A fuller and more specific version of the title of this post would be "Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of An Shigao (Chinese: 安世高; pinyin: Ān Shìgāo; Wade–Giles: An Shih-kao, Korean: An Sego, Japanese: An Seikō, Vietnamese: An Thế Cao) (fl. 148-180 CE) and Lokakṣema (लोकक्षेम, Chinese: 支婁迦讖; pinyin: Zhī Lóujiāchèn) (fl. […]
An article in The Economist has two titles in different editions, both datelined March 26, 2020 Amsterdam: Typhus off! "Why Dutch swear words are so poxy English insults often refer to sex; Dutch ones, to disease" Swearing "Dutch disease A country where sicknesses are curses" The content is the same:
David Brooks is working hard to maintain his reputation for always being wrong about things that are easy to check: If you lived your life on Twitter you would never know music existed. — David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) April 18, 2020
In some on-going research on linguistic features relating to clinical diagnosis and tracking, we've been looking at "lexical diversity". It's easy to measure the rate of vocabulary display — you can just use a type-token graph, which shows the count of distinct words ("types") against the count of total words ("tokens"). It's less obvious how […]
Yevgeny Basovskaya, a specialist on public speech at Moscow’s State University of the Humanities, says that the disease has had a "radical" influence on the way Russians speak their language. This begins with the word coronavirus, which has an "a" in the middle. This is in "in complete violation of Russian orthographic rules". Paul Goble, […]
[This is a guest post by Jonathan Smith] Here's an audio passage from a film I've been watching: Your browser does not support the audio element. If you know Chinese, test yourself to see how much of it you understand.
Every day, I get several talk announcements from the various mailing lists that I subscribe to, which represent a rich array of disciplinary sources: linguistics, computer science, anthropology, sociology, communications, math, literary studies, marketing, and so on. Usually I can figure out from the title what the presentation is going to be about — but […]
[VHM: This is a guest post by Chris Button. It will be primarily of interest to specialists in the phonological history of Sinitic. Since there are quite a few such scholars on Language Log, I expect that it will occasion the usual lively debate that follows posts on such subjects. It will also undoubtedly be […]
From Brenton Recht: I live in a city with a large immigrant population in general and a large Bosnian population in particular (Utica, NY [VHM: population around 60,000; between Syracuse and Schenectady]). As such, I see "BiH" bumper stickers once in a while on the road. Most of the Bosnian population either came during the […]
pic.twitter.com/mB9S3owgvH — Literary Hub (@lithub) April 7, 2020 My decision after the break —