Since I became a Sinologist in 1972, hardly a day has passed when I didn't spend an hour or two vainly searching for a character or expression in my vast arsenal of Chinese reference works. The frustration of not being able to find what I'm looking for is so agonizing that I sometimes simply have […]
Or maybe, "What is vamping, and how could the Trump administration redo it?" Perhaps because I was very tired, that was my reaction to this story by Nia-Malika Henderson, "April Ryan asked the most important question of the Trump presidency", CNN 3/30/2017: After a contentious — and some said condescending, sexist and racist — back-and-forth with White […]
From David Cragin: I was exchanging WeChats with a friend and she called me a cow, i.e., “Nǐ niú de 你牛的.” It immediately made me laugh because calling someone a cow isn’t a good way to engender warm feelings in English. Hā 哈!, but I guessed that in Chinese it must be a compliment.
On Saturday, April 1, the TEDx series comes to the University of Pennsylvania, and the TEDxPenn website explains that the event's thematic phrase "Rise and Run" is intentionally polysemic—the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase. On the one hand, rise and run is a reference to the mathematical description of slopes, positive growth, upward […]
There's a town called Hǎbātún 奤夿屯 (where tún 屯 means "village, hamlet; camp; station") in Chāngpíng qū 昌平区 ("Changping District") of Beijing. The name sounds odd and the first two characters are unusual. It is said to date back to the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) when it was a Mongol military encampment. Southerners supposedly referred to […]
There's a Germantown in Philadelphia and a German Village in Columbus, Ohio. in Fredericksburg (the birthplace of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz) and in New Braunfels, they speak Texas German, and in Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities in many states, they speak Pennsylvania Dutch / German (Deitsch, Pennsylvania Deitsch, Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch, Hinterwäldler-Deutsch).
An acquaintance of mine has a new iPhone, which he carries in a pocket that is (relevantly) below waist level. He has discovered something that dramatically illustrates the difference between (i) responding to speech and (ii) responding to speech as humans do, on the basis of knowing that it is speech.
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Monday's New York Times crossword is the handiwork of Tom McCoy, an undergraduate member of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project. I wouldn't've thought it possible, but he's managed to make a coherent theme out of a nonstandard grammatical variant in American English.
"Congressional Republicans want to fight on, but the White House says Obamacare repeal is dead", Vox 3/26/2017: But Mulvaney’s remarks raise a question: If “fixing the system” is a major legislative priority, why is Trump leaving it unfinished? Mulvaney’s answer — that Trump “is not willing to do what other politicians would do” — in […]
We have the testimony of a colleague whose ability to write Chinese characters has been adversely affected by her not being able to visualize them in her mind's eye. See: "Aphantasia — absence of the mind's eye" (3/24/17) This prompts me to ponder: just how do people who are literate in Chinese characters recall them?
I've recently been working with Naomi Nevler and others from Penn's Frontotemporal Degeneration Center on quantifying the diverse effects in speech and language of various neurodegenerative conditions. As part of an effort to establish baselines, I turned to the English-language part of the "Fisher" datasets of conversational telephone speech (LDC2004S13, LDC2004T19, LDC2005S13, LDC2005T19), where we have basic demographic […]
[This is a guest post by Brendan O'Kane, written on the evening of 3/24/17] At a friend’s dissertation defense this morning, a certain distinguished Dutch professor emeritus, explaining the appeal of prosimetric vernacular literature to audiences in late imperial Shandong, noted that “people before about 1950 were mostly bored shitless.” This cracked the room up, […]
From Jonathan Lundell: Can't think of anyone to ask but LL… what on earth does this mean? I know that Nunes's Monday testimony was coordinated with WH because top WH official told me, "Watch the predicate that is set" by Nunes. — Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) March 24, 2017