From Charles Belov: My Apple Music subscription served me a folk-pop hip-hop song "Yibin BBQ" by Yishi Band at the tail end of a playlist mostly made up of rock from the former Yugoslavian republics. Googling this band reveals that they sing in a dialect called Yibin. I thought I heard a final consonant stop […]
That's the abbreviated title of a popular webcomic by Lin Chao 林超. The full title in Chinese is Nà nián nà tù nàxiē shì 那年那兔那些事 (lit., "that year that rabbit those affairs"; i.e., "The story of that rabbit that happened in that year") From the beginning of the Wikipedia article: The comic uses animals as […]
The First DIHARD Speech Diarization Challenge has results! "Diarization" is a bit of technical jargon for "figuring out who spoke when". You can read more (than you probably want to know) about the DIHARD challenge from the earlier LLOG post ("DIHARD" 2/13/2018) the DIHARD overview page, the DIHARD data description page, our ICASSP 2018 paper, etc. This […]
Readers of Language Log will be thoroughly familiar with "topolect", since it is one of our regular categories (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, and especially here). Imagine my delight when I received from Neil Kubler the following photograph of a label in an ethnographical museum in China:
Paul Midler came upon this scene in the Shanghai Pudong Airport:
China is currently hosting the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan, the smallest and southernmost province of the PRC. The BFA bills itself as the "Asian Davos", after the World Economic Forum held annually in Davos, Switzerland. The BFA draws representatives from many countries, so naturally they have to provide translation services. Unfortunately, the machine translation system they used this year failed […]
Posted to twitter by Ariel Waldman, with the comment "tell me again how AI will take over the world":
Klaus Nuber spotted this poster of an ad in Germany with German text spruced up with Vietnamese diacritics:
In case you're in need of some intensely elegiac and panegyric reading material, this lovely volume just might fit the bill:
At a press conference yesterday, Paul Ryan announced that he won't be running for re-election this fall, explaining that Your browser does not support the audio element. uh to be clear I am not resigning I intend to full my serve term as I was elected to do but I will be retiring in January […]
One of the most well-known pieces of lexicographic history is the controversy that greeted the publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Whereas the predecessor of W3, Webster’s Second New etc., had been regarded as authoritatively prescriptive, W3 was condemned in the popular media for its descriptive approach, the widespread perception of which can be […]
Jeff Demarco writes: My son snapped this photo on his way home from Hong Kong Disneyland. Wasn't quite sure what was intended…