Morris Halle passed away early this morning: born 7/23/1923, died 4/2/2018. The abstract from "Morris Halle: An Appreciation", Annual Review of Linguistics 2015, describes his influence on the field: Morris Halle has been one of the most influential figures in modern linguistics. This is partly due to his scientific contributions in many areas: insights into […]
When I read Chris Christie quoted as saying "[I]f Mr. Pruitt is going to go, it’s because he should have never been there in the first place" (e.g. in this article and in this picture caption), the wording "should have never been" struck me as somewhat awkward compared to "should never have been". The third […]
While Chinese characters are inimical to the full writing of the topolects, they occasionally can be used to convey a sense of certain aspects of various local or regional forms of speech. Here are some examples from the Northeast / Dongbei:
In "Advances in birdsong modeling", 4/1/2017, I discussed Eve Armstrong's brilliant research report "A Neural Networks Approach to Predicting How Things Might Have Turned Out Had I Mustered the Nerve to Ask Barry Cottonfield to the Junior Prom Back in 1997". Now, a year later, Dr. Armstrong has followed up with "Colonel Mustard in the […]
Undernegation of the week, from a reader down under — Jack Waterford, "AFP bloodhounds still just sniffing about", The Canberra Times 3/31/2018: The AFP raids were at the behest of the Registered Organisations Commission, which claims to have feared that the AWU might be in the process of destroying documents relevant to a civil investigation. […]
Ursula K.Le Guin died a couple of months ago, and since then I've been re-reading some of her works that I've enjoyed over the years. Yesterday I was struck by the epigraph to her 2004 collection The Wave in the Mind, which apparently I missed when I read the book a decade ago. It's part of […]
On her blog today retired U. Wisconsin law Prof. Ann Althouse asks some interesting questions about local Nanjing reactions to a nursing home (possibly with a morgue and a kindergarten) being located nearby. She cites this article by Fan Liya in Sixth Tone (3/30/18): "Nanjing NIMBYs Oppose Hospice, Fearing Death in Their Midst/Nursing home offering […]
A couple of years ago around this time I wrote about the "Schlump season" (3/21/15) at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Now, as Dartmouth is becoming enmired in the early spring mud, Pamela Kyle Crossley, who teaches there, told me that she thought of the Russian word for this season: rasputitsa. And that made […]
And a consonant without a vowel is a body without a soul. So says Spinoza in his Hebrew Grammar (Compendium grammatices linguæ hebrææ), as published postumously in 1677. At least, that's sort of what he says.
A couple of weeks ago, we asked: "The end of the line for Mandarin Phonetic Symbols?" (3/12/18) The general response to that post was no, not by a long shot. Now, in addition to all the other things one can do with bopomofo, one can use it to confound PRC trolls, as described in this […]
I have a feeling that I'm coming at this sentence wrong, somehow — Laurie Garrett, "Meet Trump’s New, Homophobic Public Health Quack", Foreign Policy 3/23/2018: Outside of his work with the military, [Robert] Redfield, a devout Roman Catholic, was associated with Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (ASAP), a Christian organization headed by W. Shepherd […]
In the course of doing research for a series of posts I plan on doing, I was listening to an interview from a few years ago with Bryan Garner, and something he said bothered me. Well, actually, I was bothered by more than one thing that he said, but this post is only about one […]