Pedro J. Silva just returned from his first trip to China, bringing with him two charming specimens of Chinglish. The first one is from Beijing Capital International airport (terminal 3, international departures):
I recently became aware of a viral new meme in China, but didn't know what it meant or even how to pronounce it. The characters are 盘他, which superficially, literally would seem to mean "plate him / her / it". Of course, that doesn't make sense, so 盘他 flummoxed me for quite a while. Since […]
In preparing a new edition of Friedrich Hirth's venerable China and the Roman Orient: Researches into Their Ancient and Medieval Relations as Represented in Old Chinese Records (1885) (CRO), for the sake of comparison I included in my introduction a section on Frederick J. Teggart’s Rome and China: A Study of Correlations in Historical Events […]
Back in 2010, I went in search of the earliest examples of cartoon cursing characters — those playful typographical symbols that have been called "grawlixes" (a term coined by "Beetle Bailey" creator Mort Walker) but which I prefer calling "obscenicons." I detailed my quest in two Language Log posts: "Obscenicons a century ago" and "More […]
Since so much of learning to read and write Chinese characters depends upon mindless repetition, writing them countless times, some bright people in the age of AI have finally seized upon a way to escape from the drudgery: training a robot to write the characters endlessly for them. "Chinese schoolgirl shamed for using robot to […]
(The following is a guest post by Penglin Wang.) Thanks to Professor Victor Mair’s organization of a series of informative postings, which share expertise in areas that I do not often get a chance to be a participant, I was happy to contribute material with which I am familiar. As I have a heavy teaching […]
This morning's email brought a notice from Le Monde, to which I apparently subscribe: Two things struck me about the salutation "Chère abonnée, cher abonné". The more obvious and less interesting one is that Le Monde is obviously not on board with "Écriture inclusive". The second, less topical thing: the English word "subscriber" implies that […]
Ever since Donald Trump sang his Emergency Song ("Emergency in B Flat", 2/17/2019), I've been hearing similar intonation patterns all over the place — in a line at the market where one shopper was telling another about someone's many excuses for not meeting her; on a sports talk radio program where the host was enumerating […]
An introduction and guide to my series of posts "Corpora and the Second Amendment" is available here. The corpus data that is discussed can be downloaded here. That link will take you to a shared folder in Dropbox. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen. New URL for COFEA and […]
From today’s Financial Times: I think they meant "anti-anti-Semitism ceremony". [h.t. Donald Clarke]
Some people freak out when early borrowings from one language into another are pointed out, as though it were an insult to the integrity of the recipient language, or that it somehow clashes with the sacred laws of linguistics. When looked at dispassionately, borrowing among languages is both normal and pervasive. In this post, I […]
In his 2/15/2019 announcement about declaring a state of emergency on the southern border, President Trump used a striking sequence of fifteen singsong phrases: Your browser does not support the audio element. So the uh the order is signed. And uh I'll f- I'll sign the final papers as soon as I get into the […]
First, as a slightly belated Valentine's present, onomatopoetic / mimetic chocolates: "Chocolates That Represent Japanese Onomatopoeic Words To Describe Texture", by Johnny, Spoon & Tamago (1/16/15) Here are the names of eight of the nine chocolates designed by Oki Sato of the Tokyo and Milan-based design studio Nendo: ツブツブ (tsubu tsubu): a word for small […]