Another Little Prince book translated to a Philippine language! This time, Kapampangan—the language of the provinces of Pampanga (where I lived as a kid) and Southern Tarlac, and other parts of the Central Luzon. The translation was done by Oscar Muñoz Balajadia, Jr. aka Paps Osmubal.

I think the closest Tagalog equivalent of Engllsh "lonely" that I've heard is nalulungkot na nag-iisa "being sad about being alone". But it's too wordy and doesn't quite feel the same as the English word

A colleague said [ˈʒʊʒɪŋ] over Zoom and the closed captioning transcribed it as ⟨zhuzhing⟩. Nice.

Took my Mom, brother, sister, and her fiancé to Seattle Pride during my visit home to Washington State. Except for my sister, it was their first time!

While in the #Kansai region of Japan, I kept my eyes & ears open for the Kansai dialect of Japanese. Here are examples of written Kansai dialect that I encountered. All but one were taken in Osaka while one was taken in Kyoto #langsky #日本語 #関西弁 #方言 #大阪 #京都

I did a double take when I saw a Japanese mailbox. I thought Tesla owned the Japanese postal system lol That 〒 symbol is a postal mark, called 郵便マーク yūbin māku. Postal codes come after this symbol as well. For example: 〒１２３−４５６７ #justgaijinthoughts

In his 1610 Spanish textbook for Tagalog speakers, Tomás Pinpin describes cheese as something that "a Spaniard eats, hard milk etc." Transcription: ang ,queſo, ay yaong quinacain nang Caſtillang, gatas na matigas &c.

me: Whatcha eat for lunch? husband: Hawaiian BBQ me: At L&L? him: Ono me: What happened? him: No, I ate at Ono me: Was it ʻono? him: Yes. And it was bad me: So it wasn't ʻono him: ???? No, it WAS Ono me: I mean ʻono. That means delicious in Hawaiian. So it wasn't good? him: no me: oh no him: ...

Interesting & potentially confusing linguistic coincidence English a.m. "the time between midnight and noon". From Latin ante meridiem "before noon" Greek π.μ. p.m. "the time between midnight and noon". From προ μεσημβρίας pro mesimvrías "before noon"

Last night, as I walked through Capitol Hill—Seattle’s gay neighborhood—I noticed a curious coincidence involving the rainbow crosswalk at Pine & Broadway. You see, there’s also a rainbow crosswalk at the corner of Castro & 18th in the Castro District—San Francisco’s gay neighborhood.

Repost from last year: The Etymology of the words for Christmas in the languages of the Philippines! Maligayang Pasko!

My two favorite Bill Labov papers, each of them absolutely wonderful and together spanning almost 60 years. May his memory be a blessing. The social motivation of a sound change, 1963 doi.org/10.1080/0043... The regularity of regular sound change, 2020 old.linguisticsociety.org/sites/defaul...

RIP Dr. William Labov, the father of sociolinguistics. I wrote a post about him that's too many characters for Blue Sky. I mentioned the time I was his and his wife Dr. Gillian Sankoff's student host when he visited Cornell in November 2013, during my 2nd year of grad school

My first ever journal paper! Terrified but so excited to see it in print. This is for the underdogs: Batanic langs & oblique case. Turns out the oblique does more and the locative does less than we think! Happy to bring Batanic to the fore of Austronesian linguistics! doi.org/10.1515/stuf... (DM 📄)

One of my Mongolian teachers wished me Happy Thanksgiving in Mongolian so I practiced writing it! The left side is "Happy Thanksgiving" and the right side is "Thank you", written in both Traditional Mongolian and Cyrillic scripts.