Language Log

Bob Sanders writes: "I was just reading today's online issue of the NZ Herald and came upon the following photo":

The people have spoken. At the American Dialect Society annual meeting in Salt Lake City (held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America), the 2017 Word of the Year has been selected, and it's fake news. (Yes, yes, we all know that's technically two words, just like dumpster fire, the choice for 2016. The "word of […]

Nia Wesley, "Girl's tattoo of late grandma's voicemail can be played with iPhone": A Chicago singer honored her late grandmother in a unique way. Sakyrah Morris held on to a voicemail her grandmother sent her just a month before she passed away. She got a tattoo of the voicemail's exact sound waves. Through technology with […]

Following up on "Proportion of dialogue in novels" (12/29/2017), I've taken a look at the same numbers for Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels (which as before Yves Schabes and I have been analyzing for reasons irrelevant to this post).

The two notes below, as described in this article (in Chinese) were written around the same time and under similar circumstances.

In China and in the Sinophone diaspora, although Hakka may be relatively few in number, they are disproportionately influential in practically every realm of society, politics, and culture:  government, the military, literature, film, cuisine, business, academia, and so on and so forth. "Hakka made an official language" (Taipei Times, 12/30/17) Hakka is to be made […]

David Smith, "Trump Tower meeting with Russians 'treasonous', Steve Bannon says in explosive book", The Guardian 12/3/2017: Bannon has criticised Trump’s decision to fire Comey. In Wolff’s book, obtained by the Guardian ahead of publication from a bookseller in New England, he suggests White House hopes for a quick end to the Mueller investigation are gravely misplaced. […]

Today's SMBC:

One of Matt Wuerker's 2017 political cartoons:

A couple of weeks ago, a strange language misunderstanding occurred during the Regular Press Conference of the PRC foreign ministry spokesperson, Hua Chunying, on December 19, 2017. During the press conference, a Japanese journalist raised a question in English. He asked:  "Giant panda Xiang Xiang who has traveled to Japan made its formal debut in […]

I learned this morning that Aravind Joshi died yesterday at his home. Among Aravind's many awards are the 1997 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence; the first ACL Lifetime Achievement Award, in 2002; the 2003 David E. Rumelhart Prize; and the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal, "[f]or his fundamental contributions to our understanding of how language is represented […]

As we enter the second half of the 15th year since we started Language Log, we've been reflecting on the past and planning for the future.

Yesterday BBC's Radio 4 program "Today", the cultural counterpart of NPR's "Morning Edition", invited into the studio a robot from the University of Sheffield, the Mishalbot, which had been trained to conduct interviews by exposure to the on-air speech of co-presenter Mishal Husain. They let it talk for three minutes with the real Mishal. (video […]