simplified characters in Taiwan
Not sure why and when people use simplified characters in Taiwan. If it were simply a matter of ease in writing, it would be more prevalent. Here it says 周年庆 instead of 週年慶.
Follow the past and herald the future 繼往開來
Follow the past and herald the future 繼往開來 #idioms #retro #streetart
language wars
For you English language buffs: a brief history of the fight between prescriptivists and descriptivists (by Joan Acocella in the New Yorker). In short, prescriptivists believe language follows certain rules, so there is a correct way to speak and write; descriptivists believe that language doesn’t necessarily follow strict rules so the best we can do is describe how people currently use … Read More
per petterson
James Wood, from the New Yorker: I have a friend, a writer, who became so obsessed by the Norwegian novelist Per Petterson’s “I Curse the River of Time” that he copied it out, word for word—perhaps hoping that his pure replica might unlock the secrets of that mysterious book, with its curling form and drifting sentences. When he told me … Read More
pom & arvo
…words I wouldn’t have known without having an Australian officemate.
thinking in norwegian
A common difficulty for Norwegian learners is to distinguish between the different “thinking” words. Using the right word for the right context is not always easy–at least if you’re worried about offending people. jeg tror = I think, but only in circumstances for which you are uncertain about something. for example, “I think he is 32 years old”–implying that you … Read More
how Ai Weiwei got his name
well, this is according to Wikipedia, but it’s cool if true: Ai Weiwei’s father was a famous Chinese poet called Aì Qīng (艾青). But that wasn’t his real name; his original name was Jiang Zhenghan (蒋正涵), styled Jiang Haicheng (蒋海澄)–in addition to his numerous pen names. Anyway, this poet was tortured and imprisoned in 1932 for opposing the Kuomintang (KMT) party. While … Read More
norwegian = really old english
I learned from my first Norwegian teacher that the English and Norwegian languages used to be very much the same, but then went divergent ways over the centuries. Today I found on my bookshelf (it must be G’s) a book called The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson–and while skimming through it I found … Read More