Zhao Mengfu 趙孟頫 (1254-1322) is one of the most famous painters in the history of Chinese art. Many of his priceless works still exist, and he was even honored by having a 167 kilometer-diameter feature on Mercury (132.4° west, 87.3° south), the "Chao Meng-Fu crater", named after him. When Zhao Mengfu's name came up in a discussion on […]
Evidence continues to pile up that singular they is naturally used in standard English whenever the antecedent is indefinite or quantifier-like (not a personal name, for example) and the sex of whoever it might turn out to identify is completely immaterial. My correspondent Daniel Sterman thought, and I thought too, that there was evidence of […]
Permalink Comments off
"Wall Street big, 49, killed by shark while diving in Costa Rica", Fox News (N.Y. Post) 11/4/2017: A 49-year-old Wall Street private equity manager was killed by a tiger shark while diving with a group off a Costa Rican island, according to officials.
If you see the two big letters "GB" in the top right corner of an official publication from the Chinese government, you know it's serious. Those letters stand for Guójiā Biāozhǔn 国家标准 ("National standard"). In the present instance, they have promulgated, as of December 1, 2017, "Guidelines for the use of English in public service […]
"Japanese start-up helping ‘delinquents’ compete against college graduates for city jobs with new internship: The company Hassyadai has so far helped 100 youth from outside Tokyo to land employment", SCMP (12/2/17): Dubbed the “Yankee internship”, the programme, whose participants range in age from 16 to 22, is unique in that it includes the category of […]
ProZ.com is a membership-based website that targets freelance translators. They currently have posted a job for which they are seeking a qualified translator, but are uncertain of what language the source text is in. On first sight, the sample text (see below) looks vaguely Turkic to me. The person who posted the job notes: We […]
Language Log will be off the air for a while this weekend, due to building-wide electrical repairs.
Given the bevy of shamed politicians and celebrities who have been paraded before the public in recent weeks, it may be of interest that the word for "sexual harassment" in Chinese is quite a colorful one: (Source)
In Paris for this workshop, I'm glad to see that cultural diffusion is alive and well on l'Avenue des Gobelins:
From Mark Meckes: I'm a regular Language Log reader, completely ignorant of Chinese languages. I was just wondering whether there exist worthwhile online tools to help someone like me figure out the meaning of something written only in hanzi. (The question is occasioned by my looking at a package of tea given to me by […]
The following are new forms of greetings that are circulating in Beijing on the heels of a major child molestation scandal at an elite school, the forced eviction of migrant workers, the convictions and suicides of ranking politicians, and perpetual fears of social instability.
From Thorin Engeseth: I was doing some reading this morning on the magpie, and the Wikipedia page states: Similarly, in China, magpies are seen as an omen of good fortune. This is even reflected in the Chinese word for magpie, simplified Chinese: 喜鹊; traditional Chinese: 喜鵲; pinyin: xǐquè, in which the first character means "happiness". […]
Ross Douthat, "Is There an Evangelical Crisis?", NYT 11/25/2017 (emphasis added): But it’s also possible that evangelical intellectuals and writers, and their friends in other Christian traditions, have overestimated how much a serious theology has ever mattered to evangelicalism’s sociological success. It could be that the Trump-era crisis of the evangelical mind is a parochial […]