Language Log

The opening of the most recent Scenes From a Multiverse:

Two articles in Chinese (here and here) recently brought news of an indigenous type of tea and referred to it as a rare type of salmon.  Trying to figure that out led to two linguistic puzzles: 1. Making sense of the unusual name for the salmon:  yīnghuā gōu wěn guī 櫻花鉤吻鮭 (lit., "cherry-hook-kiss / mouth-salmon"; […]

"Dave Barry's Year in Review 2019" … which begins with the federal government once again in the throes (whatever a “throe” is) of a partial shutdown, which threatens to seriously disrupt the lives of all Americans who receive paychecks from the federal government.  Consulting the OED on throe (entry updated 2017), we learn that its orthographic history […]

Today's xkcd: The mouseover title: ""Off-by-one errors" isn't the easiest theme to build a party around, but I've seen worse."

Here's news of a remarkable discovery: "Ancient Chinese epitaph penned by Japanese found in China", THE ASAHI SHIMBUN (December 26, 2019 at 19:00 JST). The article includes a photograph of a rubbing of the last line of the epitaph with the following kanji: 日本國朝臣備書 I can read that easily as Sino-Japanese "Nihonkoku chōshin Bi sho", […]

From "Who's Bill This Time", Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me! 12/21/2019: Your browser does not support the audio element. Peter Sagal: Mayor- Mayor Pete has been getting some heat. I don't know if you saw this. He attended a big fundraiser in Napa at a winery with a, quote, "wine cave." And everybody was so mad […]

Maidhc Mac Roibin sent in this photograph of the front of a dessert shop in Cupertino from Fintano's flickr site:

Martin Gerlach and Francesc Font-Clos, "A standardized Project Gutenberg corpus for statistical analysis of natural language and quantitative linguistics", arXiv 12/19/2018: The use of Project Gutenberg (PG) as a text corpus has been extremely popular in statistical analysis of language for more than 25 years. However, in contrast to other major linguistic datasets of similar […]

People's Daily video posted on illegal Twitter: Chinese calligraphy, an artistic expression of human language in a tangible form, is not exclusively for mankind anymore. This robot not only masters the art, but it is also designed to preserve the character calligraphy culture. pic.twitter.com/IrFZ2rlOaZ — People's Daily, China (@PDChina) December 25, 2019  

Bob Ladd sent in a screenshot from the Guardian, with the message: I think this suggests that, except with auxiliary verbs, subject-verb inversion is not really something that is fully a part of English speakers' competence any more. The agreement discrepancy of "clues" and "lies" would be instantly detectable in most other contexts, but not […]

These days people make all sorts of public and private hand gestures to convey a wide variety of information.  Innocent though they may seem, for various reasons many of them become controversial (e.g., the sign for "OK", which has recently been classified by some organizations as a symbol of hate). These students at a university […]

When I was skimming the transcript of the 12/19 Democratic presidential debate for "Warren vocal stereotypes", I noticed that several of the candidates started some of their answers to questions with "so". Among the dozen examples: WOODRUFF: Senator Warren, why do you think — why do you think more Americans don't agree that this is […]

Five-year-old girl gives audience middle finger for 20 minutes while starring as angel in nativity play https://t.co/6sYPlbzrzC — The Independent (@Independent) December 17, 2019