Entries tagged with language

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It's foggy outside. Why am I awake?

Insomnia means I'm probably going to be dead at work in the afternoon.

On the other hand I got my code to compile. So in the morning I can run it and watch it crash and burn!

This entry was brought to you by intervocalic alveolar flapping.

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language,
meme

Accents and memes

I blame

astra_nomer and

eowyn.

( Accent meme; another way to say 'I'm not a native (L1) speaker' )

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language

Etymology Fun

I chanced to look up the word "rickshaw" in Dictionary.com and was surprised to find that the American Heritage Dictionary now includes Middle Chinese in some of their etymologies. Below is their etymology for "jinrikisha" for instance:

[Japanese jinrikisha : jin, person (from Middle Chinese n^yin, rin) + riki, strength (from Middle Chinese lik) + sha, vehicle (from Middle Chinese chia).]

If I recall correctly, they used to just break up the words into Sino-Japanese morphemes, so this is definitely a step forward.

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Davis Square food and language

Just got dinner from the Blue Shirt Cafe. A couple of old Asian men were screwing plastic tubing into the ceiling of the restaurant's entrance, and I heard one of them say, "Kam ū a-lú-mih ê thè-phù? A-lú-mih ê khah súi lah." (Is there alumnium tape? The aluminum stuff looks better.) I'm always struck by how nostalgic I get when I hear people speak my home dialect.

Entry tags:

language,
random

Amusement of the day

I now have a new web site for the answers to all my questions--the Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia! Maybe it'd be more useful if I knew German....