Language Log

Yesterday's SMBC: Mouseover title: "Chicken etymology is really easy because the word origins AND the words you use to describe them are all 'bock bock bock'."

Yesterday's SMBC:

Brand-name transliteration (in Embarcadero Center, San Francisco), courtesy of Nancy Friedman:

ICYMI — Alexander C. Kafka, "‘Sokal Squared’: Is Huge Publishing Hoax ‘Hilarious and Delightful’ or an Ugly Example of Dishonesty and Bad Faith?", The Chronicle of Higher Education 10/3/2018: Reactions to an elaborate academic-journal hoax, dubbed "Sokal Squared" by one observer, came fast and furious on Wednesday. Some scholars applauded the hoax for unmasking what […]

At the beginning of Donald Trump's press conference yesterday about the results of the midterm elections, he said something psycholinguistically interesting: Your browser does not support the audio element. it was a big day yesterday, an incredible day and last night the republican party defied history to expand our senate majority while significantly beating expectations […]

A few days ago, I wrote the following titles on the blackboard in my "Poetry and Prose" class: Dà Táng Sānzàng qǔjīng shīhuà 大唐三藏取經詩話 (Poetic Tale of Tripitaka of the Great Tang Fetching Scriptures) Yóuxiān kū 遊仙窟 (The Grotto of Playful Transcendants) Guānshìyīn yìngyàn jì 觀世音應驗記 (Records of the Verifications of Responses by Avalokiteśvara) As […]

In May of 2015, I gave a talk at the Centre Cournot in Paris on the topic "Why Human Language Technology (almost) works", starting with a list of notable successes, including how well Google and Bing on-line translation did on the Centre Cournot's web site. But my theme required a few failures as well, and […]

Don Clarke has called to my attention a new bilingual, digraphic expression:  “娘man结合”.  That's "niáng man jiéhé ('woman man [the English word] combination')". It’s a women’s fashion style that combines femininity in one part of the outfit with manliness in the other — like wearing a colored print dress with an army jacket.  Supposedly, “man” is read in the first tone. Don […]

Just checking to see that Google Translate is still into hallucinatory automatic writing… Today's input is five random hiragana characters — あっぉぉを — repeated various numbers of times:  あっぉぉを Oh yeah 2X I am afraid that 3X We have an Omote 4X We will hold an Om to Oh no 5X We will send out […]

SMBC on the future of helpful gmail, a few days ago:

Here we go again.  More Roman letters and English words on police and security guard uniforms in China (see below for some earlier posts).  Here's a doozy:

That's what happened to Paul Midler when confronted with this display on an ATM in China:

From Jonathan Weinberg: An update to "'100% grated parmesan cheese'" (9/5/2017): In which the court explains that it can blow off the affidavit of Anne Curzan and Ezra Keshet of the University of Michigan that only one interpretation of the phrase “100% grated Parmesan cheese” is plausible in context, and the affidavit of Kyle Johnson […]