet graffiti, which in their English language home page they call the Corpus of Latrinalia. I haven't looked at it and know nothing about it – I'm just reporting its existence. They have warnings on the front […]
From Guy Freeman: These advertisements on a Hong Kong bus (plastered on the back of every seat on the upper deck) use Cantonese so unashamedly, at least in their main type, that I just had to pass them on. Clearly advertisers still appreciate that written Cantonese is the best way to connect to the Cantonese-speaking […]
It's a good joke, but probably just an accidental one — "Quiz: What kind of Brexit are you? MPs can’t agree on what form, if any, Brexit should take. Can you do better?", Politico.eu 4/1/2019, as of 14:30 Philadelphia time, is just a few inches of blank space, with no questions, no answers, no links, […]
"Dubstep artist Skrillex could protect against mosquito bites", BBC News 4/1/2019: The sun is shining on your skin, there's a breeze in your hair and someone has just handed you a coconut with a straw sticking out of it. This is living. But just as you start to relax you find yourself clawing at your […]
Jillian Jordan and David Rand, "Are You ‘Virtue Signaling’? Probably. But that doesn’t mean your outrage is inauthentic", NYT 3/30/2019: Expressions of moral outrage are playing a prominent role in contemporary debates about issues like sexual assault, immigration and police brutality. In response, there have been criticisms of expressions of outrage as mere “virtue signaling” […]
BBC Future has a very nice article by Alex Rawlings about the work of Ghil'ad Zuckermann on language revival in Australia and the larger context of such efforts. One new thing I learned about Zuckermann from this article was that before he moved from Israel to Australia, he was a specialist on language revival in […]
Literally. Kate Bernot, "Please let New Orleans' "Huge Ass Beer" lawsuit reach the Supreme Court", The Takeout 3/1/2019: Per The New Orleans Advocate, the trademark for Huge Ass Beers belongs to one Nicholas S. Karno #1 Inc., which operates multiple Bourbon Street bars. Said bars—the Steak Pit, Prohibition, and Cornet—offer oversized and novelty pours of […]
Robert Booth, "'Ching, wap, ox': slang interpreters decipher texts for court evidence", The Guardian 3/29/2019: Do you know your “tum-tum” from your “ching” and your “corn” from your “gwop” (gun, knife, ammunition and money)? Neither do police and prosecutors, who have begun consulting a linguistics professor to help decipher urban slang and drill lyrics used […]
I first heard about Beau Jessup (founder [2015] and CEO of Special Name) and her Chinese baby-naming business a couple of years ago. There was even a TEDx talk by her about it:
Headline in the Washington Post (a few minutes ago): A professor at China’s permier university questioned Xi Jinping. Then he was suspended. Obligatory screenshot: