Language Log

Looking for something else, I stumbled on this unexpected Google Books description of Peter Guralnick's Searching for Robert Johnson:

The first two conditions, along with eight others, are covered in this interesting Sixth Tone article: "An Awkward, Greasy Year: China’s Top Slang of 2017 " (12/28/17) by Kenrick Davis Davis's presentation is excellent, so let us begin this post with two montages accompanying his article.

From Paul Sleigh:

From Geoff Dawson: On display in a current exhibition at the National Library of Australia.

For reasons not strictly relevant to what follows, Yves Schabes and I have been analyzing the novels of Agatha Christie. (For the not-strictly-relevant background, see Xuan Le et al., "Longitudinal detection of dementia through lexical and syntactic changes in writing: a case study of three British novelists", Literary and Linguistic Computing 2011, and Graeme Hirst […]

A Shanghainese friend of a friend just sent him a link to a curious video, and he forwarded it to me.  It looks like a Nike-sponsored rap song with five different fāngyán 方言 ("topolects") and lots of English. My friend asked, "I wonder to what degree the Hànzì 汉字 ("Chinese characters") in the subtitles match […]

A week ago, I wrote a post on "CCP approved image macros" (12/17/17).  Being the authoritarian, totalitarian government that it is, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has the power to coin, sanction, and promote whatever forms of language use it desires.  This week, at the conclusion of 2017, we have this dazzling collection of CCP-approved […]

This is really strong work from PVD's First Baptist Church. I chuckled when I drove by the sign this evening. Photo credit to their FB page: https://t.co/Ivqmh6QqQ9. pic.twitter.com/4QRJ6PyBSF — Philip Eil (@phileil) December 6, 2017

From March through July of 2016, we had a long-running series of posts comparing words in Indo-European and in Old Sinitic (OS),  See especially the first item in this series, and don't miss the comments to all of the posts: “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions” (3/8/16) “Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, […]

Sometimes a new experimental result suggests a very different way of interpreting older results. On a visit a couple of days ago to Ofer Tchernichovski's lab at Hunter College, I encountered a striking example of this effect. The background is the experimental literature on zebra finch song learning. If one of these birds is raised in […]

Michelle Goldberg, "Fifty Shades of Orange", NYT 12/22/2017: At a televised cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Donald Trump, as is his custom, called on his appointees to publicly praise him. In a performance that would have embarrassed the most obsequious lackey of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Vice President Mike Pence delivered an encomium to […]

Dave Cragin writes: Throughout my years of learning Chinese, I’ve been surprised at the number of times I’ve been told by various Chinese that a specific Chinese phrase is: only something foreigners say and/or Chinese NEVER say that phrase or only old Chinese women or only old Chinese say that phrase.

David Adger of Queen Mary University of London is using the new Star Wars movie as an opportunity to delve into the linguistics of Yoda-speak. He surmises that Yoda's native language involves predicate inversion a la Hawaiian, and that this Yodish syntactic pattern is then transferred into his second language, English. (Or is that Galactic Basic […]