From the latest updates to the online OED, new senses added to these words: Sinicism, n., sense 2: “A Chinese word, phrase, or idiom borrowed into, or introduced into a sentence in, another language.” Sinitic, adj. and n., sense B: “The languages of East Asia considered collectively; spec. the branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family […]
Variation across across Europe and the Middle East in the names of Donald Duck's three nephews: I'm a little surprised that Disney gives such freedom to local adapters.
Latest chapter of the perpetual litany against the epidemic of nearsightedness in the homeland of sinograms: "China rolls out mandatory national standards to prevent myopia among students", Zhang Jinruo, People's Daily (3/16/21) The abnormally high incidence of myopia among Chinese children has been noted and bemoaned for decades. Governments have repeatedly declared war on nearsightedness. […]
A recent xkcd suggests the geothmetic meandian: Mouseover title: "Pythagorean means are nice and all, but throwing the median in the pot is really what turns this into random forest statistics: applying every function you can think of, and then gradually dropping the ones that make the result worse."
Charles Belov writes: My understanding was that Hong Kong newspapers, newscasts, and popular Cantonese songs use literary Chinese exclusively while Hong Kong star magazines and Cantonese hip-hop (e.g., LMF, Softhard) use colloquial Cantonese exclusively. But today as I was walking along, an old Beyond song, 俾面派对, was earworming me and it suddenly hit me that, […]
I dimly remember a silly song about eating fish heads. And I'll confess to having used fish heads and other fillet leftovers to make soup. But I've never heard of eating fish hearts. In fact, I'm not sure that I've ever consciously seen a fish heart. So I was taken aback by a recent (3/8/2021) […]
For more than five decades, Orville Schell has been one of our leading China expositors. Having authored or co-authored a dozen books on Chinese affairs, he now turns his hand to a fictional biography with My Old Home: A Novel of Exile (Penguin Random House, 2021). Blurb from the publisher: A uniquely experienced observer of […]
In his addresses to the Liǎnghuì 兩會 (Two Sessions), annual plenary meetings of the national People's Congress and the national committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference that have just concluded in Beijing (March 4-11), Xi Jinping repeatedly stressed “guó zhī dà zhě 国之大者”. The grammar is clearly literary, with the first character a […]
A friend called my attention to this intriguing article: "This man can read and write 30 ancient Indonesian scripts, some as old as 500 years", by Kiki Siregar, Channel NewsAsia / CNA (3/6/21) Thirty years old Diaz Nawaksara says, “I started in 2012 by studying the Javanese script first.” Today, he can read and write over […]
A recent email from the Modern Language Association directed me to a piece of usage advice from Barney Latimer: "Versus or Against?": When The New York Times ran with the front-page headline “Trump Urges Unity versus Racism,” many readers questioned the accuracy of this assertion, but none pointed to its glaring grammatical error—its misuse of […]
Dwight Reynolds called my attention to this extraordinarily apropos article from the Travel section of the Beeb (3/9/21), by Charukesi Ramadurai : "Malaysia's harmonious approach to life" While Malaysia generally stays under the radar, it is one of Asia’s most friendly and tolerant countries where its three major ethnic communities live mostly in harmony. The […]
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