Mr John Kelly, an attorney for Melania Trump, reading out a statement concerning why she has just scored nearly $3million in a London libel suit (reported here in The Guardian; I reproduce the use of "right-handed" found in the article, despite its oddness): The article was illustrated with an old photograph of the claimant standing […]
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During the second half of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first century, Burton Watson translated a wide range of works of premodern Chinese literature into highly readable, reliable English. His numerous published translations span the gamut of Chinese texts from history to poetry, prose, philosophy, and religion. He was also an accomplished translator […]
Recently this video, or a link to it, has been showing up on just about every web page I visit:
Just because I haven't written a post about Chinglish for many moons doesn't mean that it has disappeared. In fact, the following is such a paramount specimen that I would be remiss not to bring it to the attention of Language Log readers. From C. Grieve (who comments "I'm assuming the restaurant was a greasy […]
In 1975, Osamu Fujimura hired me as a Member of Technical Staff in his new Linguistics Research Department at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. I spent 15 formative years there, and I owe a great deal to the environment that he created.
Jocelyn Ireson-Paine came across the Language Log posts which mention blooming: the increase in size of translated texts. She draws, and this made her think that if line drawing is regarded as translation from an original scene to lines, blooming can occur there too. She has written a brief note on this in "Drawing as […]
This is weird, and even slightly creepy — paste a list of countries like Costa Rica, Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, France, Germany, England, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Peru, Puerto Rico, Scotland, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay, Venezuela, USA into Google Translate English-to-Spanish, and a […]
In a long list of LLOG posts over the years, we've observed the widespread (and false) folk-linguistic view that the grammatical term passive means "vague about agency". (You can learn what it really means from Geoff Pullum's 2011 post "The passive in English".) This confusion arises partly because passive verbs can sometimes be used to […]
The case of activist Gweon Pyeong 권평 / Pyong Kwon / Quan Ping 權平 is now going to trial in China. Gweon stands accused of wearing a t-shirt with three Xi-themed slogans printed on it: "T-shirt slogans" (11/7/16) In this post, I would like to explore in greater depth one of the three slogans, namely […]
A competent PR counsel would have advised against this wardrobe choice: The twitterverse immediately pounced, with captions like these: Reinforcements from the 101st Fighting Ivies Have Arrived. From the shores of Burberry, the 82nd heir-born has arrived. Kush Body Armor by J.Crew. "When you don't know where you are or what you are doing."
Frank Bruni, "What Happened to Who?", NYT 4/8/2017: I first noticed it during the 2016 Republican presidential debates, which were crazy-making for so many reasons that I’m not sure how I zeroed in on this one. “Who” was being exiled from its rightful habitat. It was a linguistic bonobo: endangered, possibly en route to extinction. […]
Following up on "Weak t", 4/6/2017, I wouldn't want you to think that Donald Trump's pronunciation of "scientists" is unusually under-articulated. Here's Barack Obama from his 5/2/2009 Weekly Radio Address: Your browser does not support the audio element. Just the "-tists" syllable: Your browser does not support the audio element.