Language Log

Still ahead of their time #YesMinister #Covid_19 pic.twitter.com/QY3balSOAU — Christopher H. Logue (@thevirologist) March 12, 2020

The Annual Reviews journals have released a list of relevant articles: Human Coronavirus: Host-Pathogen Interaction Coronavirus Host Range Expansion and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Emergence: Biochemical Mechanisms and Evolutionary Perspectives Structure, Function, and Evolution of Coronavirus Spike Proteins Middle East Respiratory Syndrome: Emergence of a Pathogenic Human Coronavirus Glycan Engagement by Viruses: Receptor Switches […]

The domesticated horse, the chariot, and the wheel came to East Asia from the west, and so did horse riding: Mair, Victor H.  "The Horse in Late Prehistoric China:  Wresting Culture and Control from the 'Barbarians.'"  In Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew, and Katie Boyle, ed.  Prehistoric steppe adaptation and the horse,  McDonald Institute Monographs.  Cambridge:  […]

Yesterday afternoon at Indiana University I gave a wide-ranging lecture on Iranian and Chinese interconnections from the Bronze Age through the late imperial period.  After the lecture, Chen Su, a doctoral candidate in Central Eurasian Studies, approached me and said that some of the points I made helped her to realize something about her own […]

In the PRC, you'd best not say anything about COVID-19.  It's more or less forbidden for citizens to talk about it, much less question the government's handling of the CRISIS (not a "dangerous opportunity").  Even the name and the very existence of the disease are highly problematic.  Still, despite all the draconian censorship, people figure […]

Cartoon by K. L. Ricks:

The idea of real people interacting in virtual worlds has been a staple of SF writing at least since the 1980s. There have been networked multi-player games at least since the 1970s, and of course such games have become a big deal in recent years. And more and more, the meetings that I'm involved in […]

From Alex Baumans: This has just popped up in my Facebook feed, so I have no idea where this comes from, or whether it has been doing the rounds. Anyway, for someone who regularly uses a spelling system with diacritics, it all seems a bit silly and parochial. Semiotically, on beyond the metal umlaut!  

According to Know Your Meme, That Wasn't Very Cash Money of You is a catchphrase associated with a drawing of the character Sayaka Miki from Puella Magi Madoka Magica wearing sunglasses. The phrase uses "cash money" to mean "cool." The image was turned into an exploitable in which other characters say the phrase, and the phrase itself has been paired with images […]

Fraser Howie called my attention to these two articles that look at language usage in Singapore from quite different angles: "Revealed: The World’s Best Non-Native English Speaking Countries, 2019", by Anna Papadopoulos, Ceoworld (November 5, 2019) "Singapore has almost wiped out its mother tongues:  Elderly speakers of Cantonese, Hakka and Hokkien sometimes cannot talk to […]

From John Berenberg — "Coronavirus fears empty streets":

Language Log has been blogging on the "crisis = danger + opportunity" trope since at least 2005.  Our latest iteration is "'Crisis = danger + opportunity' redux" (2/19/20), with a list of references to earlier posts in the series.  By now, the "crisis" meme has become so dull and hackneyed that Tianyu M. Fang has […]

According to Yannis Haralambous, "Grapholinguistics, TEX, and a June 2020 conference in Paris", TUGboat 2020: Grapholinguistics is the discipline dealing with the study of the written modality of language. At this point, the reader may ask some very pertinent questions:“Why have I never heard of grapholinguistics?” “If this is a subfield of linguistics, like psycholinguistics […]