I love congee and I love the word "congee": "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 2" (11/30/16) "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 3" (2/25/17) Lisa Lim has written an edifying article on the subject in the South China Morning Post Magazine (11/10/17): "Where the word congee comes from – the answer may surprise you: The dish is frequently […]
An interesting new paper by Joe Pater: "Generative linguistics and neural networks at 60: foundation, friction, and fusion": Abstract. The birthdate of both generative linguistics and neural networks can be taken as 1957, the year of the publication of seminal work by both Noam Chomsky and Frank Rosenblatt. This paper traces the development of these […]
I just spent a few days in China, mainly to attend an "International Workshop on Language Resource Construction: Theory, Methodology and Applications". This was the second event in a three-year program funded by a small grant from the "Penn China Research & Engagement Fund". That program's goals include "To develop new, or strengthen existing, institutional […]
Zachary Woolfe, "Hyper-High Notes", NYT 11/10/2017: I wrote this week about the highest note in the history of the Metropolitan Opera, an A above high C currently being sung by Audrey Luna in Thomas Adès’s “The Exterminating Angel.” In my brief rundown of high-note history, I referred to the French soprano Mado Robin “shrilling” up […]
New China TV, published on Nov 8, 2017:
In "Mandarin Janus sentences" (11/4/17), there arose the question of whether duōshǎo 多少 ("how many") and duō shǎo 多少 ("how few") are spoken differently. I'm very glad that, in the comments, Chris Button recognizes that Sinitic languages can have stress. (The same is doubtless true of other tonal languages).
Don't miss Danielle Geller's remarkable, moving personal essay in The New Yorker, "Annotating the First Page of the First Navajo-English Dictionary." Here's how it starts: The first, incomplete Navajo-English Dictionary was compiled, in 1958, by Leon Wall, an official in the U.S. government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. Wall, who was in charge of a literacy program […]
The American Dialect Society gets a nice shout-out in Tuesday's New York Times crossword. More than a shout-out, in fact: the puzzle is actually ADS-themed. Subscribers to the Times crossword can download the puzzle in Across Lite format or as a PDF. After you've solved it, you can read my commentary in the NYT's Wordplay […]
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It's the saddest thing I have seen in many months of sad news: The front page of the Metro, a free newspaper given away on the buses in Britain, said "At least 27 people were killed during a morning church service in the latest US shooting massacre." "The latest"! They're now so routine that the […]
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On reddit: My friend's tattoo. When asked "what does that mean?" He replies, "I don't know, I don't speak Chinese." That is literally what it means. from funny
From Bryan Van Norden: It took me a while to "get" this, but it's very cool, and you can appreciate it even if you have never learned a Chinese character before in your life. It's a contemporary Chinese poem entitled "War Symphony." You only need to read four characters to understand it: 兵 bīng means […]