Language Log

In the Dumbing of Age strip from a few days ago, Amber has been traumatized by the violence associated with a kidnapping, which has left one of her friends in a coma:

From Victor Steinbok:

From a Taiwanese website Dūnmù jiànduì fángyì chūbāo! Mǎ Yīngjiǔ cue Cài Yīngwén dàoqiàn wǎng bào 1450 xiǎngfǎ 敦睦艦隊防疫出包！馬英九cue蔡英文道歉 網曝1450想法 For someone who is not intimately acquainted with the political and linguistic scenes in Taiwan, it is hard to make sense of this headline. Here are the easy parts: jiànduì 艦隊 ("fleet") fángyì 防疫 ("epidemic […]

A rare find of linguistic news in a blog concerning the Supreme Court: "Relist Watch: Kalsarikännit edition", John Elwood, SCOTUSblog SCOTUSblog is about the work of the Supreme Court of the United States.  The author must have a streak of the linguist in him, for he chose to  begin today's post with three paragraphs about […]

Everyone is talking about the importance of more extensive COVID-19 testing in determining who is infected, and (eventually) who has been infected. But nearly all the discussion that I've heard and read has been based on the assumption that the relevant tests are accurate.  And this assumption is false — the available tests for this […]

Message from Stoyan Gegovski: I am editing parts of the "Xi'an Investment Guide" (every major city in China issues one of these every year) and I came upon an interesting use of the abbreviation "IP" which might interest you: "Xīn shídài xīn Xī'ān xīn IP 新时代 新西安 新IP" It is placed on the third page […]

Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese has an extreme propensity for elision, truncation, and abbreviation, which is one of the factors that make it so hard to read. Yesterday, we looked at the current Chinese proclivity for acronyms and initialisms, made much easier to produce and apply due to the use of digital technology and pinyin […]

We've mentioned "kaomoji " before (see "Readings"), but only gave a few examples. "Kaomoji 顔文字 ("face character / writing") is a Japanese term for more or less elaborate "drawings" composed of kana, characters, punctuation marks, and now letters and other symbols drawn from a wide range of writing systems.  They can be quite fanciful, even […]

All in one sign!  Here it is: (Source: Pinyin News)

Two delightful Chinglish specimens submitted by Karen Yang:

A cartoonist and her collaborator have been arrested in China for being "spiritually Japanese" (jīng Rì 精日).  They have also been accused of "insulting China" (rǔ Huá 辱华).  The latter term is transparent, and I've been hearing it a lot for the last couple of decades, whereas the former term is morphologically more difficult to […]

This morning I received this card from a friend:

A sign warning against uncivilized behavior in the main bazaar in Urumqi, the capital of China's Xinjiang region (Bloomberg):