Within the last couple of years, some of my students expressed themselves by sticking this emoji — 😂 — at strategic places in their messages to me. Funny thing is that I never really knew how to interpret it. It looks like the face of someone who is laughing so hard that they are crying. Maybe […]
Ben Hull writes: In our Computational Linguistics class we were discussing different methods of segmenting Chinese character texts. Today I came across a terrific example of the problems of segmenting left to right, in the first sentence of the attached image. I hope you find it as amusing as I did.
One of the benefits of checking linguistic hypotheses in real-world data is that you sometimes stumble on unexpected and potentially interesting patterns. This morning's Breakfast Experiment™ provides an example. Yesterday, as I prepared for a seminar on prosody and syntax, the following passage caught my eye (in Gerrit Kentner and Isabelle Franz, "No evidence for […]
Lucas Klein writes from Hong Kong: I just read Don Wyatt’s Blacks of Premodern China (which I believe you published?), and I found that someone who had previously borrowed the book from the library had left a sticky note in it… and evidently whoever it was forgot how to write 崑崙, so wrote it out in pinyin with the mountain […]
The OED's definition of the political sense of dog whistle is "A statement or expression which in addition to its ostensible meaning has a further interpretation or connotation intended to be understood only by a specific target audience", derived from the literal sense "A high-pitched whistle used in training dogs; (later) esp. one producing sounds […]
Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: ""I think I'll pass. These days I have a hard time feeling comfortable in crowded bars with loud music and lots of shouting." –me, after the pandemic, but now for a second reason"
Tom Ace writes: (Possibly) an Escher sentence: "The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so." It appears on page 65 of this document.
My sister Heidi and I agree that, though we dislike the substance, we like the word. Somehow, the shape and sound of the word are captivating. "Phlegm", with its five consonants and one vowel, rolls up out of your throat, flows across your tongue, and issues forth through your lips. "Phlegm"! What a singular word!
[This is a guest post by Ying-Che Li] Being Taiwanese myself, I very much appreciate Victor’s frequent attention to Taiwanese code utility, code crossing, and other linguistic phenomena, which interestingly reflect Taiwan’s current political and cultural atmosphere. I have several immediate comments after reading Victor’s two recent postings on Taiwanese. As I became immersed in […]
Sunny Jhutti sent in this photograph of an Indian shop sign: