[This is a guest post by Robert Hymes] I just happened to be reading your Language Log post from April, “Of horseriding and Old Sinitic reconstructions.” I too have always been sympathetic to the possibility of a mare-馬 connection, which I’ve tended to assume would have happened through a Chinese borrowing from Indo-European either directly […]
"Jennifer Arcuri: Boris Johnson cast me aside as if I were a gremlin", ITV News 11/17/2019: The businesswoman at the centre of a controversy involving Prime Minister Boris Johnson says she wished he had declared their personal relationship as a potential conflict of interest to avoid her "humiliation". In an interview with ITV’s Exposure to […]
Alex Isenstadt, "Louisiana delivers Trump a black eye", Politico 11/17/2019: President Donald Trump campaigned hard in three conservative Southern states this fall, aiming for a string of gubernatorial wins that would demonstrate his political strength heading into impeachment and his own reelection effort. The plan backfired in dramatic fashion. The latest black eye came on […]
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The Wikipedia article on Kiev or Kyiv gives this as the pronunciation of the Ukrainian form Київ, transliterated as Kyiv: Your browser does not support the audio element. And here's a lesson from Twitter: https://twitter.com/wiczipedia/status/1194686620097826821
This Washington Post item confused me for a few seconds: I first interpreted the headline as "Donald Trump is confident that Roger Stone is guilty on all counts, and" (whoops) "he (=Trump) faces up to 50 years in prison"? I was sent down this particular garden path by the recent flurry of news stories about […]
The bear seems a particularly fecund source of images, metaphors, memes, and symbols. I'm currently preparing a Language Log post on words for bear in Sinitic and in languages with which it was in contact. At the same time, I'm editing a closely reasoned and heavily documented philological study of bear words and lore by […]
When I walked into my "Language, Script, and Society in China" class on Tuesday morning at 9 a.m., the students were energetically discussing a colloquial expression. Those from south China didn't know the expression, but the ones from northeast China knew it, although they weren't entirely sure how to write it in characters, and there […]
From Bob Bauer: Bob explains: The photograph shows the front of a Hong Kong restaurant which has not only chosen as its name the colloquial indigenous Cantonese word, 冚棒唥 ham6 baang6 laang6 ‘all; in all’ (Sidney Lau 1977:324), but has also displayed this name in BOTH Chinese characters AND Jyut Ping. We should especially note that […]
Two of the best known displays of Chinese culture worldwide are the Lion Dance and Dragon Boat Races. The former, including the Chinese word for "lion", is actually an import from the Western Regions (Central Asia, or East Central Asia more specifically). Compare Old Persian * (*šagra-) (sgl /sagr, sēr/) (> Persian سیر (sīr)). The […]
Compiling references to the Ocracoke "brogue", I wondered about the origins of the word. The Wikipedia entry confirms the possibilities that I recall: Multiple etymologies have been proposed: it may derive from the Irish bróg ("shoe"), the type of shoe traditionally worn by the people of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, and hence possibly originally […]
Frances Stead Sellers, "Amid flooding and rising sea levels, residents of one barrier island wonder if it’s time to retreat", WaPo 11/9/2019: On any normal late-fall day, the ferries that ply the 30 miles between Swan Quarter and this barrier island might carry vacationing retirees, sports fishermen and residents enjoying mainland getaways after the busy […]
This is one in a long series of posts about words for "horse" in various languages, the latest being "Some Mongolian words for 'horse'" (11/7/19) — see also the posts listed under Readings below. I consider "horse" to be one of the most important diagnostic terms for studying long distance movements of peoples and languages […]
Today in Seth Cable's seminar on Montague's Universal grammar, he gave out a problem set that included the task of adding "Neither Mitt smokes nor Barack smokes" to the little fragment of English that had been developed. And in the discussion of the problem set, it turned out that I was the only one in […]