JoAnna Klein, "Did Dietary Changes Bring Us ‘F’ Words? Study Tackles Complexities of Language’s Origins", NYT 3/14/2019: Thousands of years ago, some of our ancestors left behind the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and started to settle down. They grew vegetables and grains for stews or porridge, kept cows for milk and turned it into cheese, and shaped […]
This little clip, of sociolinguistic as well as non-linguistic interest, has gone viral in the Algerian online world (via Twitter):
Wikipedia describes academia.edu as a for-profit "social networking site for academics", whose misleading .edu domain name "was registered in 1999, prior to the regulations requiring .edu domain names to be held solely by accredited post-secondary institutions". For my part, I'd describe academia.edu as "a source of large volumes of annoying unsolicited email". Yes, I know […]
Thomas Lumley called my attention to the neologism and bilingual pun "whaumau", now a Twitter hashtag: The only reason why I'm bothered about having very limited wifi access here… can't stream Matatini 😭 #WHAUMAU pic.twitter.com/X2yYL6Uji1 — Josephine (@soseesays) February 21, 2019
Tong Wang told me that she just learned a new word. It's "up主“, a term borrowed from Japanese into Chinese, and refers to those who upload audio, video, or other resources to share on certain websites. In this expression, zhǔ / nushi 主 means "master; lord; host; owner", etc. (it has many other meanings in […]
News from the laboratories of democracy — Anna Staver, "Computers zip through 2,000-page bill after Senate Republican forces its reading", Denver Post 3/11/2019: All work in the Colorado Senate came to halt Monday morning thanks to a procedural maneuver invoked by a ranking Republican. Committee hearings, floor debates and votes were all delayed as House […]
I have a colleague at Penn who teaches medieval Arabic cultural history; his name is Paul Cobb. He used to teach at the University of Chicago. I have a friend at the University of Chicago who teaches medieval Chinese cultural history; his name is Paul Copp. He received his PhD from nearby Princeton, which starts […]
Every time someone (usually a Chinese person) raises the issue of writing Sinographic languages in a phonetic script, people (usually non-Chinese) will jump on him / her and say that it can't be done or that it will destroy the culture. When it is pointed out that it already has been done repeatedly for the […]
For International Women's Day, Google made one of its doodles — this one with quotations from various women from around the world. Each is given its own distinctive typography. Several languages and scripts appear.
This morning while shaving, as I was listening to the radio around 7:30 a.m., I heard a medley of songs by three artists, all with the same title: "Hold on". But a funny thing happened in all three of these renditions: whenever the singer pronounced the title phrase, it always came out as "hol don", […]
Below is a guest post by Nancy Dray, following up on Brian Joseph's obituary for Eric Hamp (3/4/2019). Deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Professor Eric P. Hamp, I thought I would repost something—my parody lyrics for “The Very Model for Historical Comparison”—that I wrote more than 25 years ago, in large part […]