This has been a busy week for me, wherefore no posts — a full day at Penn on Monday; Tuesday and Wednesday at Baidu in Sunnyvale; Thursday at Apple in Cupertino; Friday at ETS in San Francisco; lunch with Geoff Nunberg on Saturday; and then an afternoon at Scale By The Bay 2018. There were […]
[This is a guest post by an anonymous correspondent.] We traveled last week from our home in Baltimore out to see our daughter in Ohio, and while en route in Pennsylvania, my husband and I noticed something. At various points along the turnpike, we saw signs that noted "Falling Rocks" and others that noted "Fallen […]
Earlier this week (11/12/18), under the rubric "Of knots, pimples, and Sinitic reconstructions", we discussed the origins and meaning of the fascinating Sinitic word "geda" ("pimple; knot; lump"). That, in turn, was prompted by our initial acquaintance with "geda" in "Too hard to translate soup" a couple of months before (9/2/18). After considering a possible […]
Tweet by Dan Okrent: Menu translation, Hanoi pic.twitter.com/mDG3FH2Bd8 — Dan Okrent (@okrent) November 12, 2018
Tweet by Noelle Mateer: pic.twitter.com/ZKeOBldM0m — Noelle Mateer (@n_mateer) November 13, 2018
A tweet by Kelsey Munro: https://twitter.com/KelseyMunro/status/1062464615257231360
A couple of months ago, we talked about gēda 疙瘩, which is one of those very cool, two syllable Sinitic words, neither of whose syllables means anything by itself (i.e., not only is it a disyllabic lexeme, it is also a disyllabic morpheme). Furthermore, gēda 疙瘩 is highly polysemous, with the following meanings: "pimple; knot; […]
John Leicester, Raf Casert, and Lori Hinnant, "In remembering WWI, world warned of resurging ‘old demons’", Associated Press 11/11/2018 [emphasis added]: As Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and dozens of other heads of state and government listened in silence, French President Emmanuel Macron used the occasion, as its host, to sound a powerful and sobering […]
Kendra Schaefer, "China's 'barrage videos' are chaotic af — and say a lot about loneliness", The Next Web 10/11/2018: “Hey, I know,” said someone in a design meeting once. “How about we let users post live comments as they watch their favorite shows. Then we could scroll those comments across the viewport so they cover […]
From a tweet by Claire Varley: The troubleshooting section for our new fridge has melted my heart. Imagine being the copywriter who sat there for hours trying to decipher the language of fridge… pic.twitter.com/H7AAd2sn6T — Claire Varley (@clairepvarley) November 9, 2018
Article by Mandy Zuo in today's (11/9/18) South China Morning Post, "Chinese education officials sorry for announcing Mao-style political background check on students": Education authorities in southwest China have apologised after they hit a raw nerve by announcing students must pass a “political background check” before they can take the national university entrance exam next […]