Language
Da Hsueh
Earlier I identified the phonetic system used to transliterate the name of my university as Gwoyeu Romatzyh 國語羅馬字. Today I look at the official address for my school, which was recently updated by the administration and all departments were required to follow suite. Accordingly, both the homepage of the university and my name card say […]
Characters
I was going to write a short piece linking to two great Chinese-character related blog posts, one by Victor Mair (guest posting on Language Log) and the other by LanguageHat, but Pinyin News beat me to it. So go read Mark’s intro instead (he includes some useful additional links), or just hop over to the […]
Dong Hwa
The official “English” name of my university is National Dong Hwa University 國立東華大學. I put English in quotes because, as you can see, the name is a mix of translation and romanization. This is different from some other universities, such as Taiwan Normal University 國立台灣師範大學, where the whole name is translated, but similar to schools […]
Indexicality
According to Wikipedia, one of the characteristics of indexicals is that “in order to successfully interpret them the hearer must know the respective speaker, time, and place of utterance.”
Amardeep’s latest poem plays with indexicality and how it is conveyed (or not) on the web:
If you’re reading this in Delhi, Bombay, Chennai, or indeed, Taiwan, either […]
Shimu
Who the hell is this “shimu” everyone is talking about? Well, not everyone - just our department’s always helpful and infinitely polite administrative assistant. After noticing my blank stare, she explained that shimu 師母 was another word for my wife.
More precisely, it is a way to refer to the wife of a teacher. Not surprisingly […]
Uptown
One of the things I love about riding the NY City Subway is how much individual personality each of the train conductors has. They each have different ways of announcing the stops, of telling people to get away from the closing doors, etc. The lack of standardization can be annoying at times, for instance, some […]
Pity the Fool
On the social news site, Digg, someone with the alias “homerfink” posted a link to a story about Mr. T’s return to television. The show is called “I Pity the Fool” and features the former A-Team and Rocky III star traveling the country giving Dr. Phil-like tough-love personal advice.
In their blurb, homerfink wrote:
Pity the fool […]
Aggravating
Having never served on a jury, my knowledge mostly comes from the movie, “12 Angry Men“. But I’ve always found the instructions given to juries fairly odd. They seem to imply a very strange idealized notions of language, thought, and discourse that have no bearing on reality. It is as if they were written by […]
Nuestro Himno
Recently some latino celebrities recorded a Spanish language version of the American national anthem, leading president Bush to state:
I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English, and they ought to learn to sing the National Anthem in English.
This led Eric Bakovic at Language Log to do […]
White Matter
Although I am somehow now functioning in a Chinese language working environment, I know myself to be a very slow language learner. While many people study languages because they have a natural facility for doing so, I study languages for the opposite reason: because it is so damn hard.
Although I normally wouldn’t touch BBC science […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
