In my introductory undergraduate course on English words, and in most undergraduate introductory courses on linguistics, students are invited to reflect on language and identity—how the way you speak communicates information about who you are—which they are typically very interested in. This isn't my beat, professionally speaking, but as a linguist I have a duty […]
On Saturday the 26th, Yixue Yang and I went to the Ting Wong Restaurant in Philadelphia's Chinatown. I took one look at the menu and knew right away that the first thing I wanted was the second item on the menu, the Congee with Chopped Beef.
Since I began the study of Chinese languages half a century ago, there's one word that I have found very useful and versatile, but extremely hard to translate into English, so in this post I'm going to propose that we might as well just simply (gāncuì 乾脆 = the previous five English words) borrow it […]
There's a controversy over whether President Xi Jinping called President-elect Donald Trump to congratulate him on his victory in the November 8th election. The problem is summarized in this passage from The Economist: Chinese officials pay obsessive attention to ensuring the Communist Party’s line is reflected accurately by the country’s main media. But Mr Trump’s […]
This is a guest post by Bill Badecker, Linguistics Program Director at the National Science Foundation. Subject: Language & Communication: Request for Information
Permalink Comments off
“As the car is hurtling towards the cliff, it’s driving on quicksand,” Levitt said.
When, about 40 years ago, I first read the "Basic Annals of Xiang Yu (232-202 BC)" ( Xiàngyǔ běnjì 項羽本紀) in the The Scribe's Records (Shǐjì 史記, ca. 94), the foundation for the 24 official dynastic histories that followed it, I was struck by this sentence: `Yúshì Xiàng wáng dà hū chí xià, Hàn jūn […]
In "Life is Meaningless, Say China’s Top Students: A Peking University professor reports that students have full course loads and ‘empty hearts’", Fu Danni (Sixth Tone, 11/23/16) introduces us to a newly minted term: kōngxīn bìng 空心病 ("empty heart disease").
The last month or so has seen renewed discussion of the benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence, sparked by Stephen Hawking's speech at the opening of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University. In that context, it may be worthwhile to point again to the earliest explicit and credible AI warning that […]
On Monday (11/26/16), Erika Sandman will be defending her doctoral dissertation on "A Grammar of Wutun" in the Faculty of Arts, Department of World Cultures, at the University of Helsinki. I have a special interest in this type of "mixed" (for want of a better word) language that is situated at the interface between the […]
Reports of the death of languages and the extinction of languages are alarmingly routine, but before a language dies out entirely, when it is endangered, its dialects die off one by one. "Last native speaker of Scots dialect dies" (10/6/12) Dialect Death: The case of Brule Spanish (1997) The list of publications documenting the dead […]
Speaking of biscriptalism, Guy Almog called my attention to an interesting project called Aravrit (that is, Arabic + Hebrew [ivrit]). From the home page: Aravrit is a project of utopian nature. It presents a set of hybrid letters merging Hebrew and Arabic. This new writing system is composed of an Arabic letter on the upper half and a […]
Helen Sims-Williams has a new post on The Philological Society Blog: "Understanding the loss of inflection" (11/23/16) Helen takes what might superficially seem to be a dry and dreary topic and turns it into a lively, stimulating essay. Here's how it begins: