One of the most curious and fascinating words I learned during the first or second year of Mandarin study was móguǐ 魔鬼 ("devil; demon; fiend"). Somehow it just sounded right as the designation for what it signified: Tā shìgè móguǐ 他是個魔鬼 ("He's a devil") Even the characters, which I have always deemphasized since I began […]
A few weeks ago I attended the last afternoon of Scale By The Bay 2018 ("So much for Big Data", 11/18/2018), and as a result, this arrived today by email: We had a blast at Scale by the Bay. We hope you did, too. As a sponsor, the organizer has shared your email with us. […]
Below is a guest post by Bob Kennedy. This post is adapted from a letter I wrote to the editors of the journal Kyklos, in response to the recent publication of “Do Linguistic Structures Affect Human Capital? The Case of Pronoun Drop”, by Prof Horst Feldmann of the University of Bath.
A video introducing 70 obscure Chinese characters (shēngpì zì 生僻字):
There was some discussion earlier this morning ("Editors without judgment") about editorial culpability for misreadings due to the ambiguity of post-modifier attachment. In that headline (…a space for women without judgment), the problem the problem was a PP modifier (without judgment) that should attach "high", i.e. to an earlier NP (a space … without judgment), […]
The headline: Sean O'Hagan, "Photographer Hannah Starkey: 'I want to create a space for women without judgment'", The Observer 12/8/2018. The quotation: “That graduate show set me up,” says Starkey. “Suddenly I was in demand and simultaneously I became very aware of the different space that women occupy in the photography world, both as practitioners […]
Here we go again. With the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics coming up, China aims to eliminate Chinglish, and all sorts of negative examples are adduced. We've covered scores of them on Language Log, but here's one I hadn't seen before:
I could see this coming years ago. The writing was on the wall: "Some subjects in Taiwan's schools to be taught in English: As part of the goal of making Taiwan a bilingual country by 2030, some subjects in schools will be taught entirely in English", by Keoni Everington, Taiwan News, Staff Writer (2018/12/6/18) That's quite […]
Well, shitstorm, anyway: Melissa Eddy, "Some Words Defy Translation. Angela Merkel Showed Why." NYT 12/6/2018: Some words can’t be translated easily. But they can cross national borders, lose their original context along the journey, assume different meanings and crop up in unlikely places. This week, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany proved that point — memorably. […]
Metaphor watch (from today's NYT): Trump's presidency is "a kind of perpetual arm-wrestling match between a capital full of institutions & a man set on bulldozing them, bending Official Washington to his rhythms & mores with every overnight Twitter missile & gilded indiscretion." — David Greenberg (@republicofspin) December 4, 2018
At least I think that's what happened here. Gita Jackson, "Tumblr's New Algorithm Thinks Garfield Is Explicit Content", Kotaku 12/4/2018: Yesterday, Tumblr announced that it will ban all adult content starting December 17th. As users logged into their accounts, they have seen that some of their posts now have a red banner across them, marking […]
The buzzwords of the year (Shingo/Ryūkōgo Taishō 新語・流行語大賞) have been announced. As Nathan Hopson, who called the results to my attention, puts it: With the caveat that this is a contest run by a private company that publishes an annual collection of new and important words, and that there's a lot of peripheral annoyance around […]
On being ugly and poor, with an added note on consumerism. Every so often, for one reason or another, somebody creates a completely new Chinese character. Here's the latest: