I was stunned when I read this op-ed piece in the NYT yesterday (10/24/16): "China's Digital Soft Power Play". In it, the author, Jing Tsu (a professor of Chinese literature and culture at Yale), writes: This month, the Chinese government plans to introduce codes for some 3,000 Chinese characters as part of a grand project, […]
At last, an animal communication story involving healthy skepticism rather than vacant-eyed credulity, and human sagacity rather than wondrous communicative brilliance by our furry, finned, or feathered friends. Read on to be reassured about the intelligence of your species.
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This Mandarin news program was broadcast on July 13, 2016 by Èluósī bīnhǎi xīnwén 俄罗斯滨海新闻 ("Russian Coastal News").
There's a new article on linguistic borrowing by Jane C. Hu in Quartz (10/23/16): "The genius and stupidity of corporate America are on display when companies rebrand for new countries". The article originally had a better title: "Phono-semantic matching is corporate America's best option when trying to rebrand for new countries".
I spotted this very impressive warning at Siesta Key beach in Sarasota, Florida yesterday morning:
Ethan Weston & Carter Woodiel, "Paper Fully Written By iOS Autocomplete Accepted By Physics Conference", Newsy 10/23/2016: A nonsensical academic paper on nuclear physics written only by iOS autocomplete has been accepted for a scientific conference. Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor at the Human Interface Technology laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New […]
An unusually large number of people have suggested that I should post about the latest SMBC comic. Since I'm on the other side of the world, with slow and erratic internet, I'll just post the link, and note that (implied pornography aside) it would be good phonetics assignment to replace Zach's letter strings with IPA […]
Donald Trump, as we have discussed a few times now, is fond of using big league as a post-verbal adjunct, though it's often misheard as bigly. (See: "Bigly," 2/26/16; "The world wants 'bigly'," 5/5/16; "Don't let 'bigly' catch on," 10/18/16.) On the night of Wednesday's presidential debate, UC Berkeley's Susan Lin helpfully shared a spectrogram of the relevant utterance from […]
This post presents some stuff I did last March — I thought I had blogged about it but apparently I only put it into these lecture notes. It came up in some discussions today in Shanghai, because I thought that maybe similar visualizations might help explore prosodic differences between the speech of English native speakers and […]
Ever since the first trailer for the upcoming science-fiction movie "Arrival" came out back in August, we here at Language Log Plaza have been anxiously awaiting more glimpses of Amy Adams as Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistics professor who is called upon to communicate with aliens after they arrive on Earth. The final trailer of the film has […]
The news these days, I find, seldom merits a smile. But at one news story I heard at lunchtime today I actually laughed out loud, alone in my kitchen. Michel Barnier, charged with heading the EU side in the complex forthcoming negotiations that will set the terms for the UK's exit from the European Union, […]
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From Francois Lang: Attached is a photo of a sign in the washroom at Heckman's Deli in Bethesda, MD I kept waiting for all the employees to wash my hands. I even asked. But nothing. Maybe it was something I said?
We have already studied an old name for Singapore on the back of an envelope dating to 1901: "An old name for Singapore" (9/6/16) Now, Ruben de Jong, relying on the works of Dutch scholars, has discovered several others.