From the following post, we see that there are three main ways to transcribe Donald Trump's given name in Chinese and two main ways to transcribe his surname: "Transcription of 'Barack Obama', 'Hillary Clinton', and 'Donald Trump' in the Sinosphere" (10/2/16) Here are the two prevailing transcriptions of "Trump" in Chinese characters: Tèlǎngpǔ 特朗普 (mainland […]
Linguists have been having a field day with the movie "Arrival" (see: "'Arrival' arrives"). From Ollie Sayeed on Facebook, here's a playful take on the shot of Louise Banks (Amy Adams) holding up a whiteboard with the word "HUMAN" for the aliens' perusal.
We've already looked at the use of an apostrophe in Hangul. Now Wendy Heller has sent in this photograph of a shop sign in Haifa, Israel:
Many of the debates over Chinese language issues that keep coming up on Language Log and elsewhere may be attributed to a small number of basic misunderstandings and disagreements concerning the relationship between speech and writing.
The "silly AI doing something stupidly funny" trope is a powerful one, partly because people like to see the mighty cast down, and partly because the "silly stupid AI" stereotype is often valid. But as with stereotypes of human groups, the most viral examples are often fakes. Take the "Voice Recognition Elevator" skit from a few years […]
We call people "swine", "pigs", "dogs", "curs", "rats", even "water buffalo" when we want to disparage them. The latter epithet was uttered in the famous "water buffalo incident" that took place at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993, when an Israeli-born Jewish student, translating from Hebrew slang behema ("animal; beast" — used by Israelis to […]
Recently, a series of serendipitous connections led me to read Mary Astell's work, A serious proposal to the ladies, for the advancement of their true and greatest interest, first published in 1694. And this experience led me to two questions, the first of which is, Why in the world are Mary Astell's works not available […]
My dad accidentally texted me with voice recognition…while playing the tuba (h/t Chris Waigl) [Update: Mark Liberman suggests this might be some artful fakery. See: "Another fake AI failure?"]
Lisa Feldman Barrett has an article on "The Varieties of Anger" in last Sunday's NYT. Most of it consists of reflections on pre- and post-election anger in our society. But Barrett has one paragraph in which she makes some rather dubious claims about the number of words for “anger” in several languages: The Russian language […]
Yesterday evening I wound up spending several hours in the Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires, and the result was a brilliant idea. Or maybe an idle fantasy — you decide.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of joining fellow Language Logger Barbara Partee on Josh Chetwynd's KGNU radio show, "The Real Deal in Sports." Josh is the author of The Field Guide to Sports Metaphors, and he spoke to Barbara and me about how the metaphorical language of sports pervades American politics (especially in the latest presidential campaign). […]
Page of a phrasebook published in 1941 (click to embiggen):
The Oxford Dictionaries 2016 Word Of The Year is post-truth, which they define as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief". Here's their graph of its recent rise in frequency over the past seven months: