There are many things about Papua New Guinea (PNG) that make it unique (the abundance of its flora and fauna, its ritualistic cannibalism, its political complexity, etc.), but above all for me is the huge number of its languages, especially considering its relatively small population on such a large amount of land (see below for […]
Jill Lepore recently presented an illustrative example of how social media amplifies bad stuff ("The World According to Elon Musk's Grandfather", 9/19/2023): Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk […] only glancingly discusses Musk’s grandfather J. N. Haldeman, whom he presents as a risk-taking adventurer and whose politics he dismisses as “quirky.” In fact, Haldeman was […]
China’s Language PoliceWhy Beijing Seeks to Extend the Hegemony of MandarinBy Gina Anne Tam, Foreign AffairsSeptember 19, 2023 It's odd that the author knows about "topolect" and recognizes the inadequacy of "dialect" as a rendering of fāngyán 方言, but is unwilling to mention "topolect" in this article, which is so suitable for it. Maybe the […]
This is a problem that has been troubling colleagues across the country. "Why fewer university students are studying Mandarin" Learning the difficult language does not seem as worthwhile as it once did Economist (Aug 24th 2023) China | How do you say “not interested”? Ten years ago Mandarin, the mother tongue of most Chinese, was […]
No "lying flat" or "coiling up" for us! Here are Japanese words (not characters) of the year for 2022. No Time to Waste: “Taipa” Chosen as One of Japan’s Words of 2022 nippon.com (12/16/22) Quite a different set of attitudes from what young people in China are feeling nowadays. You will note that extreme abbreviation […]
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From T.S.: I have read before about English’s very rigid adjective order – we say “nice green chair” not “green nice chair”. A recent (not very funny) sketch on Saturday Night Live featured Amy Schumer extolling the virtues of wearing a “Big dumb hat”. The punchline was that this accessorises perfectly with a “Dumb little […]
For a country that already has Chinese characters (kanji) and two syllabaries of its own (hiragana and katakana; see also furigana), judging from the ubiquity of romaji across the country, it would appear that they are well into the process of turning Latin letters into an integral component of their quadripartite writing system. Some may […]
Intriguing t-shirt that is making the rounds these days: (source)
Karla Adam and William Booth, "What next for Boris Johnson? Books, columns, speeches, comeback?", WaPo 7/9/2022: Many assume Johnson will eventually return to his former profession of journalism. Writing a weekly note for the Daily Telegraph was lucrative, \$330,000 a year, which fellow hacks calculated to garner him over \$2,750 an hour. […] He also […]
In a comment on "Trends in French sentence length" (5/26/2022), AntC raised the issue of cross-language differences in word counts: "I was under the impression French needed ~20% more words to express the same idea as an English text." And in response, I promised to "check letter-count and word-count relationships in some English/French parallel text […]
Cecilia Tomori, "Scientists: don’t feed the doubt machine", Nature 11/2/2021: Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been saddened at how science has been hijacked. Arguments around herd immunity exemplify this: proponents claimed that acquiring immunity by infection was fine for most people and also that communities were well on their way to achieving herd immunity. The messages […]
The question of language survival in Taiwan is far more complex than whether Taiwanese (and Hakka and Cantonese) will die at the hands of Mandarin. Helen Davidson probes the real situation in: "Healing words: Taiwan’s tribes fight to save their disappearing languagesThe island’s Indigenous people are in a race against time to save their native […]
From Bryan Van Norden: I found interesting these paired poems by the 15th-century Japanese Zen monk Ikkyū (1394-1481) and by his mistress, the blind singer Mori. He writes his poem in Classical Chinese, because he is a man, but her poem is in hiragana, because she is a woman. Below are photos of the original scroll, […]