This comment by Quyet on a recent post ("Dungan-English dictionary" [10/26/18]) is of such significance that I feel it merits separate, special recognition of its own: The [Vietnamese] government often sends out mass text messages with announcements to every number in the country with no diacritics at all. Furthermore, teenagers have grown up to text […]
Jonathan Lundell writes about a passage in yesterday's Matthew Shepard memorial: It was lovely and moving, especially Bishop Gene Robinson’s homily, but I couldn’t help remarking his folk-seminarian (I assume) etymology for “anamnesis”. He explained it as “an-“, against, and “amnesia”, forgetting. Seminarians would learn it in the context of holy communion. I can see […]
Yesterday's SMBC: Mouse-over title: "The emeritus will take 4 hours telling you about a trip to Africa that happened 40 years ago."
Mouseover text: "I'm the proud parent of an honor student, and the person driving me is proud, too!" From Geoffrey Nunberg, "The pragmatics of deferred reference" (in L. Horn and G. Ward, eds., The Handbook of Pragmatics, Blackwell, 2003):
We have had several posts about Dungan on Language Log: "Dungan: a Sinitic language written with the Cyrillic alphabet" (4/20/13) "'Jesus' in Dungan" (7/16/14) "Writing Sinitic languages with phonetic scripts" (5/20/16) See also: Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform. Omniglot The reason I have been interested in Dungan for the last […]
Anne Henochowicz, "Passive-Aggressive: Expressing misfortune, and resistance, in Mandarin", LA Review of Books, 10/23/2018: Strunk and White’s classic textbook Elements of Style taught us to avoid the passive voice in our writing. Our verbs should take action, not a back seat, whenever possible. (This advice is not universally accepted.) In Mandarin, however, the passive voice […]
Watch what happens at the tail end of the 24 second video clip in this Twitter post: https://twitter.com/sszyz1758/status/1054376432762216448
JW wrote to ask about the effects of Georgia's contested "Exact Match" law on people with non-ascii characters in their name: How does this work out for Hispanic and other Latin alphabet diacritics? My Brazilian wife's full name includes the string "Lucía Mendonça" (í,ç). Many web forms, even in Spain, do not accept the diacritics. […]
Recent talk at the University of Pennsylvania: "Printers’ Devices, or, How French Got Its Accents" Katie Chenoweth, Princeton University Monday, 22 October 2018 – 5:15 PM Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center, University of Pennsylvania Sponsored by: Penn Libraries
Charles Below writes: As a follow-up to "Diacriticless Vietnamese on a sign in San Francisco" (9/30/18), I saw this sign about a block or two away on a closed nail salon. I note the stray dot over the I in NAILS. The surname I've redacted is, I believe, Irish.
Article published three days ago in The Economist: "Arabic, a great language, has a low profile: Part of the reason is that it is not really a single language at all", Johnson (10/18/18). The article begins: AMONG THEIR many reverberations, the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 had a linguistic side-effect. Between 2002 and 2009 […]
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. In my last post (longer […]
While passing through Hartsfield Atlanta airport a few weeks back, Neil Dolinger passed a piano located in a place where passersby could freely play it. A sign nearby (see photograph below) encourages this in 12 different languages: