Language Log

From Charles Belov:

We have often noted how much easier it is to learn Chinese now than it was just ten or twenty years ago.  That's because of all the new digital resources that have become available in recent years: "The future of Chinese language learning is now" (4/5/14) "Learning languages is so much easier now" (8/18/17) Of […]

Commenting on the (7/12/2016) headline "US government plans to use drones to fire vaccine-laced M&Ms near endangered ferrets", Joyeuse Noëlle on Tumblr noted that The best part of this title is that in the second half, each new word is completely unpredictable based on what comes before it. “US government plans to use drones to […]

Two years ago, I wrote a post about the Chinese expression "'Add oil'" (9/13/16) (cf. the comments to "Non-translation" [7/24/16]). In that post, I mentioned: I remember way back when I was in high school (in the 50s), the cheerleaders used to tell their team to "step on the gas".  So the concept of ga1yau4 […]

In "Lexico-cultural decay?", 10/9/2018, I called into question Jonathan Merritt's evidence for the view that "most of the central terms in the Christian vocabulary are rapidly declining". Merritt cites Kesebir & Kesebir 2012, who argue on the basis of Google ngram-viewer data that Study 1 showed a decline in the use of general moral terms […]

I learned this term from an important article by David Bandurski in today's (10/17/18) The Guardian, "China’s new diplomacy in Europe has a name: broken porcelain:  Beijing’s message to Sweden and beyond – criticise us, and we’ll topple your agenda – won’t win it any hearts and minds". The relevant Chinese expression is pèngcí 碰瓷, […]

Umarell is one of those words that people like because it references a somewhat familiar concept that their own language or variety has no easy way to name. Wikipedia has this to say about it: Umarell (Italian pronunciation: [umaˈrɛlː]; modern revisitation of the Bolognese dialect word umarèl [umaˈrɛːl]) is a term popular in Bologna referring specifically to men of retirement age who pass […]

Seen by a friend of Jeff DeMarco in Sydney, Australia's Chinatown:

In "Lexico-cultural decay" (10/9/2018) and "Lexical orientation" (10/12/2018) I discussed Jonathan Merritt's 10/9/2018 argument that "traditional sacred speech is dying in the English-speaking world" ("The Death of Sacred Speech", The Week 9/10/2018). Yesterday, a related piece by Merritt was featured in the New York Times — "It’s Getting Harder to Talk About God". This time he adds polling […]

Path for Ph.D. pic.twitter.com/7hrk58OQIE — Manu Kumar Datyal (@manukumardatyal) October 13, 2018 [h/t Wendy Grossman]  

Jonathan Bouquet, "May I have a word… about toolkits, real and metaphorical", The Observer 10/14/2018 [emphasis added]: No one, least of all my family and close friends, would deny that I am somewhat hidebound, stuck up to my nethers in mud. I mean, don’t get me started on the subject of mobile phones and the […]

A tweet for the misnegation archive: Thousands march in Berlin to protest against anti-racism https://t.co/iNobKJd1Zb — SCMP News (@SCMPNews) October 13, 2018 This one has the unusual property of being purely lexical, with no explicit negations at all. [h/t Donald Clarke]  

The following portfolio of photographs illustrating the Thai penchant for separating English words into syllables was taken by Paul Midler over many years of travel in the region: