Two neat Mandarin-related news bits

darcey
 April 10, 2008, 02:08 AM posted in General Discussion

So, I'm a bit of a language nut (studying linguistics), and I have some RSS feeds set up through Google Reader. Two of them are language and linguistics related. I'm assuming the increased posting I see related to Mandarin and China is because of the Olympics--I keep skimming them and keep seeing more and more on Mandarin! In the past few days, I found two neat posts from Language Log that I wanted to share.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=9 (Discussion of computers affecting writing)

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6 (a "funny translation" piece)

 

-Darcey-

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marcelbdt
 April 10, 2008, 07:53 AM

The Queen and the irrigation is very funny. I wonder if the translation was done by a computer, or just by a very determined person armed with nothing but a dictionary.

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darcey
 April 10, 2008, 10:31 PM

I have no idea... I've found a couple websites where they show various things like that; one of them was a set of children's blocks with a picture and an English word on it, and ... wow, some of those words were odd, and didn't match what I'd call the picture. I'm a geek about these kind of things and tend to bookmark them. :)