In the comments on my recent post "The BYU Law corpora," Dennis Baron writes: Sorry, J. Scalia, you got it wrong in Heller. I just ran "bear arms" through BYU's EMne [=Early Modern English] and Founding Era American English corpora, and of about 1500 matches (not counting the duplicates), all but a handful are clearly […]
Quite an amazing thread: A thread of Chinese internet nicknames for NBA players. China is crazy for the NBA, but official sources use boring phonetic transcriptions, failing to take advantage of Chinese characters having both sound and meaning. Chinese netizens have "improved" on these official names. — Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) May 7, 2018 [To access […]
Half a day after the first part of this series, "Cantonese is not the mother tongue of Hong Kongers" (5/4/18), was posted, someone unhelpfully and snarkily asked, "…but are we sure he used the English word 'dialect'?" That's not the point.
[Cross-posted on LAWnLinguistics.] I’d imagine that most people who’ve been actively involved with corpus linguistics are familiar with the BYU corpora—a collection of web-accessible corpora created by Brigham Young University linguistics professor Mark Davies. These corpora (and BYU’s corpus-linguistics program more generally) have played an essential part in the development of what I’ll call the […]
E.E. Fournier d'Albe, "The Talking Film", Nature 1/31/1925: The demonstration of the De Forest phonofilm at the Royal Society of Arts on November 26, 1924, and its recent exhibition at the Royal College of Science during the Physical and Optical Societies' Exhibition, showed that the old problem of producing a motion picture endowed with its […]
In an address celebrating the 120th anniversary of Peking University, the president of said institution, Lin Jianhua, misread hónghú zhì 鸿鹄志 ("grand, lofty aspiration") as hónghào zhì 鸿皓志 (doesn't really mean anything). The blunder swiftly spread on the internet, leading Lin to issue an apology. See this article in Chinese.
Gráinne Ní Aodha, "German students say English exam that asked them to explain Brexit was unfair", The Journal (Dublin) 5/4/2018: German students have complained that an English exam that asked them to discuss Brexit, among other things, was too difficult and “unfair”. Over 35,000 people have signed an online petition to voice their opposition to the […]
No, The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is not something dreamed up by Borges, or the Firesign Theatre. It actually exists, or at least it exists in the same state of electronic virtual actuality as Language Log, YouTube, and the Wayback Machine. The Bureau of Linguistical Reality was established on October 28, 2014 for the purpose […]
So say mainland and government spokespersons. It sounds absurd, but here's the "reasoning", as summarized by Bob Bauer: Have you heard about HK's latest brouhaha that Cantonese is NOT the mother tongue of HK's Cantonese-speaking population? A bigshot mainland scholar has written that HK Cantonese can't possibly be their mother tongue because it's MERELY a […]
Betsy Rymes, "Translanguaging is Everywhere", Anthropology News 4/27/2018: For over three years now I’ve been keeping a blog about something I call “citizen sociolinguistics”—the work people do to make sense of everyday communication and share their sense-making with others. […] Topics range from memes and emojis, to cross-posting and Urban Dictionary, to Konglish to Singlish […]
Bob Bauer sent in this photograph of a recent headline from a Hong Kong newspaper:
Yesterday I got two phone calls from an unknown but allegedly local number (267 area code). I was in meetings so I let the calls go to voice mail, and the message turned out to be in Chinese. It seems to be someone claiming to represent FedEx with information about a package that I need […]
Did China "take back" (shōuhuí 收回) Hong Kong from Great Britain or did it "recover" (huīfù 恢復) the former colony? Even though representatives of the Chinese government have used the former expression in the past, they now insist that there was no "taking back", only "recovering" what was always China's. On July 1, 1997, was […]