Joanna Klein, "Swatting at Mosquitoes May Help You Avoid Bites, Even if you Miss", NYT 1/25/2018: If you keep swatting at a mosquito, will it leave you alone? Some scientists think so. But it depends. Some blood meals are worth a mosquito risking its life. But if there’s a more attractive or accepting alternative to […]
Well, the dynamic range of the amplitude of syllables in poetry readings, anyhow: What IS that?
In "The Eagle-Eyed Vigilantes Defending the Chinese Language: As new lingo springs up and grammatical errors persist, one magazine is battling to maintain linguistic standards", Yin Yijun (Sixth Tone [1/19/18]) describes an unusual PRC journal: Shanghai-based Yaowen Jiaozi — whose name literally translates as “biting phrases and chewing characters” — was established in 1995 and […]
I'm at Yale University attending a workshop on Tangut. So you ask, "What is 'Tangut'?" Relevant Wikipedia articles: Tangut people, an ancient ethnic group in Northwest China, not Tibetan people. Tangut language, the extinct language spoken by the Tangut people, not Tibetan language. Tangut script, the writing system used to write the Tangut language Western […]
In a series of posts over the last few years, I've documented gradual declines in the frequency of the English definite determiner "the" in a wide variety of text sources: State of the Union addresses, Medline abstracts, the Corpus of Historical American English, Google Books (from both American and British sources), and so on. Both in […]
Nikita Kuzmin told me about a trend among young Chinese to exchange certain characters with other phonetically close characters in their Internet writings, so that the words sound more "cute". Here are some examples of such substitutions: jiègè 介個 — zhège 這個 ("this") pényǒu 盆友 — péngyǒu 朋友 ("friend") nánpiào 男票 — nán péngyǒu 男朋友 […]
Michael Cannings relayed this tweet by Dave Flynn: When did replacing 很 with "hen" become a thing in Taiwan? pic.twitter.com/IHX8b5EWLZ — Dave Flynn 茶米 (@DaveFlynn) January 18, 2018
News article from Xinhua (1/16/18, by Quan Xiaoshu, Qu Ting, Cao Pengyuan): "Ancient tripartite-city of Xiongnu a special religious and meeting site: archaeologists" It starts: The ruins of an ancient tripartite-city, known as Sanlian City, in midwest Mongolia's Khermental City, demonstrates that the Xiongnu tribe used to perform religious ceremonies and hold alliance meetings there. […]
Malia Wollan, "How to Speak Gibberish", NYT Magazine 1/5/2018: Strive for linguistic plausibility. In 2014, Sara Maria Forsberg was a recent high-school graduate in Finland when she posted “What Languages Sound Like to Foreigners,” a video of herself speaking gibberish versions of 15 languages and dialects. Incorporate actual phonology to make a realistic-sounding gibberish. “Expose […]
According to Andrew Higgins ("Kazakhstan Cheers New Alphabet, Except for All Those Apostrophes", NYT 1/15/2018), the pending turn to a Latin alphabet for Kazakh has run into a pothole: the 77-year-old dictator Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, who apparently has not yet been informed about Unicode, or the possibility of varied computer keyboard layouts. Mr. Higgins also seems […]
The morning mail brings an apparent instance of misnegation — Daniel Boffey, "May faces tougher transition stance from EU amid Norway pressure", The Guardian 1/16/2018: The EU also insists that the UK will only continue to enjoy the benefits of trade agreements with non-EU countries unless “authorised” by Brussels. Given the context, English grammar, and […]