Credit: Khushboo Jain.

Foreign reporters can't translate Trump

So, how do you translate "bigly" and "I moved on her like a bitch" in other languages? In Chinese, apparently it's "I pursued her like a harlot, but I could not succeed.” Some of Trump's strange vocal tics are making linguists very frustrated.

Also, Talking Points Memo discovered a formula in Trump’s Twitter takedowns: three-sentence insult haikus. “Single clause declarative sentence, single clause declarative sentence, primary adjective/term of derision.” 

Oct 25, 2016

Chinese people rarely talk about renminbi or yuan. The word they use is “kuai”, which literally means “piece”, and is the word used historically for coins made of silver or copper.

The Chinese currency is called both "yuan" and "renminbi." Which one should you use, if either? Turns out, there are political reasons behind your choice.
↩︎ Marginal Revolution
Oct 25, 2016

The Inuktitut language doesn't have an alphabet. Instead, its writing system is an abugida, where each symbol represents both a consonant and a vowel.

Is it possible that, along with these differences, my moral compass also points in somewhat different directions depending on the language I’m using at the time?

Why our memories and moralities are deeply entwined with the languages we speak.
↩︎ Scientific American
Sep 16, 2016

Can Japanese read Chinese?

As any speaker (or reader) of the two languages know, Chinese and one form of written Japanese use the same alphabet despite not being able to understand each other's spoken language. Since this form isn't phonetic anyway—meaning that instead of using letters they use pictograms that have no connection to how the word sounds—does that mean that Chinese and Japanese readers can "read" the other language? Can a Japanese speaker be literate in Chinese, even if they can't speak it? Mark Schreiber addresses this persistent claim.

Sep 15, 2016

Her Láadan lexicon includes an elaborate vocabulary for specifically female bodily experiences: for instance, there’s a set of structurally
related verbs with meanings like ‘to menstruate joyfully’, ‘to menstruate painfully’, ‘to menstruate early’ and ‘to menstruate for the first time.’

With all the debate around gendered language and terms, a linguist dives into the history of one of the original women-made languages.
↩︎ Language: A Feminist Guide
Sep 11, 2016

It's more correct to say, for instance, that people living in England developed a new accent than that Americans "lost" their British way of speaking.

Where did the American-British divides originate when it comes to how we speak English?
↩︎ Atlas Obscura
Sep 11, 2016
More Headlines