I'm spending a couple of days at the DARPA AI Colloquium — about which more later — and during yesterday's afternoon session, I experienced an amusing conjunction of events. Pedro Szekeley gave a nice presentation on "Advances in Natural Language Understanding", after which one of the questions from the audience was "Hasn't Google solved all these […]
From frequent commenter bratschegirl: Seen backstage on a locked storage cabinet.
[This is a guest post from a frustrated Chinese father in the PRC, written in response to the discussion in the comments that followed this post: "The Sinophone" (2/28/19). He doesn't mince words, but this is how he feels — passionately — about his fatherland.] As usual, the more I learn the more am I […]
This obituary is a guest post by Brian Joseph. See also "The very model for historical comparison", by Nancy Dray. The linguistics world suffered a huge loss on February 17 when Eric Pratt Hamp, a giant on the American and global linguistic scene, passed away at the age of 98. Eric was one-of-a-kind, an amazing […]
On February 19, I received this notice from Oxford Dictionaries: English Word of the Day from Oxford Dictionaries Your word for today is: li a Chinese unit of distance, equal to about 0.5 km (0.3 mile) Click on the word to see its full entry, including example sentences and audio pronunciation.
As opposed to the salubrious kind, presumably…. FOX 5 DC News (3/3/19) headline: "Fairfax County police identify victims of deadly triple homicide in Springfield" Fairfax County police have identified the three people found shot dead at a home in Springfield overnight. As Bob Dylan and Paula Cole might have sung, "Where have all the editors […]
Sent in by Joe Boyd: I read this schadenfreude-inducing story and was stuck by the singular use of "a genital" as a noun describing the scrotum ("A 46-year-old man accidentally shot himself in a genital Thursday after a gun slipped from his waistband, police said"). Two things struck me as weird about this: first, a […]
The content management system at The Atlantic magazine seems to have slipped a cog or two, and associated one story's headline with another story's subhead. Either that, or ticks play a larger role in American social mobility than I would have guessed. The image on the right appeared in my email inbox this morning, along […]
Ultimate indignity; ultimate crash blossom. Headline in electrek: "Tesla Model 3 driver again dies in crash with trailer, Autopilot not yet ruled out", by Fred Lambert (3/1/19) In this case, the repeat demise would have been much more rapid than the extraordinarily prolonged one reported by Jen Viegas: "Death Happens More Slowly Than Thought", Seeker […]
I think about the problem of the Sinophone every day, but I haven't written about it very often on Language Log (see "Readings" below). We have Anglophone (English-speaking), Francophone (French-speaking), Hispanophone (Spanish-speaking), Germanophone or Teutophone (German-speaking), Italophone (Italian-speaking), Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking), Russophone (Russian-speaking), Hellenophone (Greek-speaking), Arabophone (Arab-speaking), etc. So why not Sinophone, since diasporic Sinitic speakers […]
From their origins to the present day, speakers of Germanic languages have been distinguished by the high degree of their mobility on land and on water: the Völkerwanderung during the Migration Period, Goths, Vikings, the British Empire on which the sun never set, Pax Americana…. From antiquity, they ranged far and wide, so it is […]
I begin with an e-mail from Martin Schwartz, sent to me on 3/14/16: Last September in Istanbul a fair-haired academic there, a colleague of my wife, said she is of Çerkes background, and went on to say a relative of hers was the last Ubykh speaker. Dumêzil had been to her family's home, grouchy that […]
After initially declaring that I wouldn’t be posting about the phrase keep arms because I had nothing interesting to say about it, and then declaring that upon further reflection I did have something interesting to say, I’ve realized after drafting a post discussing the phrase that I was right the first time. So when “Corpora […]
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