I was just reading along in the NYT today but had to pause at this sentence: Mr. Trump has used bankruptcy laws to shield him from personal losses while his investors suffer. I found myself puzzling over whether "him" was all right there or whether I wanted "himself", and even more puzzled that I was […]
An ad that's been popping up for me on the web recently: I expect that others have used asterisks in this particular way before, but web search engines seem generally to treat "**UK" as plain "UK" — perhaps someone else will have better luck finding precedents. (Of course, general taboo-avoidance via asterisks is common and has […]
Earlier this year, Language Log readers contributed to the elucidation of "South Asian wrestling terms" (3/1/16).
Roger Lustig sends in this trending-on-facebook headline: Police Find Jaguars Running Back Asleep Inside Car Sinking Into a Pond, Reports Say Roger traces the first few steps down the garden path: –Police find jaguars –Police find jaguars running –Police find jaguars running back (from where?) –Police find jaguars running back asleep (talk about "second nature"!) For […]
Mike Miller writes: I recently stayed in a hotel in a smaller city in Shandong and was surprised to see what they are calling a hair dryer these days. Here's a photograph that Mike sent along:
Paul Ryan's July 4 statement (emphasis added): On this year’s Fourth, we can celebrate the historic document that was signed—and the self-evident truths it declared. We can celebrate the historic battles that were fought so that those truths would embrace all of our people. We can remember the extraordinary men and women, so dedicated to […]
That's what practically everybody else calls her too. There's a great article by Qian Jinghua in Sixth Tone (Fresh voices from today's China) titled "Call Me Angelababy, Maybe: Ban on foreign names in Chinese-language press reveals fear of cultural fragility." (6/30/16) It's about a phenomenally popular 27-year-old actress, model, and singer whose Chinese name is […]
The many Americans in the University of Edinburgh's community of language and information scientists had to celebrate the glorious 4th on the 3rd this year, because the 4th is an ordinary working Monday. I attended a Sunday-afternoon gathering kindly hosted by the Head of the School of Informatics, Johanna Moore. We barbecued steadfastly in the […]
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The last installment of this series, "Spelling with Chinese character(istic)s, pt. 3" (6/30/16), contains links to many other Language Log posts relevant to this subject. It is often difficult to fathom which English word is intended when it is transcribed in Chinese characters. John Kieschnick called my attention to an especially challenging one: ěrlílìjǐng 爾釐利景. […]
"Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing – Part 1", Degenerate State 4/20/2016: Natural language is ubiquitous. It is all around us, and the rate at which it is produced in written, stored form is only increasing. It is also quite unlike any sort of data I have worked with before. Natural language is made up […]
From alice-is-thinking on tumblr, three weeks ago, forwarded by a 20-year-old correspondent: http://alice-is-thinking.tumblr.com/post/145533947099/me-10-years-ago-i-never-use-online-abbreviations The accompanying note: this seems to be a rly common phenomenon among millennials who are especially active on social media – myself included
I recall that, as a graduate student in Sinology, one of the most troublesome tasks was figuring out how to romanize the names of Japanese authors, the titles of their works, place names, technical terms, and so forth. Overall, Japanese Sinological (not to mention Indological and other fields) scholarship is outstanding, so we have to […]