Language Log

Menu items at the Asia Bistro, Marriott Hotel, Suzhou, China, courtesy of Thomas Malphus:

Zeyao Wu found this photograph on Weibo (a Twitter-like microblogging website in China):

From Charles Belov: This song turned up on my Apple Music new music playlist. Imagine my surprise when, in the middle of this Balkan-language (Croatian, I think, the page mentions "hrvatsko") pop/rock song, Mandarin hip-hop turned up. "Mladen Burnać (feat. Rock) – Džaba Džaba"

More than twenty years ago, I wrote a science fiction novel called "China Babel" (still unpublished) in which I described a time in the future when Chinese would merge with English.  Judging from current usage, the future of the mid-90s is fast impinging on the present.

Article by the Tibetan writer, Yonden Lhatoo, in the South China Morning Post (9/8/18): "Is ‘gweilo’ really a racist word? Hong Kong just can’t decide:  Yonden Lhatoo shakes his head at the on-again, off-again debate over the use of the word that is obviously racist in its roots, but has become benign due to widespread […]

There's been a certain amount of media coverage of President Trump's difficulties in pronouncing the word "anonymous" at a rally on Friday in Billings, Montana: Donald Trump struggles with the word 'anonymous' during Montana rally pic.twitter.com/iIALVSHbSM — The Independent (@Independent) September 7, 2018 But this was the only example of a similarly extreme tongue-tangle in […]

In a production of Hapgood last night at the Lantern Theater, I was struck by a phrase that the character Elizabeth Hapgood uses four times. In fact, it caught my attention the first time she used it — as I've noted, a word or short phrase can be contextually salient even at a frequency of […]

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "The <x> that is held by <y> is also a <y><x>, so if you go to a food truck, the stuff you buy is truck food. A phone that's in your car is a carphone, and a car equipped with a phone is a phonecar. When you play a mobile racing […]

The first thing we have to take into consideration is that Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS/CC) is a dead language, i.e., a book / written language (shūmiànyǔ 書面語).  Nobody has spoken it for the purpose of spontaneous, unrehearsed conversation for thousands of years.  So we cannot and should not use pedagogical methods designed for […]

Following up on the idea that the use of the word lodestar is evidence of Mike Pence's authorship — From the anonymous NYT editorial, describing McCain: "a lodestar for restoring honor to public life". From Kissinger at McCain's funeral: "Honor was John's Lodestar". From Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles, beginning at duke William the Norman, commonlie called […]

Adrian Thieret spotted this poster in downtown Xi'an this summer:

Photograph of a high-backed chair that has gone viral on Chinese social media (as reported in this Taiwan newspaper):

One corner of a gigantic public toilet at the Yangren Street theme park in Chongqing, Southwest China: