Language Log: "Chinese — Traditional"
The other day, just before going through security at the international terminal at the airport in Melbourne, Australia, I noticed a second sign beside the sign of instructions on what you couldn't...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Goddard and Frohlich Respond to Atkinson
The following is a letter written by Ives Goddard and Bruno Frohlich of the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution in response to the paper by Q. D. Atkinson claiming that the...
View ArticleLanguage Log: A Rejection of the Power Semantic
It has been over fifty years since Roger Brown and Albert Gilman published their classic article "The pronouns of power and solidarity" (American Anthropologist 4/6:24-39, 1960), analyzing what they...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Myaamia revitalization and Meskwaki insults
Two conferences I really want to attend are currently in progress. The one I'm at is in Milwaukee, on Language Death, Endangerment, Documentation, and Revitalization; there have been some wonderful...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Holy s***! J-school punchy prose?
Yesterday's Missoulian, reporting on a non-shy mountain lion that was hanging around a campground in western Montana, had the following memorable sentence: `The kids were playing and Gerhard was...
View ArticleLanguage Log: English or Engelsk?
A recent article in Science Daily has the headline `Linguist makes sensational claim: English is a Scandinavian language'. The claim in question is Jan Terje Faarlund's conclusion that `English is in...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Mutilated currency examiners
I love reading Montana newspapers. Today's Missoulian has an article entitled "Helena man reassembles five $100 bills eaten by dog". (The article notes that the dog ignored a $1 bill; apparently it...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Ultraconserved words? Really??
On the web site of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in the "Early Edition" section, is an article by Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade:...
View ArticleLanguage Log: Xenoglossy & the psychiatrists
I just learned that the American Psychiatric Association, at their annual meeting last month, had a Media Workshop on "A Case of Xenoglossy and the Nature of Consciousness", where the organizer, a...
View ArticleLanguage Log: A new mixed language in the news
Lately we've seen a number of hair-tearing Language Log posts (including a couple of mine) about bad linguistic pseudo-hemi-demi-quasi-science getting into major science journals and the popular...
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