Subscribe to Blog via Email
Archive:
Day: September 27, 2016
Why does “Chinaman” carry a negative, denigrating connotation, while “Englishman” does not?
Thanks to posters, and in particular those I agree with 🙂 — Lee Ballentine, Sng Kok Joon Leonard. Some answers brought up how the word was coined, so I went to the Oxford English Dictionary. As it turns out, the entry for Chinaman has not been updated yet, and Google Books was if anything more […]
What was the profession of 1st Greeks who arrived in Australia and became famous for that?
You’ve read something somewhere, OP, I can tell, but I’m at a loss about where. The answer, pace Romain Bouchard, is not in Wikipedia, but I don’t remember it. Let me try and reconstruct it. The big Greek migration wave into Australia was in the 1950s–70s. The stereotype was milk bar owner (= grocery story) […]
Does your language misuse grammatical case or gender to make a rhetorical point?
I’m glad you asked, OP. Language is a system, as the structuralists of yore argued. And if there is a paradigm of cases, then people will exploit choices in the paradigm to communicate different kinds of meaning. Even when those choices should be grammatically incorrect. The example I have in mind is from Modern Greek. […]
Could Google Translate maintain a central codex “language” therefore bypassing artifacts that come from English-as-central-language issue?
Google Translate, like many machine translation projects, does not maintain [math]n^2[/math] language pairs when adding languages to its bank; it appears to maintain just n:English mappings—so that a translation from, say, Greek to Persian is pretty clearly via English as an interlanguage. That is a clear scalability issue, if you’re going to maintain the number […]