Language Log

Photograph of a sign taken by Boris Kootzenko on a recent trip to China:

On Monday, Irwin Corey, the world's foremost authority, died at the age of 102. A characteristic clip from his later years:

The Times Literary Supplement diarist who hides behind the initials "J.C." makes this catty remark (issue of January 6, 2017, page 36) about Sidney E. Berger's The Dictionary of the Book: A Glossary of Book Collectors: "Predictions were that the Internet would do away with dealers' catalogs and it is true that many a dealer […]

Dana Milbank, "Shoker! Rediculous chocker Trump attaks and dishoners English with ever-dummer spellings", Washington Post 2/7/2017: The English language was unprepared for the attak. It was destined to loose. And, inevitably, it chocked. The Trump White House on Monday night, attempting to demonstrate that the media had ignored terrorism, released a list of 78 “underreported” […]

Here and here are links (South China Morning Post [SCMP] and the Chinese website of a German radio channel) re yesterday’s surprising statement by Judge HE Fan of China’s supreme court calling President Trump a "public enemy of the rule of law". The story is being well covered by the international media (NYT, The Independent, […]

David Beaver & Jason Stanley, "Unlike all previous U.S. presidents, Trump almost never mentions democratic ideals", Washington Post 2/7/2017: The central norms of liberal democratic societies are liberty, justice, truth, public goods and tolerance. To our knowledge, no one has proposed a metric by which to judge a politician’s commitment to these democratic ideals. A […]

Over at Existential Comics, WV Quine discovers the indeterminacy of cross-generational translation:

The current SMBC:

Message in a store window @ 826 Valencia, San Francisco:

Graeme Orr asks: This relates to US-Australian relations, thrown into mirth if not disarray by a now infamous phone call. Afterwards, Mr Spicer mistook our PM's surname twice in a press conference. Australian social media heard Spicer as calling our PM Turnbull 'Trumble'. But I distinctly hear it as 'Trunbull', a simple transposition error of […]

A few days ago, I posted some f0-difference dipole plots to visualize the contrast between Barack Obama's syllable-level pitch dynamics and Donald Trump's ("Tunes, political and geographical", 2/2/2017): Obama 2009 Inaugural Address Trump 2017 Inaugural Address For another take on the same contrast in political prosody, I ran a "Speech Activity Detector" (SAD) on the recordings […]

Benjamin Franklin, "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.", 1751 [emphasis added]: 23.  In fine, A Nation well regulated is like a Polypus; take away a Limb, its Place is soon supply'd; cut it in two, and each deficient Part shall speedily grow out of the Part remaining. Thus if you have […]

Hu Shih 胡適 (Pinyin Hú Shì [1891-1962]) is widely regarded as one of the most important Chinese intellectuals of the 20th century.  As such, he is known as the "Father of the Chinese Renaissance".  In my estimation, Hu Shih was the single most influential post-imperial thinker and writer in China.  His accomplishments were so numerous […]