Language Log

But you'd expect someone in the advertising business to be more aware. Reader RR spotted this unfortunately ambiguous sign in a bus shelter in Milwaukee:

Tangshan, in Hebei Province, was the epicenter of what is considered to the deadliest earthquake of the 20th century, with more than 650,000 of its million inhabitants perishing as a result of this July 28, 1976 disaster.  I still remember clearly the day that it happened, because the news came when I was attending a […]

Photo taken by Bathrobe at a Teppanyaki restaurant (currently undergoing renovation) in Qinhuangdao (a coastal port city in northeastern Hebei province):

I'm now at the Station Biologique de Roscoff for the Ecole thématique Big Data & Speech. On the bus from Morlaix to Roscoff, there were several copies of this sign: However, the bus had no seatbelts installed.

Many times over the years we've noted cases where piled-up modals and negations  leave writers (and readers) uncertain about whether a sentence might not turn out to mean the opposite of what it was meant to. Here's another example, contributed by GD — John Albrecht, "One year on", 12/31/2017: At about this time one year ago […]

Paul Midler submits this one from South China:

Today's SMBC starts this way:

When I was teaching in Taiwan in 1970-72, there was a well-known brand of toothpaste called Hēirén yágāo 黑人牙膏 ("Darkie Tooth Paste").  Not only was the name strange, the packaging featured an image of what looked for all the world like Al Jolson in one of his blackface performances.  Naturally, I was scandalized by this, […]

Recently there was quite a ruckus over the correct word to be used for "maternal grandmother" in second-graders' textbooks in Shanghai: "Much Ado About Grandma: Textbook Change Sparks Linguistic Debate:  Critics call ‘waipo’ to ‘laolao’ change ‘cultural hegemony’ from the north", Kenrick Davis, Sixth Tone (6/22/18) "A debate over the word for ‘grandmother’ in China […]

In Sunday's post "Ask Language Log: Prosodic hyphens and italics", I noted  that one of the features that Grant Allen's 1899 novel identifies as typically American — or at least typical of the one American who is caricatured in chapter 3 — is the socially inappropriate use of "miss" as a term of address: 'Good […]

Dan Waugh sent in the following photograph, which he had received from a colleague, who in turn had received it from another colleague who was wondering what is written on the tapestry (what they are referring to it as):

Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM), the official language of the People's Republic of China, is designated in four different ways, depending upon the country in which these terms are used: Guóyǔ 国语 / 國語 ("National Language") — Taiwan / ROC Huáyǔ 华语 / 華語 ("Florescent / 'Chinese' Language") — Singapore Hànyǔ 汉语 / 漢語 ("Sinitic Language") […]

Singapore has four official languages:  Malay (de jure national language), English (de facto main language), Mandarin, and Tamil.  There are also a number of other languages that are spoken by significant numbers of the population, e.g., Hokkien-Taiwanese, Cantonese, Teochew, Hainanese, Hakka, Fuzhou (Hokchia, Hokchew), Pu-Xian Min (Henghua), and Shanghainese (Wu).  But the most commonly spoken […]