Language Log

One image evokes the other: pic.twitter.com/yBBzkwPyTm — Jonathan Gray 🐼 (@jwyg) April 8, 2020

I've been familiar with the country name "Bosnia and Herzegovina" for quite some time, but until this morning I've never seen it referred to as BiH.  I came upon this usage in news reports about the delivery of PRC medical supplies to that country, e.g., here.  Although the Chinese printing on the boxes in the […]

Scene at a Taichung night market:

Tweet from Heitor@Heitormde: Olha o nível que tá chegando. O mundo já está lascado demais para vir um cara e fazer um negócio desse. Isso é crime! pic.twitter.com/PDzujzIpbN — Heitor (@Heitormde) March 20, 2020 The 0:36 video was taken just outside the gate of the Chinese embassy in Brasilia.

A little over a week ago, I described how I mistyped "stalk" for "stock".  That led to a vigorous discussion of precisely how people pronounce "stalk".  (As a matter of fact, in my own idiolect I do pronounce "stock" and "stalk" identically.)  See: "Take stalk of: thoughts on philology and Sinology" (3/29/20) I just now […]

Students, former students, colleagues, and friends all around the world have been sending me best wishes during this age of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their impression is that things in America now are particularly bad. They offer me face masks and other PPE, they worry about my health, they give me all sorts of advice. I […]

This post is another pitch for our on-going effort to develop simple, easy, and effective ways to track neurocognitive health through short interactions with a web app.  Why do we want this? Two reasons: first, early detection of neurodegenerative disorders through near-universal tracking; and second, easy large-scale evaluation of interventions, whether those are drugs or […]

A rare find of linguistic news in a blog concerning the Supreme Court: "Relist Watch: Kalsarikännit edition", John Elwood, SCOTUSblog SCOTUSblog is about the work of the Supreme Court of the United States.  The author must have a streak of the linguist in him, for he chose to  begin today's post with three paragraphs about […]

In previous posts on this subject (see "Readings" below), we have listed a number of traits of the typical troll.  There are a few more items that have not been explicitly covered, so I will mention them here. First, though, a prefatory remark about the defining nature of a troll and what his / her […]

The good news is that it's a language. The bad news is that you can't speak it. "China’s version of TikTok suspends users for speaking Cantonese:  ByteDance’s short video app Douyin has been urging live streamers to switch to the country’s official language", Abacus via SCMP (4/3/20) I've been hearing similar reports concerning the use […]

A month ago ("Real people in virtual worlds: a viral update?", 3/5/2020), I noted that [T]he popular virtual-meeting applications don't yet have a way for a group to hold their discussion in a shared virtual space, as in current video games or applications like vrchat. And when participants' avatars (realistic or otherwise) can sit or […]

[This is a guest post by Till Kraemer] I live in Hong Kong, and many things are fascinating here, especially the way they use English characters in Cantonese. Some very frequently used words (including tones and everything) don't have Chinese characters at all, like "hea" and "chur". Obviously it's colloquial, but this interesting Chinese/English mix goes […]

From Diana Shuheng Zhang: Jūnzǐ yǒu jiǔ dé 君子有九德：A lordling has nine essential properties: kuān ér lì 寬而栗，tolerant but tough, róu ér lì 柔而立，flexible but upright, yuàn ér gōng, 願而恭，ambitious but humble, luàn ér jìng 亂而敬，rebellious but respectful, rǎo ér yì 擾而毅，adaptive but resolute, zhí ér wēn 直而溫，candid but considerate; jiǎn ér lián 簡而廉，simple and […]