S.H. writes: Maybe I'm suffering from a recency illusion, but I feel that "zero" has begun to replace "no". I see this often in Washington Post political columns, and here's an example from Robert Reich: Of course, these claims haven’t held up in court because there’s zero evidence. Checking Google Books ngrams suggests that "zero evidence" is indeed […]
John Bellezza, an archeologist and cultural historian whose work focuses on the pre-Buddhist heritage of Tibet and the Western Himalaya, and who has lived in high Asia for three decades, sent me the following two photographs of inscriptions that he took at Lake Gnam-mtsho, Tibet (TAR):
A couple of decades ago, in response to a long-forgotten taxonomic proposal, I copied into antique html Jorge Luis Borges' essay "El Idioma Analítico de John Wilkins", along with an English translation. This afternoon, a reading-group discussion about algorithms for topic classification brought up the idea of a single universal tree-structured taxonomy of topics, and […]
A few weeks ago, Mark’s post “Lawyers as linguists” alerted me to Facebook v. Duguid, a case now pending before the Supreme Court, which grabbed my attention for several reasons. First, the case presents an interesting linguistic issue. Second, the parties on both sides have framed their linguistic arguments in terms of three of the […]
"What Genghis Khan's Mongolian Sounded Like – and how we know" (10/30/18)
The focus of this post is the expression lào yīngwén, where the yīngwén part is written 英文 in characters and means "English". The lào part is much more complicated, as is typical when it comes to writing Taiwanese morphemes with Chinese characters. The Taiwanese verb "làu" means to master something. When used with reference to […]
A new (?) joke-rhetoric pattern has appeared recently on twitter, e.g. I have a Jenna Ellis joke, but I can’t tell you what it is you just have to believe me — Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) November 28, 2020
A key concept in traditional Chinese phonology is the distinction between "clear" (qīng 清) and "muddy / turbid / murky" (zhuó 濁). Although it is mainly applied to the sounds of language, the qīng 清-zhuó 濁 distinction also has applications / implications for music. Roughly speaking, the linguistic and musical correlations are qīng 清 ("clear; […]
Yesterday, I learned a new bit of legal jargon: "upon information and belief". A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit "roundly rejected the Trump campaign's appeal in its effort to challenge the election results in Pennsylvania". The opinion was written by my former colleague Stephanos Bibas, and includes this […]
Superb piece of Chinglish that popped up in Alex Baumans' Facebook feed:
David Lobina writes: In the context of Diego Maradona's recent passing, I have been struck by how often he's been referred to as a 'street urchin' in the British press in the last 24 hours or so, and not only because the term sounds rather old-fashioned to me. One (nice) article from The Guardian is […]
As Know Your Meme explains, "Release the Kraken!" is a catchphrase and image macro series based on a memorable quote uttered by Zeus in the 1981 fantasy adventure film The Clash of the Titans as well as the 2010 3D remake. Despite the dramatic delivery of the line in the reboot, the quote was perceived […]