"Lost in Translation? Understandings and Misunderstandings about the Ancient Practice of 'Sacred Prostitution'", Ancient Origins: Ishtar was sometimes called the Goddess Har since she was the mother of the harlots. These “harlots” were not prostitutes as we know them, but priestesses and healers. These harlots were holy virgins serving goddesses such as Ishtar, Asherah, or Aphrodite. […]
Marc Sarrel received the following message on his voicemail:
I'm now at the second day of an event with the long name "Second International Workshop on Language Resources and Intelligence". The first day was at Beijing Language and Culture University, where they set up an impressive mural on the wall outside the workshop venue. Here's a picture of my colleague Jiahong Yuan standing in […]
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 […]
[The first page of this post is a guest contribution by Chris Button.] I've been thinking a little about the word represented by chái 豺* which I would normally reconstruct as *dzrəɣ (Zhengzhang *zrɯ) ignoring any type a/b distinctions. However, it occurred to me that a reconstruction of *dzrəl (for which Zhengzhang would presumably have […]
Overheard After a race, one Beijing marathon runner asks another: pb le méiyǒu pb了沒有…? ("did you meet / match / make your personal best?") méiyǒu 沒有 ("no") wǒ de pb shì… 我的pb是… ("my personal best is…") I don't even know if "pb" is used this way in English, but such usage of Romanization (abbreviations, words, […]
Thought-provoking article by Lane Greene, the language columnist and an editor at The Economist: "Who decides what words mean: Bound by rules, yet constantly changing, language might be the ultimate self-regulating system, with nobody in charge", Aeon (12/6/18). Greene starts with a wallop: Decades before the rise of social media, polarisation plagued discussions about language. […]
For the past few years, I've been involved in some research on clinical applications of linguistic analysis. And as a result, I've done a lot of reading in the associated inter-, trans-, or meta-disciplinary literature (see e.g. the reading list for a seminar I taught last spring). This involves assimilating some inter-, trans-, or meta-disciplinary […]
Taiwanese master baker Wu Pao-chun 吳寶春 with a loaf of his famous bread:
From the Los Angeles Loyolan, the student newspaper of Loyola Marymount University:
From CNN's front page on the web today: Pelting them with iPhones? Stranding them in Dongle Hell? Better not to know…