Language Log

Vito Acosta sent in this photograph of a sign at Tianmu Lake ( Tiānmù hú 天目湖) in Jiangsu:

Bryan Van Norden sent in this sign that he found here:

This is a follow-up post to "'Horse' and 'language' in Korean" (10/30/19).  The two main words for "horse" in Mongolian that we will consider are mor' and adyy, though we will also touch upon others. My original inquiry: If you know, please tell me the difference between морь / mor' and адуу / adyy. Is […]

Jeff DeMarco writes: I have just come across some mixed language abbreviations on Chinese social media. For example, 川A市 refers to Chengdu. 皖J市 is Huangshan in Anhui, and 皖A市 is Chaohu. I am curious as to how the letters are assigned. The incorporation of the Roman alphabet into the Chinese writing system is a topic […]

Note from June Teufel Dreyer: "Driving around Coconut  Grove [Miami neighborhood] to admire old houses on back streets, [daughter] Elizabeth [Dreyer Geay] and I saw one with a plaque on the perimeter wall that read 'Maison d’Etre'":

About a month ago, Zaid Ahmed and others in Amazon's speech research group released DiPCo ("Dinner Party Corpus"), "a new data set that will help speech scientists address the difficult problem of separating speech signals in reverberant rooms with multiple speakers". The past decade has seen striking progress in Human Language Technology, brought about by […]

Wang Tong sent in this photograph of a sign which a friend of hers took during a visit to Japan.  The Chinese translation is quite amusing.

From Alison Winters: I am a regular reader of Language Log and really enjoy your digging on unusual Chinese turns of phrase. One word I have recently been puzzling over lately is the usage of guāngfù 光复 in the Hong Kong call to arms 光复香港时代革命*. The dictionary description indicates it has to do with reclaiming […]

Announcements 1. "Please be visible to the engineer OR* train will not stop." *spoken with very heavy emphasis Is there a choice? 2. "Your attention please:  trains en route to destination may be late.  Passengers are advised* that times may increase or decrease** at any time." *the preceding three words are uttered with rising crescendo, […]

Oscar Schwartz, "Natural Language Processing Dates Back to Kabbalist Mystics", IEEE Spectrum 10/28/2019 ("Long before NLP became a hot field in AI, people devised rules and machines to manipulate language"): The story begins in medieval Spain. In the late 1200s, a Jewish mystic by the name of Abraham Abulafia sat down at a table in […]

Below is a guest post from Kavita Pillay, co-host of the new Subtitle podcast. Do you hate a seemingly normal word for reasons that you can't quite pinpoint? Or, are there words that you love to say out loud? If so, the Subtitle podcast (more on us below) wants to hear from you! On Nov. […]

Recently, one of my students found an interesting post from the Communist Youth League about the use of Hanyu Pinyin acronyms on the Internet. When people type on Weibo, WeChat, and other social media, they frequently use Pinyin acronyms. For examples:

[This is a guest post by Nicholas Morrow Williams] Victor recently pointed out to me the appearance of Martin Kern’s important article in the latest issue of Early China on “Xi Shuai” 蟋蟀 (“Cricket”) and Its Consequences: Issues in Early Chinese Poetry and Textual Studies” (Early China 42 [2019]: 39–74).  Kern’s article offers both a […]