In "Impromptu biscriptalism on a Starbucks cup" (9/8/17), we encountered a Starbucks cup from Shenyang, northeast China that had the following handwritten notation on the side: wài's 外's ("foreigner's"). I referred to the "'s" as impromptu because I thought that it was essentially a one-off phenomenon. Nonetheless, I considered the "'s" to be linguistically significant […]
This head-scratcher of a headline from the Belfast Telegraph was brought to our attention by Mike Pope: "Ed Murray: Sex abuse claim US mayor's time in Northern Ireland 'should be probed'".
A friend of Rebecca Hamilton saw this at a local market in Dundee Scotland:
[This post was written with input from Emily M. Bender, Claire Bowern, Andrew Garrett, Monica Macaulay, David Pesetsky, Leslie Saxon, Karen Shelby, Kristen Syrett, and Natasha Warner.] Many linguists, and probably also many regular Language Log readers, will have by now heard about the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint recently filed by a set of […]
Tweet from Igor Denisov: LOST IN TRANSLATION New park near the Kremlin. Red sausage ( or Red intestinal – 红肠 ) instead of Red Square 红场 Photo credit: Zhou Guangjun pic.twitter.com/OVWZTHTWwu — Igor Denisov (@Igor_Denisov) September 13, 2017
By itself, the phrase "xuéxí lù shàng 学习路上" means "on the path / way / road" of learning. However, when you see it in large characters at the top of a lavish website devoted to the life and works of President Xi Jinping, you cannot help but think that it also punningly conveys another meaning.
The marvellous New Zealand-born opera soprano Kiri Te Kanawa announced that she has now retired from performance. Talking to the BBC about it this morning, she said of her voice: "It's in the was."
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Zeyao Wu took these two pictures in Guangzhou. She found these signs in a small market which sells vegetables and fruits.
A tip from Twitter: Possibly the most spectacular crashblossom I've ever seen; anyone @LanguageLog care to comment? https://t.co/yIxsolaZ65 — Tigerfort (@StripeyCaptain) September 12, 2017 The headline: "Man who urinated on woman at Drake concert before drink-drive killer girlfriend started brawl over avoids jail", The Mirror 9/11/2017:
On Sunday 9/10/2017, Steve Bannon was interviewed on 60 Minutes. Looking at the interview from the perspective of a phonetician, I was struck by pervasive evidence of a little-studied sound change in progress. Word-internal intervocalic coronal consonants — /t/, /d/, /n/ — in weak positions (i.e. not followed by a stressed vowel) are deleted, and […]
Guoming Zhang et al., "DolphinAttack: Inaudible Voice Commands", arXiv 8/31/2017: In this work, we design a completely inaudible attack, DolphinAttack, that modulates voice commands on ultrasonic carriers (e.g., f > 20 kHz) to achieve inaudibility. By leveraging the nonlinearity of the microphone circuits, the modulated lowfrequency audio commands can be successfully demodulated, recovered, and more […]
Following up on "Citation crimes and misdemeanors" (9/9/2017), Breffni O'Rourke sent in a link to Michel Paradis, "More belles infidèles — or why do so many bilingual studies speak with forked tongue?", Journal of Neurolinguistics 2006: This note reports misquotations, misinterpretations, misrepresentations, inaccuracies and plain falsehoods found in the literature on the neuroscience of bilingualism. […]