Graeme Orr writes: In the hit post-apocalyptic movie A Quiet Place there is a touching scene where the mother is home-schooling her son. He is being drilled in numeracy; but on a whiteboard she has written out the first quatrain of Shakespeare’s "Shall I Compare Thee to A Summer’s Day". With metrical feet and accents […]
Currently on the internet in China, there is a flurry of discussion on characters that are mirror, flipped, reversed, or inverted images of each other. Here are some of the examples that have been cited (except for the last two sets, which were added by me to illustrate other types of minimal differences): chǎng 厂 […]
Yuanfei Wang, who sent in this photograph of a menu from a Chinese restaurant called Chef Jon's (Chú wáng 厨王) in East Hanover, New Jersey, refers to it as a rèdiǎn 热点 ("hot spot"):
From an anonymous correspondent, who photographed it at Alibaba's Hangzhou campus — in, ahem, a restroom:
Read here now: the fine profile of my friend and research collaborator Julie Washington in the April issue of the Atlantic magazine. It’s been out for a while but you might not have seen it if, as in Madison WI where I live, it’s still February (we had the biggest snowstorm of the season this […]
No, not polyvinyl chloride. This is the (first run of the) Prosody Visualization Challenge, organized by Agnieszka Wagner, Anne Cutler, and Grażyna Demenko, in association with Speech Prosody 2018.
The International Phonetic Alphabet is a useful invention, which everyone interested in speech sounds should learn. But it's much less useful for actually doing phonetics than you might think. Whenever this comes up in discussion, I'm reminded of the Dr. Seuss classic On Beyond Zebra: In the places I go there are things that I […]
In "More Cohen Businesses Coming to Light," on Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall writes: The biggest taxi operator in New York, Evgeny “Gene” Friedman, now manages Cohen’s 30+ NYC medallions or at least did the last time we spoke to him. Friedman has been struggling for the last year to keep his taxi businesses out […]
[h/t Three Quarks Daily via Bob Shackleton] Lessons here.
By coincidence, today's email brought two contributions of links to remarkable examples of PP-attachment ambiguity. The first one was the lede from this story — Jason Rosenbaum & Marshal Griffin, "Hawley: Evidence exists to charge Greitens for obtaining charity fundraising list", St. Louis Public Radio, 4/18/2018: Attorney General Josh Hawley is asking the St. Louis […]
Zeyao Wu sent in this video of French politicians pronouncing Xi Jinping's name: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/xijinping.mp4 Zeyao tells me that her Chinese friends who hear them have no idea what they're saying.