Message from Stoyan Gegovski: I am editing parts of the "Xi'an Investment Guide" (every major city in China issues one of these every year) and I came upon an interesting use of the abbreviation "IP" which might interest you: "Xīn shídài xīn Xī'ān xīn IP 新时代 新西安 新IP" It is placed on the third page […]
Joe Tello sent me this funny sign: The line of Chinese at the top says "àomàn yóu 傲慢鱿" ("arrogant squid"). That's puzzling enough by itself, but I actually found the English to be even more mystifying. It seems to be telling us that this place is in the East Location of the Southwest District of […]
One of today's Super Bowl commercials features Boston r-lessness:
In a personal communication, Chris Button recently reminded me that I had once (more than two decades ago) written about the possible relationship between Semitic and Sinitic words for "gourd": You might remember a while back I was asking you about your Southern Bottle Gourd Myths paper. Recently, I've been working a little more on […]
Andrea Valentino has an intriguing article in BBC Future (1/21/20): "The alphabets at risk of extinction: It isn’t just languages that are endangered: dozens of alphabets around the world are at risk. And they could have even more to tell us." Usually, when we worry about languages going extinct, we are thinking about their spoken […]
From Alex Wang: I have through observation of my wechat via other people's moments and articles seen a noticeable uptick in the use of adding “-ing” to characters. I was wondering if it’s a fad or something inherently clumsy in the construction if one were to use Chinese so they use the English suffix "-ing" […]
This is an old Soviet joke, recycled and updated, that is making the rounds in Russia now. Вопрос на всенародное голосование – Вы не против изменения Конституции РФ, чтобы Владимир Владимирович Путин остался правителем России на всегда? Варианты ответов: 1. Нет, не против 2. Да, не против
[This is a guest post by Zhang He in response to the original post on this subject, which attracted considerable attention, such that a lot of people will be interested in what she has to say.] 1. About the Tocharian A word “kratsu” and 罽 jì and kràts I am not expert in linguistics, but […]
[This is a guest post by Thomas Lee Mair] I'm sending an excerpt from a novel I just finished. This might amuse you the way the Chinglish signs do. The excerpt is from The Grammarians, a novel by Cathleen Schine, which the NYT listed as one of the 10 best novels of 2019. The novel […]
"It May Be the Biggest Tax Heist Ever. And Europe Wants Justice." NYT 1/23/2020: Martin Shields and Paul Mora met in 2004, at the London office of Merrill Lynch. […] Today, the men stand accused of participating in what Le Monde has called “the robbery of the century,” and what one academic declared “the biggest […]
Jules Quartly (appropriate surname!) has an informative article on this subject in Taiwan Business TOPICS, "The True Story of Q" (1/21/20) — a takeoff from the most famous Chinese short story of the 20th century, "The True Story of Ah Q" (Ā Q Zhèngzhuàn 阿Q正傳 / 阿Q正传; serialized 12/4/21-2/12/22, published 1923). Toward the end of […]
Yesterday Nick Montfort returned to Penn to give a talk under the title "Lean Computer-Generated Poetry as Exploration of Language, Culture, and Computation". The talk was basically a commentary on (some of) the contents of his interactive website https://nickm.com/, so you can explore the same material yourself, minus the commentary.