Focus is perhaps the single most perniciously ambiguous word in the field of linguistics. In Beth Ann Hockey's 1998 dissertation, "The interpretation and realization of focus: an experimental investigation of focus in English and Hungarian", she wrote: Linguists have associated the word “focus” with a wide variety of phenomena. In addition a wealth of other […]
From Breffni O'Rourke: I thought you might appreciate this effort by Dall.E. The prompt was "Create a diagram of Shannon and Weaver's model of communication."
A guest post for The Digital Orientalist (4/10/24), under The Magic of Philology and Indexing, Polyglot Asian Medicines (Foundational Resources and Digital Tools), by Michael Stanley-Baker, Christopher S.G. Khoo and Faizah Zakariah (all three are based at academic institutions in Singapore), "Tracking Drug Names Across Language, Time, Space and Knowledge Domains to Produce New Visions […]
Yesterday in one of my classes, a female student from China said that she didn't like to exercise in the morning because she felt "wet". At first, I couldn't believe my ears, so I asked her, "Did you say 'wet'?" "Yes," she said, "wet". I couldn't understand in what way she would feel "wet" in […]
From Markus Samuel Haselbeck, responding to Egas Moniz-Bandeira on Twitter/X: As the discussion of polysyllabic sonography goes on, I want to add a character that I recently discovered in a Chinese restaurant, here in Leuven. I guess it is pronounced Zhōngguó (中國), China? https://t.co/1cc65vq4fC pic.twitter.com/UveFSHK3dz — Markus Samuel Haselbeck (@CiaoCiaota) April 8, 2024
[Prefatory note: The Chinese author of this guest post, TCI (encrypted acronym to protect her identity) holds a humanities M.A. from a top tier American research university which she attended from 2016 to 2018. She has been employed for several years as an adviser to students in China who desire to study abroad (especially the USA) […]
[This is a guest post by Matthew Marcucci] Population genetics is proving to be astonishingly useful in aiding the study of history, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and other disciplines. One means of studying ancient human migrations is analysis of the so-called yDNA haplogroup. In reviewing the modern-day distribution of my own yDNA haplogroup, I have come […]
The topic of this post is one that deeply fascinates me personally, but also has a bearing on many of the main concerns of the denizens of Language Log: information, efficiency, density, complexity, meaning, pronunciation, prosody, speed, gender…. It was prompted by this new article: What’s the Fastest Language in the World?Theansweriscomplicated. [sic]by Dan Nosowitz, […]
Ioanna Sitaridou's "Crowdsourcing Romeyka" project has been getting some coverage in niche media, and in at least one widely-read publication: Esther Addley, "Endangered Greek dialect is ‘living bridge’ to ancient world, researchers say", The Guardian 4/3/2024.
Mogholi is a fascinating language – Mongolic spoken in Afghanistan with strong Perso-Arabic influences. It was already in decline in the 1960s and we don't know if/how many speakers there are left nowPics: A poem (a qaṣīda) in original script, transcription and translation pic.twitter.com/9Mrct9DaAI — Egas Moniz-Bandeira ᠡᡤᠠᠰ ᠮᠣᠨᠢᠰ ᠪᠠᠨᡩ᠋ᠠᠶᠢᠷᠠ (@egasmb) April 6, 2024
If we come upon a glyph that we don't recognize and can't find in any dictionary, especially if we have half an idea what it might mean or what it might sound like, we are apt to call it a "variant character" (yìtǐzì 異體字) or calligraphic form of some standard glyph. It happens all the […]
One of our last posts was on a German Mongolist named Julius Klaproth (1783-1835) who was a specialist on Kalmyk. This prompted a regular reader to send the following interesting account about another German Mongolist who was also an expert on the Kalmyks and their language, Nicholas Poppe (1897-1991): From what I understand, the Russians […]