Eoin Cullen writes: For a while I’ve been familiar with the fact that there is an established set of two-character surnames in Chinese including Sīmǎ 司馬 and Ōuyáng 歐陽, but I was interested to see the novel two-character surname of the head of the SAR government in HK, Lam4zeng6 Jyut6ngo4 林鄭月娥.
My German is not that great. But I think I understand the headline. pic.twitter.com/WuwOGZZdz9 — Paul (@paulj71) June 13, 2019
Alison Flood, "The curse of Jeremy Hunt: why his name is hard to say", The Guardian 6/21/2019: Linguistics experts have been picking over a particularly juicy problem for the last few weeks: why do presenters from James Naughtie to Nicky Campbell keep replacing the first letter of Jeremy Hunt’s surname with a C?
Bob Sanders writes from Kanazawa, Japan: Today I bought some mouthwash at a national pharmacy chain and received a coupon for a discount on any two future purchases made later this month, with certain items excluded from this offer. In fact, it is this list of exclusions which immediately caught my attention (see photo below), […]
A truly amazing chain of Cantonese puns has sprung up from last Wednesday's protests in Hong Kong. As police were about to shoot tear gas at them (virtually point blank), Hong Kong reporters shouted out, "gei3ze2 記者!" ("Press! [Don't shoot!]). Applying the norm that you can insert virtually anything into the initial slot in the […]
The main slogan of the Hong Kong protesters is "faan2 sung3 Zung1 反送中" (“against being sent to China; against extradition to China"). The sung3 Zung1 送中" ("extradition to China") part of the slogan is echoed by the expression sung3zung1 送終 ("attend upon a dying relative; mourning; pay one's last respects; bury one's parent"). Consequently, when […]
A few days ago, the hashtag #方言怎么翻译 (fāngyán zěnme fānyì ["how to translate 'fangyan']") was trending on Weibo (a Chinese microblogging website) since it appeared in the cet-6 exam (College English Test, a national English examination in the People's Republic of China) that recently ended. It was interesting to see how examinees translated it. For […]
Many U.S. institutions of higher education used to have the phrase "normal school" or "normal college" as part of their names, though I don't know whether any still do. When I was growing up, back in neolithic times, I somehow learned that normal meant "teacher training" in that context. And though I thought the usage […]
From Charles Belov: I thought I was going to be sending you a case of Google Translate munging a song lyric when translating it from Chinese to English. Instead, I'm sending you a case of a Chinese music video making use of an emoji in the song lyrics.
Article in The Washington Post (6/18/19): "Robocalls are overwhelming hospitals and patients, threatening a new kind of health crisis" " … Many of the messages seemed to be the same: Speaking in Mandarin, an unknown voice threatened deportation unless the person who picked up the phone provided their personal information…."
Chris Smith, "Genius hid a Morse code message in song lyrics to prove Google was copying them", BGR 6/17/2019: Did you ever notice how you tend to Google the lyrics of a song and then you don’t bother clicking through to Genius’s website because Google displays them right on the search results page? Well, Genius […]