Language Log

Today's Dinosaur Comics:

On Joshua Yang's Twitter (@joshiunn): On a signboard in Pingtung, "saviki", the Indigenous Paiwan Austronesian word for "betel nut", is represented in the Chinese character "莎" (sa) & Japanese kanas "migi" w/ Bopomofo annotations. Taiwan is a society of diverse linguistic heritage but this sign is something else. pic.twitter.com/dzYtZNhibu — Joshua Yang (@joshiunn) May 23, […]

From Eoin Cullen: This is a really fascinating story:  a Taiwanese film ("Dāng nánrén liàn'ài shí 当男人恋爱时" ["Man in Love"]) where the main character has been dubbed for the mainland Chinese release. The film is mostly in accented Taiwan Mandarin and the protagonist peppers his speech with Southern Min (Taiwanese / Hoklo), so someone decided […]

Essay in Wall Street Journal:  "Computers Speaking Icelandic Could Save the Language From ‘Stafrænn Dauði’ (That’s Icelandic for ‘Digital Death’):  To counter the dominance of English in technology and media, Iceland is teaching apps and devices to speak its native language."  By Egill Bjarnason (May 20, 2021). This is such a fascinating article, and one […]

Today Dinosaur Comics:

YouTube has created a new musical opportunity — musical accompaniment for recorded spontaneous orations, as a kind of after-the-fact sprechgesang. I'm not sure who did this first, or when, but I've seen it more often over the past few months. Here's one of my favorites:

Article in Sunday's NYT: "A Scratched Hint of Ancient Ties Stirs National Furies in Europe" "Czech archaeologists say marks found on a cattle bone are sixth-century Germanic runes, in a Slavic settlement. The find has provoked an academic and nationalist brawl." Andrew Higgins (5/16/21) The opening paragraphs lay out very clearly the reasons why the […]

From a Duolingo chat page:

A jumble of soccer talk and Confucian piety, with a splash of CCP ideology Week in China has an interesting article about a football flap that occurred recently in China: "Lost in translation:  Cannavaro gets Confucian" (May 14, 2021; WiC 540) The story is quite convoluted and complicated, so we need to start with the […]

The last two panels of today's SMBC: For background, see "Buffaloing buffalo", 1/20/2005.

Johnson, in the Economist (5/7/21), has an enjoyable article:  "Some languages are harder to learn than others — but not for the obvious reasons". Here's the first part of the article: When considering which foreign languages to study, some people shy away from those that use a different alphabet. Those random-looking squiggles seem to symbolise […]

Francois Lang sent in this menu from YU Noodles Cafe in Rockville, MD:

From my 10th grade high school world history class in 1959, I was intrigued by the evocative, mysterious Mamluks.  I was impressed by their achievements in statecraft, art, architecture, and many other fields.  Thus Mamluk is a word that is very well known in English, even to a rural highschooler in Osnaburg Township of Stark […]