Language Log

Google Street View in Pittsburgh at 5809 Forward Ave. shows a Young's Oriental Grocery. The corresponding Hangul transliteration of "Young's" gives "Young 'seu 영 '스".

In "Call me comrade … party requires members to resurrect Maoist term to signal equality:  Outdated greeting seen by analysts as a distraction and unworkable in today’s world" (SCMP, 11/13/16), Sidney Leng writes: A written guideline requiring Communist Party members to once again address each other as “comrade” is an outdated resurrection of Maoist rhetoric […]

On microblogs and on social media in China, it was well nigh universal to call the ruler of North Korea Jīn sān pàng 金三胖 ("Kim Third Fat" [referring to Kim Jung-un, third in the line of Kims following his father Kim Jung-il and his grandfather Kim Il-sung]) — until the North Korean government caught wind […]

Donald Trump's granddaughter (Ivanka Trump's daughter), Arabella Rose Kushner, does a remarkably good job at reciting two Tang poems. Arabella wanted to have a pre-bedtime #ChineseNewYear party this past Sunday evening. She got all dressed up and performed songs and poems for Jared, Joseph and me. It was pretty adorable 🐒#yearofthemonkey #happyChineseNewYear A video posted […]

From Donald Clarke: The sign seems straightforwardly to be a warning that this is a "dangerous construction site".  The more you look at it, however, the more questions arise.

Ryan of Singapore sent me photographs of a section from a Chinese almanac that amounts to a ten-page English phrasebook phonetically annotated in Cantonese. Here are two of the pages (as usual, click to embiggen):

Advertisement for a beverage that is available in Japanese convenience stores:

It's been a while since we posted a nomination for the Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding — I believe that the most recent nomination was in April of 2012.  But here's a worthy suggestion from Laura Bailey: .@LanguageLog is the 2nd sentence a contender for the Trent Reznor Prize For Tricky Centre Embedding? pic.twitter.com/tOwyqzCEpH […]

From Jenny Chu, on November 9: I am a long-time follower of Language Log but usually comment on the Chinese and Vietnamese related topics by Prof. Mair. Yet I thought you might be amused by the attached conversation. It shows some nice examples of the playfulness and creativity of the human language faculty, as well […]

The Love Love Rock festival, a music event in Xindian, New Taipei City, uses an interesting version of the character aì 愛 ("love") for its branding.  Certain elements of the character are duplicated (and some reversed) to convey the double 愛 (aìaì).

A few days ago, someone asked me a question about a common situation that's rarely discussed: How can an adult learn to communicate in a language they don't know, without access to courses and books and instructors? And what if the problem isn't just lack of foresight and preparation, because no courses or books or instructors […]

"Arrival" hits the theaters this weekend, and I'd heartily recommend it to all Language Log readers. The film, despite its science-fiction trappings, does a remarkably good job of depicting how a linguist goes about her work. I've posted about the movie a few times before even seeing it, based on the trailers: "'Language is messy,' […]

One of the many interesting talks next week at Penn will be one by Alper Bozkurt, on the “Internet of Bionic Things: Cyber-Enabled Bionic Organisms for Environmental Sensing". His abstract: The present day technology falls short in offering autonomous mobile robots that can function effectively and efficiently under unknown and dynamic environmental conditions. Insects and canines, on […]