Language Log

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "If you study graphs in which edges can link more than two nodes, you're more properly called a hyperedgelord."

Matthew Haag, "Company Is Offering ‘Fur-ternity Leave’ for New Pet Owners", NYT 8/20/2018: A Minneapolis marketing company recently made tweaks to its employee benefits this summer, ranging from conventional to unusual. It gave workers a larger commuter stipend, as well as a reason to avoid the office altogether: “fur-ternity leave,” or the ability to work […]

Let's plunge right in: "How ‘Skr’ Took Over the Chinese Internet:  A brief history of the meaningless hip-hop term that inspired countless viral memes", by Yin Yijun, Sixth Tone (8/7/18)

Jichang Lulu reports that an eating establishment in London has chosen the name qī wèi 柒味 ("seven flavors").  This comes via Yuan Chan on Twitter: I'm pretty sure the owners of this London restaurant aren't and don't understand #Cantonese.Chinese name literally means smell/flavour of male genitals in Canto pic.twitter.com/dzLWJzxOWI — Yuen Chan (@xinwenxiaojie) August 15, […]

Two days ago, I was sitting in a Panera around lunch time.  Next to me was a mother with two young daughters.  One of them looked to be about four years old, and the other about one and a half year old. The girls were both well behaved, and I enjoyed their company for more […]

[Below is a guest post by Matt Goldrick on behalf of the Linguistic Society of America] Over the past decade the lack of transparency in research – and its implications for the reproducibility of research findings – has been a major focus of scientists and funding agencies (see previous discussions on LanguageLog here, here, here). This […]

Karl Smith saw this sign in Taichung, Taiwan:

The following photograph accompanied this article: "China's Student Activists Cast Rare Light on Brewing Labor Unrest", U.S. News & World Report (Aug. 14, 2018) People hold banners at a demonstration in support of factory workers of Jasic Technology, outside Yanziling police station in Pingshan district, Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China August 6, 2018. REUTERS/Sue-Lin Wong

Kumari Devarajan, "Ready For A Linguistic Controversy? Say 'Mmhmm'", NPR 8/17/20018: Once upon a time, English speakers didn't say "mmhmm." But Africans did, according to Robert Thompson, an art history professor at Yale University who studies Africa's influence on the Americas. In a 2008 documentary, Thompson said the word spread from enslaved Africans into Southern […]

On Monday, I'm pursuing the quixotic enterprise of talking to an NLP workshop about phonetics. LRNLP ("Language Resources for NLP") 2018 is a workshop associated with COLING 2018 in Santa Fe NM.  My abstract: Semi-automatic analysis of digital speech collections is transforming the science of phonetics, and offers interesting opportunities to researchers in other fields. […]

[Forwarded from James Heilpern] Call for Papers: The Fourth Annual Law & Corpus Linguistics Conference Deadline: October 10, 2018 Event Date: February 7-9, 2019 Location: Brigham Young University, Provo, UT Organization: Brigham Young University Contact: James Heilpern, heilpernj@law.byu.edu BYU Law School is pleased to announce the Fourth Annual Law & Corpus Linguistics Conference, to be […]

You've almost certainly heard about "cloud computing" — the phrase is frequently in the news, and has even made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, with the gloss "the use of networked facilities for the storage and processing of data rather than a user's local computer, access to data or services typically being via the […]

We at Language Log are no strangers to Nepal: "'Bāphre bāph!' — my favorite Nepali expression" (8/12/18) "Learn Nepali" (9/21/16) "Dung Times" (3/14/18) "Royal language" (9/29/15) "Oli ko goli" (10/13/15) "Unknown Language #7" (2/27/13) "Unknown Language #7: update" (5/12/13) Being linguists and language specialists, we know how to pronounce this deceptively simple name, right? "Nepal":  […]