Disfluency has been in the news recently, for two reasons: the deployment of filled pauses in an automated conversation by Google Duplex, and a cross-linguistic study of "slowing down" in speech production before nouns vs. verbs. Lance Ulanoff, "Did Google Duplex just pass the Turing Test?", Medium 5/8/2018: I think it was the first “Um.” […]
We've been looking at strange Chinese characters: "Really weird sinographs" (5/10/18) "Really weird sinographs, part 2" (5/11/18) For a sinograph to be weird, it doesn't need to have 30, 40, 50, or more strokes. In fact, characters with such large numbers of strokes might be quite normal and regular in terms of their construction. What […]
A couple of days ago, I wondered why modern English is reluctant to turn adjectives into verbs ("This towel kinds to your skin", 5/12/2018, and Laura Morland commented that "Universal verbing privileges would indeed be the kinder option." We were lamenting the loss of certain kinds of category-bending freedom, but Christopher Beanland wants us to […]
Rosalyn Shih has an entertaining and informative piece called "Let's Go Laaaaaaaa: And learn Cantonese particles" in LARB China Channel (5/1/18) Some highlights: …In Singapore, particles have migrated to English, prompting the Quora thread “Why do Singaporeans say lah at the end of every sentence?” It seems that the more southern the Chinese-speaker, the more […]
Nathan Hopson spotted this "Cool Guy" t-shirt on Facebook:
From my hotel bathroom in Miyazaki: This towel makes a lot of bubbles and kinds to your skin. So, you have a pleasant bath time.
Some of the commenters to the first part of this series seem to be making the case that many of the characters chosen by Scott Wilson for his SoraNews24 article are not so weird after all. I beg to differ. I think that all of the characters he chose are truly strange, awesomely odd. Even […]
Several comments to this post raised the issue of the closeness of Vietnamese and Cantonese: "Cantonese is not the mother tongue of Hong Kongers" (5/4/18)
From E.W. Scripture's 1925 obituary in Nature for L'abbé P.-J. Rousselot: In 1897, G. Paris and Breal succeeded in founding a laboratory of experimental phonetics at the College de France ; it was annexed to the chair of comparative grammar (Breal) and Rousselot was made its director. In opening the laboratory, Prof. Breal did not […]
Remarkable video from the DPRK: "Kim Jong Un meets U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo & releases 3 U.S. prisoners [English]"
Scott Wilson has written an entertaining, and I dare say edifying, article on "W.T.F. Japan: Top 5 strangest kanji ever 【Weird Top Five】", SoraNews24 (10/6/16) — sorry I missed it when it first came out. Wilson refers to the "Top 5 strangest kanji", but he actually treats nearly three times that many. The reason he emphasizes […]
Here at the Seagaia Convention Center in Miyazaki, where LREC2018 is sited, the restroom iconography looks like this:
An anonymous correspondent asked: Are these actually related words, or just homonyms? p. 127 of Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Quest for God: How the World's Greatest Conqueror Gave Us Religious Freedom: Male shamans were treated with cautious respect, but they evoked suspicion and even disgust. As one saying put it, “the worst of men become […]