Language Log

Stunning speech (7:49) by Achille, a graduating student from Burkina Faso at the NTU commencement on June 6:

A favorite expression of Dōngběi rén 東北人 ("Northeasterners") is zhóu.  It means "mulish".  The adjective zhóu describes a person who is stubborn, but not in an obnoxious, offensive way, rather in a cute, amiable, charming, or naive manner. Despite its relatively high frequency in Northeastern speech, there is no known Sinograph / Chinese character that […]

[This event has been postponed to Saturday 6/13/2020 in accordance with the call to #ShutDownSTEM]

Nick Montfort, "'Peaceful Protesters' but no 'Peaceful Police'", 6/7/2020: About four million Google hits for “peaceful protesters,” only about 55,000 for “peaceful police.” Anyone who has been reading the news will have seen the phrase “peaceful protesters” again and again—and probably will not have seen this other phrase. Does that mean peaceful protesters outnumber peaceful […]

A lament for the passing of Pekingese (Běijīnghuà 北京话) —  for those who don't understand Mandarin, just listen to a bit of what the presenter is saying for the flavor, then skip down to the explanations below the page break to find out what it's all about:

John Mullan, "The Mystery of Charles Dickens by AN Wilson review — a great writer's dark side", The Guardian 6/3/2020 [emphasis added]: Then there is “The Mystery of the Cruel Marriage”. Nothing has more tainted Dickens’s reputation than his public repudiation (via an advertisement in the Times) of his wife, Kate, who had borne him […]

We here at Language Log know our Ossetians:  see "Know your Ossetians" (2/17/20), and be sure to read the informative comments to that post.  Today, let us go one step deeper into their language and lore.  We shall do so through getting to know some basic things about the Nart sagas (Abkhaz: Нарҭаа ражәабжьқәа; Nartaa […]

It's in the air, apparently — there are two entropy jokes in current webcomics with four-character titles.

If you're looking for words with lots of consonants and few or seemingly no vowels, try Eastern Europe, especially Czechia. I have a friend named Stu Cvrk, and I asked him the story of his surname and how to pronounce it.  Here's what he told me: It is Czech. The Czech pronunciation is "tsverk". My […]

Article in The Irish Times (6/3/20): "Church of England rules Irish inscription on grave stone must have translation:  Family of Irishwoman wanted phrase ‘In ár gcroíthe go deo’ at grave in Coventry" Here are the first few paragraphs of the article: The Church of England has ruled that an Irish-language inscription on a Coventry gravestone […]

The cattle head-and-hooves offering in this recently unearthed burial caught my attention: "4,200-year-old burial of Bronze Age chieftain discovered under UK skate park", by Laura Geggel – Associate Editor, Live Science, May 01, 2020 Since the article is not long and is full of extremely interesting and valuable information, I copy it below. First, however, […]

What the people of the former British colony dread:

Last week at the Chinese National People's Congress (NPC; the annual two-week meeting just ended), a delegate submitted a proposal to end foreign-language translations at press conferences and major events in order to "safeguard the dignity of the Chinese language". "Chinese legislator proposes banning foreign translation at government press conferences" Move could promote Chinese culture […]