Edward Stabler, "Three Mathematical Foundations for Syntax", Annual Review of Linguistics 2019: Three different foundational ideas can be identified in recent syntactic theory: structure from substitution classes, structure from dependencies among heads, and structure as the result of optimizing preferences. As formulated in this review, it is easy to see that these three ideas are […]
On September 23, 2020, Christopher Beckwith delivered the following lecture at Indiana University: Scythian Philosophy So, Was There a Classical Age of Eurasia After All? Christopher I. BeckwithSept. 23, 2020, 12:00 noon In the middle of the first millennium BCE philosophy appeared in several ancient cultures. Its most prominent early practitioners were Anacharsis (‘the Scythian’, fl. 590 BC), Zoroaster […]
This semester, John Trueswell has been teaching a seminar focused on Lila Gleitman's recently-published collected works, Sentence First, Arguments Afterward: Essays in Language and Learning. Last week, the paper under discussion was Cynthia Fisher, Henry Gleitman, & Lila Gleitman, "On the semantic content of subcategorization frames", Cognitive Psychology, 1991. The start of its abstract: This […]
Editorial by Geremie Barmé in China Heritage (10/6/20): "Hong Kong & 講耶穌 gong2 je4 sou1". Here are the opening paragraphs of this installment of "Hong Kong Apostasy": The Cantonese expression 講耶穌 gong2 je4 sou1, literally ‘to give a sermon about Jesus’, or ‘to preach’, means to prattle, or to speak in a boring and vacuous […]
Persuasive 14:09 YouTube video of Aiong Taigi explaining why he doesn't use Chinese characters (Hàn-jī 漢字) on his channel, but instead sticks to Romanization (Lomaji) as much as possible: A'ióng, lí sī án-chóaⁿ bô teh ēng Hàn-jī? 【阿勇，汝是安盞無塊用漢字？】:
This photograph is from a little over a year ago, when the former Hong Kong UK consulate worker Simon Cheng was kidnapped by the CCP government and taken to China where he was tortured and forced to make a "confession":
ABC Cantonese-English Comprehensive Dictionary Robert S. Bauer Series: ABC Chinese Dictionary Series Paperback: $42.00 ISBN-13: 9780824877323 Published: December 2020 University of Hawaii Press 1248 pages
I was thrilled when I came upon this 3:04 YouTube video by chance on the morning of the mid-Autumn festival (October 1):
Last night, I was talking to my dad and telling him I was concerned that 2021 would make us miss 2020. He responded with a Russian saying I’d never heard before: “On average, we live pretty well: worse than last year, but definitely better than next year.” — Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) September 28, 2020
Recently, Antônio Simões wrote to Cynthia McLemore to ask about a 28-year-old proceedings: I used to find on the internet the Proceedings from 1992 that you edited with Mark Liberman. I tried to find them, but they are not on the internet anymore. Do you still have that volume in pdf? Or is it accessible […]
From Elizabeth Dreyer: Ah! Autant pour moi, as the French say for "I stand corrected": As much for me. So much for me? … I've just looked up the origin of this expression and in fact it's rather fascinating. People write "autant pour moi" but that is a corruption, a miswriting of "au temps pour […]
Article in BBC yesterday: "Nüshu: China's secret female-only language", by Andrew Lofthouse (10/1/20) Here's what it looks like: Nüshu is a women's-only script that was passed down from mothers to their daughters in feudal-society China (Credit: CPA Mediat Pte Ltd/Alamy)