Preface Because surnames of immigrants in a melting pot like America often end up getting distorted, bowdlerized, prettified, and otherwise transformed from what they were in their original homelands, we cannot take their current form as gospel linguistic truth. Nonetheless, people who encounter them cannot avoid taking them at their face value, which may cause […]
Vacillating Chinese terminology for think tanks Mark Metcalf wrote to tell me: Global Times*just ran an article that might be of interest regarding PRC think tanks and a new book related to this topic: “Researchers, scholars explore methods to boost China’s influence of thoughts”. *an appendage of People's Daily I was caught up short by […]
Continuing our series on dragons, this note and illustration come from Juha Janhunen, the Finnish linguist: Happy Blue Dragon Year to everybody! Below is the official flag (1889-1912) of the Manchu Empire (in the west misleadingly known as "China"), which happens to have a blue dragon on it. Manchu muduri 'dragon' still seems to lack an external etymology. […]
Today is the Lunar New Year's Day, and it's the Year of the Dragon / /lʊŋ³⁵/ . As such, a kerfuffle is stirring in China and the English-speaking world regarding the English translation of lóng ⿓ / 龙 / 竜 (J), which is usually "dragon". I will begin with the pronunciation of the word. In […]
Photograph of a sign on a curry shop in Banqiao District, New Taipei City:
A little over a month ago, People's Daily published an article featuring drone photography of the coastal city of Quanzhou in Fujian Province: Aerial view of legacies along ancient Maritime Silk Road in China's Fujian Xinhua (12/16/23) Upon reading the article, I commented: Journey to the West Sun Wukong and Hanuman This article is especially […]
[Several days ago, I had prepared a post on this topic, but Mark scooped me with his "Mushroom language?" (1/9/24). His coverage of the counterposed Adamatzky and Blatt, et al. papers is superior to mine, so I will just strip out that part of my post and leave the remaining observations with which I had […]
Elian Peltier, "How Africans Are Changing French — One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time", NYT 12/12/2023: French, by most estimates the world’s fifth most spoken language, is changing — perhaps not in the gilded hallways of the institution in Paris that publishes its official dictionary, but on a rooftop in Abidjan, the largest […]
[This is a guest post by Michael Bates. It is about the place in Pakistan where Osama Bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011 and where, a scant five months earlier, on January 25, 2011, Indonesian terrorist Umar Patek was arrested.] Via Google search, I found your post about the etymology of "-ābād" ("Abbott's […]
The name "Tibet" has been outlawed in the PRC. Henceforth, Tibet (the name by which it has been known to the world for centuries) is to be called by its newer Chinese name, Xizang ("West Zang") — even in English. Chinese state media drops ‘Tibet’ for ‘Xizang’ after release of Beijing white paper Use […]
Merriam-Webster's online dictionary entry for folx defines it as a re-spelling of folks "used especially to explicitly signal the inclusion of groups commonly marginalized". The etymology is given as "respelling of folks, with x after MX., LATINX". The entry also notes that the first known occurrence was in 1833, without clarifying that older uses (and many recent ones) are examples of […]
Long have we pondered the overwhelming dominance by individuals of Indian heritage over the spelling bees. Do they have some sort of mysterious power or secret for memorizing hundreds of thousands of obscure words? Now we have an answer from one of the masters himself, Dev Shah, a ninth-grader living in Largo, Florida, who won […]