From Frank Chance: I have complained for years about the reversal of Japanese names in the Western – and Japanese – media. If China can dictate pinyin, as it essentially did in 1979, Japan can lead in the change to respect the original language. Here's an article that speaks to this issue: "Japan asked the […]
Yesterday, as my colleagues and I were gearing up for our first virtual faculty meeting to plan our online teaching for the remainder of the semester, someone mentioned "social distancing". Immediately, another faculty member said that he heard on television that an MIT professor had advised against that expression because, in fighting the coronavirus, we […]
[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson, who sent along the two screen shots with which it begins.] Another splendid example of why punctuation matters and why machine translation is dumb…
One of our grad students has sent around a creative party invitation — details after the jump:
I've recently seen several 1980s songs about troubled romantic relationships re-purposed to refer to the COVID-19 disaster. The most viral is Gloria Gaynor's "I will survive": It only takes 20 seconds to “SURVIVE”! 👏💕🎶 #iWillSurviveChallenge #fyp #coronavirus #handwashing #washhands https://t.co/wRmBfCUJV4 — Gloria Gaynor (@gloriagaynor) March 10, 2020
Following up on "Turandot and the deep Indo-European roots of 'daughter'" (3/16/20), John Mullan (student of Arabic, master calligrapher, and expert chorister) writes: As someone who’s studied a bit of Persian and a few other Indo European languages, I’ve always found it odd that most all of the kinship terms in Persian—mādar, pedar, barādar, dokhtar, […]
One of the recent events cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic was the ceremony awarding the Talcott Parsons Prize to Bill Labov: The American Academy of Arts & Sciences is awarding linguist William Labov the Talcott Parsons Prize for distinguished and original contributions to the social sciences. […] Labov is regarded as the founder of […]
From Molly Des Jardin: In the midst of our stressful times, I'm writing to share a distraction that is somehow still relevant. Given the kind of things you have noted on Language Log historically, I wondered if you observed this hashtag: #COVIDー19
🤣 TODAY'S SPECIAL DRINK – THE QUARANTINI#COVID19Aus #COVIDー19 #covid19australia #COVID2019 #coronavirus #CoronaOutbreak #coronavirusaustralia #CoronavirusOutbreak #selfisolating #selfisolate #virus pic.twitter.com/4jjTfKT1gY — Evey Hammond (@EveyHammond19) March 14, 2020
In recent days, the famous aria from the final act of Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot, "Nessun dorma" (Italian: [nesˌsun ˈdɔrma]; English: "Let no one sleep"), has surfaced as part of a worldwide movement to encourage the Italian people in their struggle against the novel coronavirus (see here, here, and here). This article by Claudia Rosett […]
Everybody is talking about the latest pandemic. How do you say it in Japanese? "‘Koronavairusu’ or ‘Koronauirusu?’ Japan Learns English: Excessive focus on 'proper' pronunciation skews English learning", Asia Sentinel, by Xiaochen Su (March 15, 2020) —– With much of Japan gripped with the fear of contracting the Covid-19 virus, which has stricken at least […]