How would you respond in your native language if someone walked up to you and asked (in your native language or in English or some other language which both of you know), "What's the word for 'the insect that eats wood and destroys walls'?". A friend of mine in China did that with eight of […]
Maybe the tide is turning against "Gene for X" thinking — Ed Yong, "A Waste of 1,000 Research Papers", 5/17/2019: Decades of early research on the genetics of depression were built on nonexistent foundations. How did that happen? In 1996, a group of European researchers found that a certain gene, called SLC6A4, might influence a […]
… as a technical term, that is. Disfluency is no better, although the prefix is less judgmental. There are two problems: These terms pathologize normal behavior, creating confusion between pathological symptoms and common phenomena in normal speech, which may be different not only in their causes and their frequency but also in behavioral detail; Applied […]
Hugh Schofield, "France asks: Can you solve the riddle of the rock?", BBC News 5/10/2019: A village in western France is offering a €2,000 (£1,726) prize for help in deciphering a 230-year-old inscription found on a rock on a remote beach. Until now no-one has been able to make out the meaning of the 20 […]
To understand today's xkcd, you need to know what A/B Testing is, what Linear A and Linear B are, what Aksara Kawi is, what JavaScript and some of its subtypes are, … Mouseover title: "We wrote our site in Linear A rather than Aksara Kawi because browser testing showed that Crete script rendered faster than […]
From Stephen Hart (the object pictured is a camera attachment for microphones, lights, and the like):
Marilynne Robinson, "Is poverty necessary?", Harpers 5/16/2019: Margaret Thatcher said that the redundant—those on the dole—were “demoralized.” In her dialect group this word doesn’t mean disheartened. It means without morals. An American might put the matter differently, but the attitude is familiar enough. An American might wonder whether that sense was actually dominant — or […]
Since high school, the Voynich manuscript is something that I have puzzled over from time to time. What language and script is it written in? What's it about? Although no one has been able to read the manuscript since Wilfrid Voynich, the Polish–Samogitian bibliophile and book dealer first brought it to light more than a […]
This odd headline caught my eye: "Man in China detained after giving dogs 'illegal' names," by Travis Fedschun | Fox News (5/15/19) And what were the offending names? Not what you might have thought: Chéngguǎn 城管 ("Urban Management") Xiéguǎn 协管 ("Assistant Management")
[This is a guest post by Jeffrey Shallit] A Chinese student here at Waterloo used the term "odevity" for what English-speaking computer scientists typically call "parity" — the property of an integer being odd or even. I had never heard this term before, so I used Google Scholar to look at where it is being […]
Subtitle: Phoneticization on an order from a Macanese restaurant in Vancouver. Bruce Rusk sent in this prime example of extreme Sinographic shorthand, adding, "The geographic origin of the cuisine is a big hint to the document’s meaning…".
Inquiry from Doug Adams: As you know I’m working on a review for JIES [Journal of Indo-European Studies] on KT Schmidt’s Nachlass [VHM: see here]. I need to say something about the name Loulan itself and, not unusually, I’m sinking uncontrollably into the quicksand of reconstructed Chinese. The question arises concerning the first syllable, represented […]