[This is a guest post by an anonymous correspondent in East Asia.] I thought you might be interested in taking on the ignorance of remarks earlier today by Singapore's minister of education. He's headed toward "like, wow" territory. Basically, he was speaking about Singapore expanding a program aimed at reinvigorating the learning of what it […]
The philosopher Herbert Paul Grice was cited in an opinion issued on 5/24/2019 by Judge William M. Conley in the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. The case is MillerCoors, LLC v. Anheuser-Busch Companies, LLC (3:19-cv-00218-wmc, and as the judge's opinion explains, During Super Bowl LIII, defendant Anheuser-Busch Companies, LLC, launched an […]
British headline-syntax example of the week: "Sheffield deaths: House murders accused mother in court", BBC News 5/27/2019. The link was sent in by H. Kepponen, who notes that the story is not about a domestic residence killing a woman inside a courtroom with malice aforethought, but about a mother who has been charged with murdering […]
There are lots of good reasons to want to track the development of infant vocalizations — see e.g. Zwaigenbaum et al. "Clinical assessment and management of toddlers with suspected autism spectrum disorder" (2009). But existing methods are expensive and time-consuming — see e.g. Nyman and Lohmander, "Babbling in children with neurodevelopmental disability and validity of […]
Sign on a toilet door: Source: "In the first flush: China’s toilet revolution remains in full swing", Week in China 453 (5/24/19)
A couple of nights ago, I had dinner with one of my students from China and his parents, both of whom are members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The father is a doctor and has to work 10 hours a day, during which he sees a hundred patients every day. Most of them are […]
On a large discussion list, I said something that involved a lot of close, careful reasoning and marshalling of evidence to come to a precise conclusion, and another member of the list approved what I wrote with a hearty "Shack!" I was dumbfounded.
Sign on a municipal bus in San Francisco: (Sponsored by truthornahsf.org)
As most people are aware, Australia had its general election last week. Chinese politicians and signs promoting them were very much in evidence. Here's an example of one that caused a lot of controversy:
For more than three decades, I have edited and published a journal called Sino-Platonic Papers. The first issue (Feb., 1986) was "The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries and Current Lexicographical Projects" (free pdf; 31 pages) — that led to the creation of […]
A commenter's remark on the recent post "Dysfluency considered harmful": I've always understood the 'dys-' prefix to be in contrast to an 'a-' prefix, where 'dys-' means something like 'born without' and 'a-' means 'loss of.' My favorite example of the contrast is 'dyslexia' vs. 'alexia', with the first meaning inherent problems with reading and the […]
What follows is Doug Adams' draft of an excursus that is not trying to be complete in itself (i.e., it's not a free-standing article), but rather something that will provide a certain amount of orientation to readers of the review of Schmidt's Nachlass (for which see the first item in the "Readings" below). [Excursus: The […]