Daniel Sturman writes: I was looking for information about the composer Sébastien de Brossard, and used Bing’s automatic translation to open each of his seven non-English Wikipedia pages. The translation from Russian made a rather curious choice that gave the page a Lovecraftian feel, with a tinge of Zalgo:
Tweet by Chenchen Zhang: on the subject of language, this is perhaps the most detailed language map of China I've come across (I prefer to say Sinitic languages instead of fangyan though the map is called fangyan ditu here) pic.twitter.com/LPU8QulNKs — Chenchen Zhang🤦🏻♀️ (@chenchenzh) August 31, 2020 For Hmong-Mien and Tai-Kadai languages, follow the thread.
The speaker of the Czech senate addresses Taiwan's parliament alluding to JFK's ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ — and finishes by saying "Wǒ shì Táiwān rén 我是台湾人" ("I am Taiwanese") in (an attempt at) Mandarin. The video is in Czech but it's easy to spot where this happens — right before the ovation — at 1:12. […]
The following graphics reflect the disgust of Hong Kong protesters over the police rewriting of the notorious attack on subway passengers by CCP orchestrated goons at the Yuen Long MTR station on July 21, 2019 (hence "721"). All of the illustrations have as their theme the set phrase (chéngyǔ 成語, often misleadingly referred to as "idioms") zhǐlùwéimǎ 指鹿為馬 ("point at a […]
From the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC): "Massive civil disobedience breaks out, tension rises" (8/29/20) After the Chinese Central Government’s secret plan to replace Mongolian with Chinese as language of instruction in all schools across Southern Mongolia starting this September in the name of the “Second Type of Bilingual Education” was revealed in […]
"Female snipers in challenging filed operation" Photo essay in China Military (8/30/20). Below are the captions for the five photographs in the essay. The scary, creepy, bizarre photographs are omitted in this post, but may be seen at this link, where you can also see the headline cited above.
Let's take the following three utterances that superficially and essentially all say the same thing — "give me face": 1. Gěi wǒ gè miànzi ba 給我個面子吧 2. Gěi gè miànzi ba 給個面子吧 3. Gěi gè miànzi bei 給個面子唄
Happenings at USC Marshall School of Business. Dear Full-Time MBA Class of 2021, Thank you for your interest and involvement in the current situation concerning the Class of 2022 and their GSBA-542 experience. This matter is of great importance to all of us. Accordingly, I want to make you aware of the action we are […]
This one depends on word-sense ambiguity rather than on the structural and part-of-speech issues in the ambiguous headlines we've called crash blossoms. "After 9 months, women’s body to get new head", Times of India 8/26/2020: Nine months after being headless and non-functional, the Goa State Commission for Women is set to get a new chairperson. […]
(Plus one non-native accent…) Response to this video has been absolutely insane! Cannot thank everyone enough! 4.5 Million views on TikTok! #COVID19 #covid #corona pic.twitter.com/8i8F8ktJvD — Blake Pavey (@BlakePavey) July 30, 2020 Almost a month old, but still relevant.