A neat animation by Jack Stratton of James Jamerson's bass line in the 1967 hit song "Ain't no mountain high enough": The best way to watch it is full screen, in my opinon. It would be nice to have a program that creates a similar dynamic highlighting of syllable-scale pitches and rhythms in speech, maybe […]
Look everyone! it's a post about language in China by not-Victor! :) I just had to drop everything and write this post while I was listening to the latest Reply-All podcast, this week consisting of a series of phone interviews with people around the world about the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in their area. […]
[This is a guest post by Cyrus Shaoul] I am a long time LL reader and I came across an interesting machine translation error today. When my Japanese friend sent me this sentence: 62年前のこの日に慶應義塾大学病院で命を授かりました。 I was flummoxed by the verb 授かる [VHM: sazukaru {"be gifted / endowed with (an award / title); to be blessed […]
At first I thought these might have come from Singapore or some other Southeast Asian country, but upon closer inspection, I see that they are from the Hong Kong Department of Health, which was confirmed by Fraser Howie, who sent them to me. They are respectively in Hindi, Indonesian, Thai, Nepali, Bengali, Sinhala, Urdu, Vietnamese, […]
Aatish Bhatia plots COVID-19 data in (a population-growth version of) phase space, eliminating time as a dimension — which turns out to be a good idea, as it often is: An explanation by Henry Reich: There are some linguistic connections — viewed abstractly, this sort of analysis connects to pretty much everything — but I'll […]
From John Lawler: My (non-linguist) partner heard someone say "I'm surprised at the lack of unpreparedness" on the radio this morning, and when we googled it to find out who was misnegating, we found the phrase everywhere, and not just recently, either. John suggests a Google search . . .
Everyone is talking about the importance of more extensive COVID-19 testing in determining who is infected, and (eventually) who has been infected. But nearly all the discussion that I've heard and read has been based on the assumption that the relevant tests are accurate. And this assumption is false — the available tests for this […]
From Diana Shuheng Zhang: This English translation is modified based on pages 26-28 of the article — Adams, Douglas Q: "More thoughts on Tocharian B prosody," Tocharian and Indo-European Studies 14 (2013), 3-30. A fragmentary manuscript in Tocharian B, ca. 600 AD, excavated in Kucha (Qizil Miŋ-Öy), Berlin Turfan Collection. Now stored at Frankfurt. No. THT 496, B 496.
This period of prudent isolation is a good time to remember that linguistic analysis applies not only to sound, structure, and sense, but also to social interaction. As the first in a series of posts on this topic, we feature Eve Armstrong's brilliant application of simulated annealing to a problem currently on hold, but sure […]
[This is a guest post by Pamela Crossley] I was recently doing something with my old undergraduate major, Old English, and was reminded of the word Salmonath (Solmonath), which put me in mind of this old conversation on your blog: "Mud season in Russia: Putin, Rasputin" (3/31/18) So you’ll like this one. Like the others […]
Following up on "Écriture inclusive" (10/9/2017), Eloy Romero Muñoz sent in a link to a June 2019 "Édition augmentée" of the Manuel d'Écriture Inclusive.
In a note I was composing to some friends, I just wrote "let's take stalk of…", was surprised and smiled, corrected myself, and continued writing. But then I paused to reflect….