Nicola Davis, "Bat chat: machine learning algorithms provide translations for bat squeaks", The Guardian 12/22/2016 It turns out you don’t need to be Dr Doolittle to eavesdrop on arguments in the animal kingdom. Researchers studying Egyptian fruit bats say they have found a way to work out who is arguing with whom, what they […]
A readworthy article by Julie Sedivy: "Is the Chinese Language a Superstition Machine? How similar-sounding words in ambiguous languages may lead to taboos", Nautilus (1/5/17).
David Brooks may be a fantasy-nonfiction author manqué, but Jorge Luis Borges has set a standard in that space that's hard to match. From "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", in Ficciones: There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tlön, which is the source of the living language and the dialects; there are impersonal verbs qualified […]
An excellent article by Lane Greene: "Language: Finding a voice", The Economist 1/5/2017.
Federico Escobar pointed me to an essay by David Brooks, "The 2016 Sidney Awards, Part I", NYT 12/27/2016: Perry Link once noticed that Chinese writers use more verbs in their sentences whereas English writers use more nouns. For example, in one passage from the 18th-century Chinese novel “Dream of the Red Chamber,” Cao Xueqin uses […]
For some reason, the Chinese have taken to comparing President Elect Trump to a rooster, this year's symbol in the 12-year cycle of the zodiac. A giant chicken sculpture outside a shopping mall in Taiyuan, north China's Shanxi province, that looks like US president-elect Donald Trump Getty Images
On Twitter, John Lewis shared a prime example of the perils of global search-and-replace: what happens when "km" gets expanded to "kilometres" in an edition of Trivial Pursuit. Trivial Pursuit makers change all mentions of "km" to "kilometres" as a universal find and change. Can't see what could go wrong there. pic.twitter.com/956hYeJw3B — John Lewis […]
In several recent posts, I have pointed out how Chinese and Japanese announcements and greetings for foreigners are often pronounced in a special way that deviates markedly from what Chinese and Japanese would say to each other: "Tones and the alphabet" (4/27/16) (last three paragraphs) "'Ni hao' for foreigners" (10/11/16) "Bus announcements in Okinawa" (12/6/16)
Bruce Humes writes: I noticed this news item today (below) that foresees teaching young South Korean students how to read Chinese characters. I don’t know Korean, but I’ve always been interested in how Chinese characters are used (or not) in Korean and Japanese. I look forward to the occasional piece in your Language Log, touching […]
Guy Almog sent me this photograph of a detail from a poster that he and I spotted at several places in and around the Haifa subway:
Joshua David Stein, "The Loud, Empty Word That Defines President-Elect Trump", The Daily Beast 1/1/2017: Perhaps because there are so many casualties already accruing and so much damage already being done, it has gone less noted than it should that among the incoming Trump administration’s most endangered victims is the English language itself. Nouns shudder. […]
Stephen Hart sent in this scan of a box containing medicine that he bought in Malaysia in 1972: