Mix and match Japanese orthography
Most Language Log readers are aware that the Japanese writing system consists of three major components — kanji (sinoglyhs), hiragana (cursive syllabary), and katakana (block syllabary). I would argue that rōmaji (roman letters) are a fourth component, as they are in the Chinese writing system. How do people decide when to switch among the different […]
Language LogNew worlds, words, and letters
A recent strip from Dinosaur Comics: Mouseover title: "stop, you fool! you're building a world far too quickly and far too awesome! no narrative will ever live up to it!!" And a couple of days later: Mouseover title: "hesternal means "of or pertaining to yesterday" and long-time dino comics readers already know and love and […]
Language LogNest: a rare and perplexing surname
By chance, I came across the surname "Gnaizda". Its phonological configuration puzzled me for a while, but then I began to formulate hypotheses about its origin. I briefly thought that it might have been Semitic and considered the possibility that it was cognate with "genesis". It was easy to rule out "genesis", though, because that […]
Language LogLÀ encore…
Continuing my anecdotal exploration of "focus"-like phenomena in French, I dove into a random point in the middle of a random Radio France podcast("Libre Pensée – L’Europe, l’Union européenne et les élections européennes", 4/14/2024). And within a few seconds, I heard this, where the apparent "focus" on là caught my attention: Euh mais pour bien […]
Language LogFish-in-fish matryoshka sinoglyph
Egas Moniz-Bandeira on Twitter/X: It's cute, clever, fun, but do the Chinese need it as part of their bloated (!) writing system? Does Unicode need this inessential / nonessential / unessential sinoglyph as part of the world's functional writing systems? Selected reading "Cucurbits and junk characters" (3/30/24) "Another "variant" character" (4/7/24) "Polysyllabic sinoglyphs" (4/11/24) […]
Language LogVictor Hugo, hélas
Focus is perhaps the single most perniciously ambiguous word in the field of linguistics. In Beth Ann Hockey's 1998 dissertation, "The interpretation and realization of focus: an experimental investigation of focus in English and Hungarian", she wrote: Linguists have associated the word “focus” with a wide variety of phenomena. In addition a wealth of other […]
Language LogTwo brushes in one hand — virtuoso calligraphy
Mind-boggling! Selected readings "Robot calligraphy" (12/27/19) "Robot philosopher-calligrapher" (5/6/22) [h.t. shaing tai]
Language LogA very noisy channel
From Breffni O'Rourke: I thought you might appreciate this effort by Dall.E. The prompt was "Create a diagram of Shannon and Weaver's model of communication." That image is a totally incoherent representation of the "noisy channel model", pictured in a more helpful way in Claude Shannon's 1948 monograph A Mathematical Theory of Communication: And a […]
Language LogDigital Humanities for the study of traditional Asian medicines
A guest post for The Digital Orientalist (4/10/24), under The Magic of Philology and Indexing, Polyglot Asian Medicines (Foundational Resources and Digital Tools), by Michael Stanley-Baker, Christopher S.G. Khoo and Faizah Zakariah (all three are based at academic institutions in Singapore), "Tracking Drug Names Across Language, Time, Space and Knowledge Domains to Produce New Visions […]
Language LogFeeling wet
Yesterday in one of my classes, a female student from China said that she didn't like to exercise in the morning because she felt "wet". At first, I couldn't believe my ears, so I asked her, "Did you say 'wet'?" "Yes," she said, "wet". I couldn't understand in what way she would feel "wet" in […]
Language LogPolysyllabic sinoglyphs
From Markus Samuel Haselbeck, responding to Egas Moniz-Bandeira on Twitter/X: As the discussion of polysyllabic sonography goes on, I want to add a character that I recently discovered in a Chinese restaurant, here in Leuven. I guess it is pronounced Zhōngguó (中國), China? https://t.co/1cc65vq4fC pic.twitter.com/UveFSHK3dz — Markus Samuel Haselbeck (@CiaoCiaota) April 8, 2024 Proof that […]
Language LogChinese (il)logic from inside
[Prefatory note: The Chinese author of this guest post, TCI (encrypted acronym to protect her identity) holds a humanities M.A. from a top tier American research university which she attendedfrom 2016 to 2018. She has been employed for several years as an adviser to students in China who desire to study abroad (especially the USA) […]
Language LogThe E-V22 haplogroup and its East Asian congeners, ancient and modern
[This is a guest post by Matthew Marcucci] Population genetics is proving to be astonishingly useful in aiding the study of history, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and other disciplines. One means of studying ancient human migrations is analysis of the so-called yDNA haplogroup. In reviewing the modern-day distribution of my own yDNA haplogroup, I have come […]
Language LogFast talking
The topic of this post is one that deeply fascinates me personally, but also has a bearing on many of the main concerns of the denizens of Language Log: information, efficiency, density, complexity, meaning, pronunciation, prosody, speed, gender…. It was prompted by this new article: What’s the Fastest Language in the World?Theansweriscomplicated. [sic]by Dan Nosowitz, […]
Language LogRomeyka rescue
Ioanna Sitaridou's "Crowdsourcing Romeyka" project has been getting some coverage in niche media, and in at least one widely-read publication: Esther Addley, "Endangered Greek dialect is ‘living bridge’ to ancient world, researchers say", The Guardian 4/3/2024. The crowdsourcing platform's interface seems well-designed and easy to use. There are a few obvious questions — for example, […]
Language LogStill more Mongolic
Mogholi is a fascinating language – Mongolic spoken in Afghanistan with strong Perso-Arabic influences. It was already in decline in the 1960s and we don't know if/how many speakers there are left now????Pics: A poem (a qaṣīda) in original script, transcription and translation pic.twitter.com/9Mrct9DaAI — Egas Moniz-Bandeira ᠡᡤᠠᠰ ᠮᠣᠨᠢᠰ ᠪᠠᠨᡩ᠋ᠠᠶᠢᠷᠠ (@egasmb) April 6, 2024 Moghol […]
Language LogAnother "variant" character
If we come upon a glyph that we don't recognize and can't find in any dictionary, especially if we have half an idea what it might mean or what it might sound like, we are apt to call it a "variant character" (yìtǐzì 異體字) or calligraphic form of some standard glyph. It happens all the […]
Language LogMore on Mongolian and Kalmyk Studies
One of our last posts was on a German Mongolist named Julius Klaproth (1783-1835) who was a specialist on Kalmyk. This prompted a regular reader to send the following interesting account about another German Mongolist who was also an expert on the Kalmyks and their language, Nicholas Poppe (1897-1991): From what I understand, the Russians […]
Language LogWriting on things
If someone is investigating texts, they can concentrate on the subject / content / style / linguistic nature of the writing. Increasingly, however, scholars have begun to concentrate on the objects and materials on which the writing takes place. From this, they tease out all sorts of interesting information about the social, political, and economic […]
Language LogKalmyk-German glossary
[Basic information about Kalmyk (Mongolic language) and Julius Klaproth (1783-1835) below.] For researchers of Julius Klaproth or those interested in Kalmyk language, I'm preparing to catalogue this Kalmyk-German glossary believed to have belonged to Klaproth. Any suggestions as to which book it is a glossary of? pic.twitter.com/SfSPyvZR3W — Royal Asiatic Society (@RAS_Soc) April 4, 2024 […]
Language LogAce love
Photograph of an artistic arrangement on the wall of a tea shop in Philadelphia's Chinatown. (Nothing can be done about the shadows behind the characters and the letters, because they are affixed to the wall in such a way that they stand out from it.) iiù nián chuán chá qíng六年傳茶情"six years transmitting affection for tea" […]
Language LogLuggage tags with (hidden) sewing kit
Chinese not necessary to use this marvelous dual purpose device. Never be without a sewing kit again. Sew on the go! Airline compliant. Deduct Fashionable Life. They're all the rage! Selected readings "It is cool to f*** the empress" (11/26/20) "Braised enterovirus, anyone?" (7/16/08)
Language LogThe Syriac Script at Turfan
First Soundings by Martina Galatello This is the first book-length palaeographic study of about a thousand fragments in Syriac and Sogdian languages discovered between 1902 and 1914 in the Turfan area on the ancient Northern Silk Roads. This manuscript material, probably dating between the late 8th and 13th /14th centuries, is of utmost relevance for […]
Language LogSan Francisco Cantonese
From Charles Belov: While riding the 22 Fillmore bus through the Mission District in San Francisco today, I overheard a conversation in Cantonese. It was nearly 100% in Cantonese, not the Cantlish* that I rarely also hear. What surprised me, though, was when one of the elderly speakers said "Hong Kong" they used the English […]
Language LogPersophone Muslim population in China
https://t.co/6qX4TK1llDIn 1405, the 5th karmapa of Tibet visited Emperor Yongle of China, upon the latter's invitation. A scroll of painting was produced to depict he event. The commemorative texts on the scroll are in five languages: Chinese, Hui (Persian), Uyghur, Tibetan, and… pic.twitter.com/SuX1rlv5Yg — Iskandar Ding (@iskdin) April 1, 2024 video N.B.: Persophone ("Persian-speaking"), which […]
Language LogElle Cordova puts a beat on medicinal rat-a-tat
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Elle Cordova (@ellecordova) Another version: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ggFDNm4twGE François Lang: Her diction and memory are amazing. It really reminds me of the Major-General's patter song from The Pirates of Penzance. Selected readings "'Famous authors asking you out'" (3/10/24) "AI humor of the day" (2/25/24)
Language Log"The genes they inherited from their pirates"
Laura Baisas, “We were very wrong about birds”, Popular Science 4/1/2024: Birds combine genes from a father and a mother into the next generation, but they first mix the genes they inherited from their pirates when creating sperm and eggs. This process is called recombination and it is also something that occurs in humans. Recombination […]
Language LogAggressive Chinese toponymy
According to the CCP, India's northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh is now part of the PRC's "South Tibet", in other words, of China, so is to be named "Zangnan" — says nobody except the PRC. India rejected China's renaming of about 30 places in its northeastern Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh on Tuesday, calling the […]
Language LogDangerous opportunity
Lord knows we've encountered many bizarre translations and explanations of the much maligned Mandarin term, weiji (see "Selected readings") below, but this is one of the weirdest crosslingual definitions that has ever come to my attention: Suicide is usually an attempt to deal with a crisis. The Chinese character for "crisis" translates into "dangerous opportunity." […]
Language LogDon't keep apologizing for your poor L2
Ying Reinhardt wisely advises us in this delightful article: "I stopped apologising for my poor German, and something wonderful happened: After a decade in Germany, I was still anxious talking to native speakers – then I realised my language skills weren’t the problem" The Guardian (4/1/24 What Ying Reinhardt says about German as a second […]
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