When I started to learn Mandarin more than half a century ago, it was easy for me to master lán 蓝/ 藍 ("blue") and lǜ 绿 / 綠 ("green"). But as I became better acquainted with Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese, I was troubled by the word qīng 青, which seemed to straddle and include […]
Michael Birnbaum, "E.U. rejects Boris Johnson’s Brexit proposal, raising prospect of chaotic break within weeks", WaPo 10/3/2019: “There are problematic points in the U.K.’s proposal, and further work is needed,” said European Commission spokeswoman Natasha Bertaud. Although British Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay had admonished that the ball was in the European Union’s court, Bertaud emphasized, […]
Eileen Sullivan, "Trump Publicly Urges China to Investigate the Bidens", NYT 10/3/2019: Mr. Trump has defended his conversation with Mr. Zelensky as “perfect” even after a reconstructed transcript of the call was released that showed him seeking help from Ukraine in investigating the Bidens. And he doubled down on his request on Thursday. “I would […]
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Lisa Feldman Barrett, "Zombie ideas", Observer 10/2019: It’s October, a month auspicious for All Hallow’s Eve and everything spooky. Accordingly, our topic for this month is … zombies. Not the charmingly decayed corpses you encounter in movies and books, but zombie ideas. According to the economist Paul Krugman (2013), a zombie idea is a view that’s […]
"Beijing reveals mascots for 2022 Winter Games", YouTube (9/19/19):
Yiming Wang et al., "Espresso: A fast end-to-end neural speech recognition toolkit", ASRU 2019: We present ESPRESSO, an open-source, modular, extensible end-to-end neural automatic speech recognition (ASR) toolkit based on the deep learning library PyTorch and the popular neural machine translation toolkit FAIRSEQ. ESPRESSO supports distributed training across GPUs and computing nodes, and features various […]
Article in SCMP Magazine: "How Hong Kong slang terms for ‘police’ have evolved over time", by Lisa Lim (9/28/19): Back in the day, Hong Kong policemen were referred to in Cantonese as luhky ī [sic; VHM: luk6ji1 綠衣] (“green clothing”), for the green uniforms they had worn since the 19th century. Khaki drill became the […]
Ben Zimmer, "How Maguire Accidentally Made the Case for Singular ‘They'", The Atlantic 9/27/2019 (subhead: "The national intelligence director’s recent testimony inadvertently supported the argument against grammar purists"): When the committee chairman, Adam Schiff, asked Maguire if he thought that the whistle-blower was “a political hack” as Trump had suggested, Maguire responded, “I don’t know […]
Here's a simply titled article from China Daily: "Opening up of financial market continues" (9/26/19). The article may have a plain title, but it is full of gibberish. The concluding sentence takes the cake: Therefore, the securities market as the focus of the internationalization of the entire financial market must be targeted in order to […]
Yesterday, Merriam-Webster tweet-teased Donald Trump over a couple of glosses: 'Transcript': 🎙 a typed copy of dictated or recorded material 'Memorandum': 📝 an informal report or message — Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) September 25, 2019
[This is a guest post by Douglas Q. Adams] Readers of this blog may remember the excitement generated a few months ago by the announcement that “Tocharian C,” the native language of Kroraina (Chinese Loulan) had been discovered, hiding, as it were, in certain documents written in the Kharoṣṭhī script ("Tocharian C: its discovery and […]
"Teens charged with Qld arsenal 'completely despicable'", Sky News 9/11/2019.