The image you see here, when combined with a few moments’ thought, provides the answer to the puzzling question: How can one write in a completely foreign language? The solution to that puzzle is: On a piece of paper, handwrite any phrase you like, in a language you do know. Then rotate the paper 180 […]
The word “really”, expressed forcefully, was the crux of a long-running comedy routine more than a decade ago, on the American TV program Saturday Night Live. A recent study takes a really good look at the equivalent word in the Mandarin Chinese language. The study is: “Stance-taking and (inter)subjective roles of Mandarin zhende (ma/a),” Shuang […]
Benedict Cumberbatch, a British actor with a most unusual name, has been an inspiration to people who study or teach about language. Let’s be more specifically accurate about that: his name has been the inspiration. Here are three items that would not exist but for the existence of Benedict Cumberbatch’s name. Benedict Cumberbatchia (1) “A […]
This is another drawing by artist Becky Moon, about her favorite Ig Nobel Prize winners. Moon has been a scholar of the Ig Nobel Prizes since she was a young teenager. This one celebrates the Ig Nobel Linguistics Prize awarded in 2007 to Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the […]