( Read more... )

I don't order things online, but sometimes others do so for me, and I'm always amused / bemused by wording such as this:  "Your package will ship on 1/23/25". Normally, I would expect "your package will be shipped on 1/23/25" or "we will ship your package on 1/23/25".  Now, however, "Your package will ship on 1/23/25" seems to have become almost ( Read more... )

From Mark Sundaram and Aven McMaster at The Endless Knot, 50 minutes on "The Scandalous History of the Manhattan Cocktail":

Click to view

Mark Sudaram describes himself as

…an interdisciplinarian, medievalist, philologist, linguist, academic, musician, and philosophical layabout. He is the co-host of the Endless Knot Podcast and is the main force behind the ( Read more... )

With current LLM technology, users can create individualized chatbots, and interact with them over time as if they were real friends. This started almost a decade ago with Replika, and more recently, we've seen similar tools from Character.ai (from September 2022) and Meta's AI Studio (from July 2024).

There've been several recent problems with ( Read more... )

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68018&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=angrezi-devi-goddess-english

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68018

When I was in the British Museum bookshop several weeks ago, I was pleased by the numerous offerings of books on language.  Two types stood out:  those on the origins of speech and those on the origins of writing.  As we would say in Mandarin, they are iǎngmǎshì 兩碼事 ("two different things").  The best stocked / selling one on scripts was Andrew ( Read more... )

Yesterday on YouTube, "Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon sits down with Dasha Burns, POLITICO's White House bureau chief". At the end of the interview, there's a conventional exchange of thank-yous. From Dasha Burns:

All right Steve, I know you got a show to record,
thank you so much for- for beaming in here
and uh sorry for the ( Read more... )

[This is a guest post by Penglin Wang]

Identification of the Xiongnu word ninghu (寧胡) as meaning ‘six’ in the phrase ninghu yanshi ‘the sixth consort’ (Wang 2024) and its connection with Jurchen ninggu (寧谷) and Manchu ninggun ‘six’ has opened up the possibility for thinking about the Xiongnu official title danghu (當戶) in relation to ( Read more... )

Kim Jong-un’s bizarre new ban for North Koreans:
The hermit kingdom has outlawed popular items in recent months as part of a massive crackdown on Western cultural influences.
Heath Parkes-Hupton, news.com.au (1/6/25)

"Weird", as some attendees at the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year vote last evening might have said.

Dictator Kim Jong-un ( Read more... )

A recent SMBC:


( Read more... )