Language Log

From an anonymous contributor:

From Anne Henochowicz:

Yuqing Yang, a first-year MA student in our department, was talking to Jingran Joy Luo, another first year MA student in our department, when she noticed something special in Joy's manner of speech.  Namely, Joy used the ablative particle cóng 从 as a locative.  Normally, the locative is indicated by zài 在 in Mandarin. Joy […]

https://twitter.com/jessica_roy/status/1197934195508572160

"British schoolboy's thick Yorkshire accent goes viral", by Sae Strang, Newshub (11/20/19):

It's only recently that I've heard a lot of students from mainland China say "nà shà 那啥" (lit., "that what").  At first it was hard to figure out exactly what they meant by it, but as I become more familiar with the contexts in which they deploy this phrase, I wonder if it is functionally […]

A sign displayed at yesterday's congressional impeachment hearing: GOP adds new sign during the break pic.twitter.com/uI5U9mJTsf — Manu Raju (@mkraju) November 21, 2019

This headline sent me down the garden path for a couple of seconds:

The latest episode of the new podcast Subtitle is about "Words we love to hate". Full disclosure: Kavita Pillay interviewed me for the program, and so you can hear my voice from time to time. More later — I'm off to Washington DC for a workshop on "Digital Cognitive and Functional Biomarkers" organized by the […]

In "Dynamic stew" (10/24/13) and the comments thereto, we had a vigorous discussion of words for "bear" in Korean, Sinitic, Tibetan, and Japanese,  And now Diana Shuheng Zhang has written a densely philological study on “Three Ancient Words for Bear,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 294 (November, 2019), 21 pages (free pdf). Let's start with the basic word […]

Garrett Wollman writes: Not sure if this really belongs in LL's misnegation files, but I found this sentence hard enough to parse (despite knowing exactly what the author meant) that I stumbled over it on a re-read: "The really troubling thing," Zora says to the rain, "is that I can't convince myself I'm not in […]

From Jeff DeMarco:

All in one sign!  Here it is: (Source: Pinyin News)