Language Log

Nancy Friedman just published "52 interesting things I learned this year" (Fritinancy, 12/30/2024). The whole thing is worth reading, but I especially liked (10), which resonates with (17), which references LLOG.

"Five common English words we don’t know the origins of – including ‘boy’ and ‘dog’", Francesco Perono Cacciafoco*, The Conversation (7/4/24) [*See the author's extraordinary academic profile here.] The author begins by describing the act of naming items in the world, the etymological study of words, the comparative method, the relationship of English to Germanic […]

In the summer of 1990, I spent a memorable five weeks at the outstanding summer institute on Indo-European linguistics and archeology held by DOALL (at least that's what we jokingly called it — the Department of Oriental and African Languages and Literatures) of the University of Texas (Austin).  The temperature was 106º or above for […]

Wondermark for 11/25/2021 — deriving "rappers", from "wrappers" and their "candy shanties" on the Hersey Chocolate assembly line: Mouseover title: "People will claim lots of things to impress some random moron."

[The following is a guest post by John Mock.  I am impressed by how much detailed scholarship (although perhaps not always of great precision and rigor) on such an esoteric matter as that discussed herein already existed in the 18th and 19th centuries.] John Biddulph in his book Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh (Calcutta: Office […]

Yesterday's SMBC: Mouseover title: "Chicken etymology is really easy because the word origins AND the words you use to describe them are all 'bock bock bock'."

In "Shampoo salmon" (2/10/14), I called attention to the variety of opinions concerning the origins of the Chinese word bōluó 菠萝 / variant bōluó 波萝 ("pineapple").  Tom Nguyen suggests that another possible source is from Old Vietnamese *bla (> dứa /z̻ɨ̞̠ɜ˧ˀ˦/ with Northern accent – note the process of “turning into sibilant” of initial consonant […]

"Scientist discovers puppy-sized spider in rain forest", ABC 11 Eyewitness News 10/20/2014: For all readers with arachnophobia, take a moment to collect yourself before proceeding further, because this spider will haunt your dreams. Harvard Etymologist Piotr Naskrecki recently posted on his blog about an encounter in Guyana's rainforest with a South American Goliath birdeater, a […]

A few days ago, Larry Horn sent this note to the  American Dialect Society's discussion list: On an article lauding the Texas Rangers’ defense in today’s NYT sports section, I did a double-take on reading that The defense—anchored by shortstop Elvis Andrus and the impregnable glove of Adrian Beltre at third base—has saved more runs […]

My previous post was about "dialects" that are often not really dialects, but bona fide languages, and the efforts of the Chinese government to phase them out.  In this post, I'll be talking about "etymology" that is not really etymology, but character analysis. The occasion for these ruminations (see especially the last two paragraphs below) […]

Last week, there was an interesting Ask MetaFilter thread about how to find "a list of all the English words that can be traced back to a given root word" ("Word histories and dirt lions") , in which Language Hat helpfully linked to the American Heritage Dictionary's "lists of Indo-European and Semitic roots" as a […]

The "About Us" page for the new search engine Cuil says that Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil. There has been considerable discussion at the Wikipedia discussion page for Cuil about whether this is really true.

This morning, I received the following interesting message from Adam C.: Back in 2019 you wrote a Language Log post about the word ASMR being ported to Japanese, and as I research the phenomenon itself I frequently encounter the same English version in videos by Japanese and Korean speakers. (Russians, unsurprisingly, use ACMP.)   So […]