Below is a guest post by Bob Ladd. Long-time readers of Language Log may recall a couple of posts from 2007 (here and here) about a possible link between population genetics and tone languages. That year, Dan Dediu and I published a paper in PNAS showing that there’s a significant geographical correlation between the distribution […]
A video by Peter Prowse has been making the rounds: You might recall a similar French-language video last spring, which Mark Liberman shared in his May 1 post, "Rire la Rémumligne!" In fact, there were several versions of this floating around, all based on a text originally shared on Facebook by the physicist François Pla […]
Mark Swofford sent this photograph of a dish on a menu in a Taiwanese restaurant chain:
[Blog post today by Bruce Humes] VHM: Since I know about half of the authors and translators in this series, I am pleased to see them and their cohort getting wider recognition and circulation. "'Multi-ethnic' Literature: Yilin’s 2020 Cache of Fiction by non-Han Writers" Posted on December 22, 2020 by Bruce As your year-end holiday […]
This is something I wanted to write about back in mid-July, but it fell victim to my backlog of thousands of e-mails. Now, slowly, slowly, slowly, I'm catching up, and I find that it's still a worthy topic to post on. "‘China, master copycat’: uproar in Indonesia at Xinhua’s batik claim" Xinhua released a video […]
Signing a declaration “under plenty of perjury” beats the previous best legal typo I saw back in 1998, which was an appellate brief seeking to overturn a trial court decision that concluded, “the judgment below should be revered.” pic.twitter.com/puq72gKGOg — John Elwood (@johnpelwood) December 19, 2020
Previously: Robocalls, legal interpretation, and Bryan Garner The precursors of the Scalia/Garner canons In my last post, I talked about the precursors of the canons from Reading Law that are the primary subject of this series of posts. As I explained there, the Last Antecedent Canon and the Nearest Reasonable Referent Canon are adapted from […]
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This morning NPR reported on a woman who was "resignated" from her position at Google — that is, she says she was forced to resign. The Urban Dictionary's definition of resignate, `to force or otherwise cause the resignation of someone or something', clearly fits the context of being resignated from a job. This verb is […]
I've long been deeply intrigued by the word "macaque". It's an odd-looking term with a murky history, but somehow it just seems to fit the creature that it designates. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed.: French, from Portuguese macaco, of Bantu origin; akin to Kongo makako, monkeys : ma-, pl. n. pref. […]
They really didn't think this one through… pic.twitter.com/qRrQVlnaTS — KnowNOthing (@KnowN0thing1) December 17, 2020