Today we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. One of my favorite Martin Luther King Jr. quotes come from a speech he delivered at a retreat attended by staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in South Carolina, one year before he was assassinated: “We have moved from the era of […]
Louise Radnofsky, "White House Disputes Trump Quote in Journal Interview: The Wall Street Journal stands by what it reported and releases audio of disputed portion of interview", WSJ 1/14/2018: The White House disputed that President Donald Trump told The Wall Street Journal in an interview Thursday that “I probably have a very good relationship with […]
The question comes from George Amis: I wonder– are first names gendered in Mandarin? That is, is it possible to tell that Tse-tung or Wai-wai are masculine names? Given the extraordinary proliferation of Chinese first names, I rather doubt it. And what is the case with Japanese first names? Here, I suspect that the names […]
This post is an initial progress report on some joint work with Mark Liberman. It's part of a larger effort to replicate and extend Xuan Le, Ian Lancashire, Graeme Hirst, & Regina Jokel, "Longitudinal detection of dementia through lexical and syntactic changes in writing: a case study of three British novelists", Literary and Linguistic Computing […]
From Bob Moore: I have recently become interested in an important Alaska native weaver named Jennie Thlunaut. The linguistic question is about the initial consonant cluster of her last name, "thl". My initial reaction on seeing the name was that this consonant cluster was not phonotactically possible in English, and that it would be hard […]
Whether he really said it or not — "Trump appears to deny using 'shithole' language" (POLITICO [1/12/18]), see also here — "shithole" is already part of the ever-burgeoning scatalogical lore surrounding President Trump, so people have to deal with it, including translating this colorful term into other languages.
Zoe Williams, "With the NHS, reality has finally caught up with Theresa May", The Guardian 1/8/2018 [emphasis added]: “If you look across the NHS, experience is different,” the prime minister flailed, as if the fact there wasn’t a stroke victim waiting for four hours in an ambulance outside every hospital was proof of her competence. […]
The Chinese government has prohibited Mongolian language instruction in all schools in the Mongolian areas of Xinjiang: "Southern Mongolia: Instruction in Mongolian Language Banned in All Schools", Unrepresented Nations & Peoples Organization (1/3/18). The last school in the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to provide education in the Mongolian language, the Bayangol No. 3 High […]
From Elijah Granet: I am writing because of this picture I recently saw on the New York Times website:
French President Emmanuel Macron presented a horse to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Vesuvius, an 8-yr old gelding from the 'Garde Republicaine'. Now, Macron's name in Chinese is transcribed as "Mǎkèlóng 马克龙" (lit., "horse subdues / overcomes / conquers / surmounts dragon"). Make of it what you will.
Over the past dozen years, there's been a scattering of LLOG posts about various forms of a periphrastic future construction in English: "I'ma", 7/3/2005 "I'monna", 7/3/2005 "'On' time", 8/4/20015 "Finna and tryna", 8/5/2005 "I'm a?", 9/19/2009 "I'ma stay with the youngsters", 5/14/2010 "Gonna, gone, onna, a — on?", 8/10/2012 But there's a quasi-inflectional aspect to […]
One constantly encounters new terms in Chinese. You may never have heard of an intriguing expression, then all of a sudden it is everywhere. One that I hadn't heard of before today is yuēpào 约炮 (lit., "agree cannon"), which garners three quarters of a million ghits. A Chinese friend called my attention to this richly […]