Language Log

Yesterday's SMBC:

Power-law distributions seem to be everywhere, and not just in word-counts and whale whistles. Most people know that Vilfredo Pareto  found them in the distribution of wealth, two or three decades before Udny Yule showed that stochastic processes like those in evolution lead to such distributions, and George Kingsley Zipf found his eponymous law in […]

[This is a guest post by Ari-Joonas Pitkänen] I’m a frequent reader of Language Log, and I’ve been particularly interested in the debate about the usefulness / limitations of the Chinese script in modern society. As the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre approaches, I remembered an anecdote about the limitations of Chinese characters […]

Nick Kaldis asks about the pronunciation of "posthumous": On NPR this morning, and once a few weeks ago, both announcers pronounced it "pōst-hyooməs"; I can't recall ever hearing this pronunciation before.

A recent radio presentation: "The Law of Languages", Living on Earth 5/31/2019. Other mass media: "Dolphins, aliens, and the search for intelligent life", Astrobiology 8/29/2011; "Dolphin Studies Could Reveal Secrets of Extraterrestrial Intelligence", 9/2/2011; To talk with aliens, learn to speak with dolphins", Wired 2/15/2011; "SETI Evolution: Searching for Aliens Using Whale Songs and Radios", […]

I'll let this incredible ESPN (it's a sport, after all) video speak for itself:

No siree!  These Hong Kong students are being taught to emulate Beijing government models: In the 13rd [sic] Hong Kong Cup Diplomatic Knowledge Contest held on May 12, Hong Kong high school students militantly spoke perfect Putonghua. Their Beijing accent, tone, gestures, facial expressions all reminded one of China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying, or […]

Malin Fezehai, "In Turkey, Keeping a Language of Whistles Alive", NYT 5/30/2019: Muazzez Kocek, 46, is considered one of the best whistlers in Kuşköy, a village tucked away in the picturesque Pontic Mountains in Turkey’s northern Giresun province. Her whistle can be heard over the area’s vast tea fields and hazelnut orchards, several miles farther […]

The "sǎo hēi chú è 扫黑除恶" ("sweeping away blackness and eliminating evil") campaign in China not only has not waned, but rather is going in a hysterical direction. The local authorities in Wuxi are marching into the kindergartens; below is their conclusion after investigating one of them:

Daniel Deutsch sent in this quotation “The Attorney General has previously stated that the Special Counsel repeatedly affirmed that he was not saying that, but for the OLC opinion, he would have found the President obstructed justice. The Special Counsel’s report and his statement today made clear that the office concluded it would not reach […]

Two days ago, in "Difficult languages and easy languages, part 2" (5/28/19), we listed scores of languages from easiest to hardest to learn.  Spanish came out overall as the easiest widely spoken language for many people to learn, while Arabic and Turkish struck many people as quite difficult to master.

Klaus Nuber writes: "Sometime ago I saw the sign of this 'Asia Palast' with the logo consisting of the two chairs and the round dingus between. Is this logo just cute or has it a hanzi background?"