Well, I don't say "Beizhing", and I think it sounds ghastly, so much so that I cringe when I hear it and my flesh creeps. I never could figure out why English speakers would use this hideous pronunciation when it would be so much easier, transparent, and direct just to pronounce the name the way […]
From a colleague (with Romanizations and translations added by VHM): Two of Xi's recent báizì 白字 ("miswritten / mispronounced character") that the CCP propaganda machine tries awkwardly to cover up: Reading “jīngzhàn xìnì 精湛细腻” ("consummately exquisite") as “jīng shén xìnì 精甚细腻" ("very refined and exquisite”). Reading“shànyǎng 赡养” ("support; provide for") as “zhānyǎng 瞻仰” ("pay respect"). […]
This seems quite informative and accurate about Mongolian history and language: "What Genghis Khan's Mongolian Sounded Like – and how we know"
Part 1 is here. An introduction and guide to my series of posts "Corpora and the Second Amendment" is available here. The corpus data that is discussed can be downloaded here. That link will take you to a shared folder in Dropbox. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen. Update: […]
This is from 2013, but it's been making the rounds on Facebook… (Source)
[The following is a guest post by David Dettmann. The "Schwarz Uyghur dictionary" to which he refers in the third paragraph is this: Henry G. Schwarz, An Uyghur-English dictionary (Bellingham, Washington: Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University, 1992).] It is a bit of a nerdy obsession of mine to customize my computers to comfortably use […]
An introduction and guide to my series of posts “Corpora and the Second Amendment” is available here. The corpus data that is discussed can be downloaded here. That link will take you to a shared folder in Dropbox. Important: Use the "Download" button at the top right of the screen. New URL for COFEA and […]
Based on these two tweets, this 85-year-old Swedish woman has at least two native tongues: 【85岁的瑞典老奶奶用山西五寨方言，讲述远去的童年】——哈娜的父亲是一位传教士。1933年哈娜出生在五寨县，13岁时离开。近日，她用纯粹、地道的五寨方言录制了一段视频，讲述小时候听过的故事，唱过的歌。并回忆起五寨的莜面窝窝、山药蛋。“哦哦娃娃睡，拉倒待，灶上烧着个胡萝卜，大人吃上不瞌睡….“ pic.twitter.com/Q0jpJZnR9I — zouzou (@yanxiang1967) April 28, 2019
A couple of years ago, in connection with the JSALT2017 summer workshop, I tried several commercial speech-to-text APIs on some clinical recordings, with very poor results. Recently I thought I'd try again, to see how things have progressed. After all, there have been recent claims of "human parity" in various speech-to-text applications, and (for example) […]
The following paragraph began as a comment to this post: "How to maintain first and second language skills" (4/25/19) How can a person acquire not just one, but two or more native languages? Now in China, some parents aspire to help their children learn both Chinese and English as their native languages. But, considering the […]
In several recent posts, we've been discussing the most efficient, least painful way to acquire facility with hanzi / kanji / hanja 漢字 ("Sinographs; Chinese characters"). Lord knows there are endless numbers of them and they are so intricately constructed that it is an arduous task to master the two thousand or so that are […]
In the comments to "Cantonese as a Second Language" (4/22/19), there's an interesting discussion going on about how to maintain and / or acquire competency in more than one language. This post started out as a comment to that thread, but it soon grew too long, so I've separated it off here. My son was […]
Serious problem here. Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish, p. 507b: F tümen properly ‘ten thousand’, but often used for ‘an indefinitely large number’; immediately borrowed from Tokharian, where the forms are A tmān; B tmane, tumane, but Prof. Pulleyblank has told me orally that he thinks this word may have been borrowed in […]