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, […]
From a Penn graduate student who recently returned to his home in Beijing, of which he is a born and bred native: I'm now back at home in Beijing after a 14-day self-quarantine in Tianjin, which was designated as one of the 12 cities to receive all diverted international flights to Beijing because of imported […]
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Andrea Valentino has an intriguing article in BBC Future (1/21/20): "The alphabets at risk of extinction: It isn’t just languages that are endangered: dozens of alphabets around the world are at risk. And they could have even more to tell us." Usually, when we worry about languages going extinct, we are thinking about their spoken […]
Many's the Language Log post in which we've looked at the pluses and negatives of writing Chinese characters (see "Selected readings" below). These include discipline, character building, aesthetic aspects, myopia, even punishment. Now, in "Bring Back Handwriting: It’s Good for Your Brain: People are losing the brain benefits of writing by hand as the practice […]
Isaac Chotiner, "A Penn Law Professor Wants to Make America White Again", The New Yorker 8/23/2019: Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is the academic who perhaps best represents the ideology of the Trump Administration’s immigration restrictionists. Wax, who began her professional life as a neurologist, and who served in […]
Below is a guest post by Christian DiCanio: 2019 was named the International Year of Indigenous Languages by UNESCO. My friends and colleagues at the recent Annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) have been on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media discussing what this means for Linguistics as a field. With respect to publishing, several journals […]
David Brooks, "It’s Not the Economy, Stupid: How to conduct economic policy in an age of social collapse", NYT 11/29/2018: People, especially in the middle- and working-class slices of society, are less likely to volunteer in their community, less likely to go to church, less likely to know their neighbors, less likely to be married […]
A highly educated Chinese colleague sent me the following note: More Chinese phrases with Latin alphabet, such as C位, diss, etc. have become quite popular. Even one of my friends who is so intoxicated by the beauty of the Chinese classic language used "diss" in her WeChat post. She could have used any of the […]
Recent talk at the University of Pennsylvania: "Printers’ Devices, or, How French Got Its Accents" Katie Chenoweth, Princeton University Monday, 22 October 2018 – 5:15 PM Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center, University of Pennsylvania Sponsored by: Penn Libraries
Along with Valerie Ross, Brighid Kelly, and Helen Jeoung from Penn's Critical Writing program, I've been looking at material from student writing assignments (as part of an NSF-funded study*). One of the many topics of interest is the extent to which students, collectively and individually, succeed in shifting their writing style to suit different genres […]
Thought-provoking observations by a native speaker: "Racism in Hong Kong: why ‘your English is very good’ is not a compliment, it’s actually very insulting: An Australian of Chinese descent reveals why she is offended every time she is praised for her excellent English-language skills", by Charmaine Chan, SCMP Magazine (5/19/18)
Disfluency has been in the news recently, for two reasons: the deployment of filled pauses in an automated conversation by Google Duplex, and a cross-linguistic study of "slowing down" in speech production before nouns vs. verbs. Lance Ulanoff, "Did Google Duplex just pass the Turing Test?", Medium 5/8/2018: I think it was the first “Um.” […]
A couple of years ago around this time I wrote about the "Schlump season" (3/21/15) at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Now, as Dartmouth is becoming enmired in the early spring mud, Pamela Kyle Crossley, who teaches there, told me that she thought of the Russian word for this season: rasputitsa. And that made […]