Paul Goble has an article in Window on Eurasia — New Series (7/24/21) that is short, succinct, and significant enough to quote in its entirety: "Despite Putin’s Words, Moscow Does Recognize the Ukrainian Language as Distinct, Yaroshinskaya Says": Staunton, July 17 – All[a] Yaroshinskaya, a senior Moscow commentator who was politically active at the […]
[This is a guest post by Bernhard Riedel] I stumbled across what was probably a mis-MT in the context of the Olympic Games. (article in Korean) "During a foot kick on the way to the gold medal, some hangul became visible. But…" On the black belt of the athlete from Spain, one can see "기차 […]
Here at Language Log we know our Ossetes and have been learning much about Scythians (see "Selected readings"), so it is good to have this new (forthcoming) book by Richard Foltz: The Ossetes: Modern-Day Scythians of the CaucasusNew York / London: I. B. Tauris / Bloomsbury, 24 February 2022 Publisher's description: The Ossetes, a small […]
The particle "ge 個/个" is one of the most frequent characters in written Chinese (12th in a list of 9,933 unique characters). It is generally thought of as a classifier, numerary adjunct, measure word. Indeed, it functions as the almost universal, default classifier when you're not sure what the correct / proper measure word for […]
Language-identification from digital text has been a solved problem for many years, so I was surprised yesterday to see Gmail offering to translate from Afrikaans an email written in perfectly idiomatic English, which started this way:
[The following is a guest post by Zihan Guo in response to this article by Bruno Maçães, a Portuguese politician and political philosopher, who asserts, among other things, that China lacks metaphysics because of the nature of its language (i.e., script): "The Black Box: A Theory of China", World Game on Substack (12/25/20) — excerpts […]
Jeré Longman, "An N.H.L. Prospect Is the First Such Player to Announce He’s Gay", New York Times 7/19/2021: Luke Prokop, 19, a prospect with the Nashville Predators, on Monday became the first player with an N.H.L. contract to publicly announce that he is gay. Prokop, who is from Edmonton, Alberta, made his announcement in an […]
All the talk of moseying and ambling propelled me into a customary mode of mind. Those who have taken classes with me know that, though I may start at a certain point in my lectures, it is difficult to predict how we will get to our intended destination, though we are certain to pass through […]
"Mio Liquid Water Enhancer Taps Into the Philadelphian Accent with 'We Fix Wooder'", Creative News 7/5/2021: With the HBO hit 'Mare of Eastown' bringing a ton of national attention to the Philadelphian (or “Philly”) accent, most notable in the series was the pronunciation of the word “water”. So, for this year’s Independence Day, Mio Liquid […]
This is both one of my favorite words and one of my most enjoyable modes. Although I am normally very active and highly goal oriented, and walk almost as rapidly as a Singaporean (fastest in the world), occasionally I simply want to unwind a bit, especially when I'm with a like-minded friend, and just stroll […]
…or maybe of the year, since it comes from an article dated 11/11/2020 — Erik Engheim, "PC Users in Denial About Apple Silicon Performance" [emphasis added]: The M1 in contrast contains: 16-core Neural Engine. Which make machine learning tasks such as image and text recognition, various video and photo editing tasks up to 15x faster […]
Panel 3 of today's SMBC displays a caricature of Nicholas Wade: (That's not really supposed to represent Mr. Wade, as far as I know — but for why you might think so, see the list of past posts below…)