Language Log: Phonetic symbols of the Republic of China on American baseball...
Below is a photo that Bryan Van Norden took of a baseball cap a guy was wearing at a casino in Atlantic City. Someone else at the table asked him what it meant, and he said he thought it was Chinese...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Subtle differences
Andrew Gelman, "Separated by a common blah blah blah", SMCISS 12/1/2013: I love reading the kind of English that English people write. It’s the same language as American but just slightly different. I...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Speech rhythms and brain rhythms
[Warning: More than usually geeky...] During the past decade or two, there's been a growing body of work arguing for a special connection between endogenous brain rhythms and timing patterns in...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Substituting Pinyin for unknown Chinese characters
On September 25, I posted on "Character amnesia and the emergence of digraphia", which occasioned a vigorous debate. A few of the commenters thought the essay in question wasn't actually written by a...
View ArticleLanguage Log: I met someone and they make me happy
When the delightfully cute UK Olympic diving star Tom Daley decided to come out as bisexual, he made a statement with a charmingly clever use of singular they: "In spring this year my life changed...
View ArticleLanguage Log: The long get longer
Al Filreis's Modern and Contemporary American Poetry is one of the most successful MOOCs. In particular, participants' involvement is sustained over time to an unusual extent — here's the daily volume...
View ArticleLanguage Log: The mountain dew is closed
It is not just the disaster of Chinese-English translation that provides us with source material for the huge fund of hilariously inappropriate texts that we tag with Lost in Translation here on...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Media uptake on uptalk
Yesterday afternoon, UC San Diego Linguistics grad student Amanda Ritchart presented her research (joint with Amalia Arvaniti) on the use and realization of uptalk in Southern California English at...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Once so ever
Jasmine Bailey, "Pennsylvania newlyweds kill for the thrill", 12/7/2013: Friday night, police arrested 22-year-old Elytte Barbour in the November death of 42-year-old Troy LaFerrara. His 18-year-old...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Final rises
As Eric Baković recently noted, there's been a lot of buzz about a presentation about "uptalk" by Amanda Ritchart and Amalia Arvaniti at the 2013 Acoustical Society meeting. All we have so far is a...
View ArticleLanguage Log: The Oxford Comma is your friend
Via twitter: Some earlier commadic fun: "Merle Haggard's ex-wives", 10/24/2010; "Visual aid for the final serial comma", 9/18/2011.
View ArticleLanguage Log: George Carlin, G.K. Chesterton, and Jorge Luis Borges
From Larry Getlen, "Conversations with Carlin", 2013: Larry Getlen: Why are you so fascinated with words? George Carlin: Because they’re all we have. Nature gave us this magnificent brain, which is so...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Japanese phonetically rendered in Mandarin pronunciation of...
As used by the Chinese air force, according to a post on Twitter that Joel Martinsen sent to Brendan O'Kane, and Brendan relayed to me: Before proceeding to an explanation of method and contents of...
View ArticleLanguage Log: No character for the most frequent morpheme in Taiwanese
Mark Swofford sent me the following photograph of two snack stands taken on September 8 on a mountain in Tucheng, Taiwan — somewhere around here: Conspicuous even to those who do not read Chinese are...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Getting worse and also better
A question from Roy Peter Clark: Last week I taught a class for a group of middle school young men and their mentors. Almost everyone in the room was African-American. The content of the class was...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Fake sign-language interpreter at Mandela funeral
Kim Sengupta, "Nelson Mandela memorial: ‘Bogus’ interpreter made mockery of Barack Obama’s tribute", The Telegraph 12/11/2013: The key address in the memorial service for Nelson Mandela was given by...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Separated by a common problem
The first issue of a new journal has just appeared: Linguistic Evidence in Security, Law and Intelligence (LESLI), founded and edited by Dr. Carole Chaski. As a member of the editorial board, I'm...
View ArticleLanguage Log: The degendering of the third person pronoun in Mandarin
One of the first things a student learns when studying Mandarin is the third person pronoun, tā. This was originally written 他 (with "human" radical), and it stood for feminine, masculine, and neuter...
View ArticleLanguage Log: From a perception standpoint
During a game on 11/28/2013 between the Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers, Pittsburgh head coach Mike Tomlin got in the way of a kickoff return by Jacoby Jones, as a result of standing with...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Science, cognitive, rapport, communication, niche
What do those five words have in common? Michael Quinion, World Wide Words Newsletter 862, 12/14/2013: Words of the year The track record for words of the year has not always been impressive (does...
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