[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson] NHK reported yesterday on the recently released results of the Agency for Cultural Affairs' annual survey of the changing uses of Japanese. This year, the survey of 3500 men and women 16 and up received responses from 54%. The most interesting results reflected the impact of online and […]
Last week, I posted a few notes about how the alienness of aliens might make it hard to learn to communicate with them ("Alien Encounters", 9/15/2016). To start with, even the basic modes of signal generation and interpretation would probably not fit our biology very well. And the interpretation of signals — biological as well as cultural — might […]
It has come to my attention that many laypeople, even Language Log readers, are using incorrect plurals for flower names. "Geraniums" indeed! "Crocuses", for heaven's sake! Please get these right. There follows a list of 30 count nouns naming flowers, together with their approved grammatically correct plurals. Don't use incorrect plurals any more. Shape up.
The latest message in the unending stream of spam sent my way by PayPal bears the Subject line "A great deal to get away from Hotels.com". My immediate response was that I don't need any help in getting away from hotels.com, thank you very much. But of course they're not offering to help me avoid hotels.com — […]
In "Annals of overgeneralization" (10/8/2013), I criticized a paper by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, "Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind", Science 10/3/2013. My complaint was that they drew conclusions about the effects of reading three general categories of texts — "literary fiction", "popular fiction" and non-fiction — based on experiments involved a small sample […]
[This, a guest post by Lañitri Kirinputra, is the fourth and last in a series of four posts on Hokkien and related Southern Min / Minnan language issues. The first was "Eurasian eureka" (9/12/16), the second was "Hokkien in Singapore" (9/16/16), and the third was "Hoklo" (9/18/16).]
Harry Collins, Willow Leonard-Clarke, Hannah O'Mahoney, "Um, er: How meaning varies between speech and its typed transcript": We use an extract from an interview concerning gravitational wave physics to show that the meaning of hesitancies within speech are different when spoken and when read from the corresponding transcript. When used in speech, hesitancies can indicate […]
Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "* Mad about jorts".
This is a guest post by Cynthia McLemore, following up on Ben Zimmer's post on "'Uptalk' in the OED", 9/12/2016. Twenty three years after James Gorman coined a word for “those rises” in the New York Times and unleashed a viral phenomenon associated with my name, and on the occasion of the OED's latest entries, […]
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[This is the third in a series of four planned posts on Hokkien and related Southern Min / Minnan language issues. The first was "Eurasian eureka" (9/12/16) and the second was "Hokkien in Singapore" (9/16/16).] Some names for Taiwanese language in MSM: Táiyǔ 台語 ("Taiwanese") Táiwānhuà 台灣話 ("Taiwanese") Fúlǎo 福佬 / Héluò 河洛 ("Hoklo")
I learned about this phenomenon through this article: "Why won't 541,000 young Japanese leave the house?" (Emiko Jozuka, CNN, 9/12/16): According to a Japanese cabinet survey released Wednesday, there are currently 541,000 young Japanese aged between 15 and 39 who lead similarly reclusive lives. These people are known as hikikomori — a term the Japanese […]
Stephen Hart sent in this photograph of a sign that appears on Ediz Hook in Port Angeles, WA (and probably elsewhere in the state):