One of my students asked why Christmas was spelled X-mas? Here is what Wikipedia has to say: The word “Christ” and its compounds, including “Christmas”, have been abbreviated for at least the past 1,000 years, long before the modern “Xmas” was commonly used. “Christ” was often written as “XP” or “Xt”; there are references in [...]
On December 12th, Stephen Colbert’s “Word” was ” Casualty of War.” You can watch it online here, but Colbert’s impeccable logic is so well crafted that I wanted to share this transcript (the text in brackets represent the text which appears in the on-screen box): Now I was burning the Iraq Study Group report the [...]
Teresa at Making Light has a great post about how deaf people are using YouTube: Why did it not occur to me that the signing deaf would be using YouTube as a public forum? This is transformational. Many of them aren’t comfortably fluent in written language. For many more, sign is and always will be [...]
I’d like to briefly link to two great discussions about the origins of Taiwanese vegetable names: Prince Roy discusses the origins of the Taiwanese word for “cabbage” which is quite different from the rest of the Chinese speaking world. Here is a summary from Language Hat: There is apparently a popular theory that the word [...]
I love this poem by Paul Blackburn which Language Hat found in an online poetry journal called Jacket. It seems to capture the essence of certain strands of American poetry. It is quite long, but here is a taste: Techniques of juxtaposition. Techniques of speech rhythms, sometimes very intense, sometimes developed slowly, as one would [...]
I love this map of South Asia, showing the names of each of the various countries and states in the local language and writing system. Image from Wikipedia, found on Language Log (which also remarks on some errors in the map). For a more detailed linguistic map of the region, see here. {Scripts, Maps, South [...]
And the winner is … Geoffrey Nunberg! A lot has been said about this nasty debate, and I’ve avoided it because it seems hard to get engaged without slinging mud, but Geoff Nunberg’s piece is truly excellent. Actually there isn’t much here about Pinker, which is perhaps why the piece is so good. Nunberg takes [...]
One of the hardest things about learning Chinese is the lack of good dictionaries. I have one of the best – the ABC dictionary with “over 10,000 characters and approximately 200,000 words and phrases” in its electronic form (also on my Palm). It serves me pretty well for most tasks, but almost every day I [...]
About half of the students at my college are Taiwanese Aborigines. Many of them are able to apply to the school directly, rather than going through the national examination system. This effectively a form of affirmative action, one which I fully endorse. In fact, it is one of the reasons I wanted to come here [...]
A conversation while ordering dinner: Me: I’ll have the poached fish. Waiter: Do you want milkfish or turbot? Me: No, she’s not my wife. Even in our native languages, we understand far less of what we hear than we realize. Try counting how many times in a day you say “What?” A lot of time [...]