tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91269590448537396832026-03-13T17:27:32.562-07:00A blog about linguistics, language learning and travel.Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.comBlogger235125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-50534505066520544612016-06-02T21:00:00.000-07:002016-06-03T01:51:01.838-07:00

This past week I've been in London and a friend of mine, Premila, invited me to join her at the annual Gurkha Cup day celebrations out in the town of Aldershot, a military town close to Guildford. The Gurkha Cup is an all-day soccer tournament that's been organized by the Tamu Dhee Association and held every year on the Sunday of the May Day bank holiday long weekend. The event draws huge

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-40129853147804959802016-05-19T21:00:00.000-07:002018-08-20T04:46:15.421-07:00

Today's post is brought to you by "ongoing problems with terminology in linguistics". As my newsfeed this week has filled up with reblogged and retweeted articles about Singlish, often the first thing that gets mentioned is that Singlish is an English-based "creole". But what exactly does the term creole mean? In many introductory linguistics textbooks, dictionaries and the Wikipedia entry (at

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-86077317976001979532016-05-12T21:00:00.000-07:002016-06-03T04:06:55.564-07:00

The BBC just covered this story: Singapore terms join Oxford English Dictionary, which is basically about how Singapore English words like wah and shiok get to join their linguistic compatriots lah and kiasu in the OED, the world's "definitive record of the English language". There's even a little quiz at the bottom of article for those of you who want to flaunt your

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-4917915059187477282014-09-18T20:30:00.000-07:002016-06-03T04:06:14.740-07:00

So I should probably apologise / apologize for my lack of updates the past year or so. It's been pretty crazy since I started grad school - I'd have to spend many a blog post explaining all the wonderful things I've been able to do since I started in the linguistics PhD programme here at the University of Oregon. In the meantime, in the 'American' spirit of self-promotion, I thought I should

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-8653815984833641122013-12-02T22:00:00.000-08:002013-12-03T17:02:22.143-08:00

My apologies to all my readers, I just haven't had all that much time to blog since I started grad school, though I have a lot of things I'd like to blog about! (I'll be making time after finals week next week to catch up on my posting.) Thanks to the Nom Nom Linguistics Facebook page, I just found out about this Tumblr site called Linguistics Sample Sentences: http://

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-76182164342274792182013-10-26T21:30:00.000-07:002013-10-26T21:30:02.327-07:00

At the moment, I'm TA-ing for a course called Language and Power here at the University of Oregon, and I've been recounting the following story to my students. It happened more than 10 years ago after I'd just moved from Singapore to Melbourne. I was at my university orientation, where I met a number of people, including a guy from Sweden. We got to talking, and he eventually asked me what

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-21195375841589040332013-09-30T13:30:00.000-07:002013-09-30T13:30:00.326-07:00

Okay, I apologise for the long delay, but finally(!), I present you with the solution to the problem set I posted in my last blog post, many months ago (see here). (Right click the image below and select 'Open Image in New Tab'. Or click here for an image you can magnify.)  The language is Singaporean Teochew, as spoken by an aunt of mine who lives in Singapore. It's part of

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-60205616526324629782013-05-25T08:59:00.000-07:002013-06-05T08:07:29.683-07:00

The past few months, I've been learning a language here in Singapore that's been noted for its crazy mind-bending use of tone sandhi. I thought I'd write a little about it in this post, since it's a phenomenon that some linguists may not be familiar with (given the tendency for many to run away at the first 'hearing' of anything tonal). At the end of this post, I'm also

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-72269140526906496092013-05-14T10:30:00.000-07:002014-09-18T20:23:08.726-07:00

Last week I had a few friends ask me about a recently published study titled "Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia" by Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude and Andrew Meade. It's been making headlines all over the globe in articles with titles like "English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language" (Wired.com), "Ice Age language may share

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-38495819162526034502013-05-04T22:30:00.000-07:002013-05-06T02:52:45.468-07:00

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the English word hotel was first recorded in the 1640s and denoted a 'public official residence'. The modern sense of the word as 'an inn of the better sort' (i.e. 'a place offering lodging, food and other services to travellers') was first recorded in 1765. The word comes from the French hôtel, which itself is derived from the Medieval

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-36672129661246940652013-05-01T01:00:00.000-07:002013-05-01T07:39:34.278-07:00

One of the things I was impressed with during my short stay in Taiwan was the Taiwan Indigenous Television (TITV) channel, which features programming for and by indigenous peoples of Taiwan, including news programmes, educational shows and variety shows. Here's a screenshot of a programme that is in (what I assume to be) the Seediq language (sometimes still classified with

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-68600539731299707232013-04-28T08:45:00.000-07:002013-04-29T09:25:43.821-07:00

Last month, I was in Taiwan for about a week with Mum. We spent a few days at Sun Moon Lake (日月潭), which we used as a base to visit our places, including Alishan (阿里山). The mornings and evenings were blissfully quiet without the hordes of tourists arriving by mid-morning. One thing I did not expect to see were signs for 'Assamese Black Tea' products, including this one for '

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-44002193218036639222013-04-21T10:00:00.000-07:002013-04-21T19:13:24.862-07:00

I just got to see Phou-oibi, the Rice Goddess, as part of the Tapestry of Sacred Music 2013 programme here at the Esplanade in Singapore.  It is described as a Manipuri ballad opera, performed by the Laihui Ensemble from Manipur in North-East India. It tells the story of a number of goddesses, including the Goddess of Fish, the Goddess of Water, the Goddess of Land, the Goddess

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-70418927469248593412013-04-12T12:00:00.000-07:002013-04-14T10:05:17.172-07:00

India and its immediate neighbours celebrate not one, not two but... a bewildering number of New Year's Days (not even counting the one in the Gregorian calendar, the Islamic New Year and Tibetan New Year). In fact, this week alone will see the start of a new year for a number of different communities across South Asia - and they don't all fall on the same day or signal the start of the

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-56307912723423959362013-04-07T21:00:00.000-07:002016-05-13T12:00:05.785-07:00

In my previous post, I looked at what the government had hoped to accomplish through its language policies, as summarised here in this quote from Lee Kuan Yew: "Our ideal was that the Chinese would be able to speak English and Mandarin, Malays would be able to speak Malay and English, and Indians would be able to speak Tamil and English. Alas, the situation did not develop as we had hoped.

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-9141299957611415542013-04-03T15:00:00.000-07:002013-05-01T09:16:29.829-07:00

Recently, I joined the Facebook group "Heritage languages of Singapore", and was immediately directed to an online petition by a group called 'Creatives For Causes' to reintroduce Chinese dialects on local TV and radio programs in Singapore. Judging by the number of signatures (only 238 at the time of writing), it seems that either it's been poorly publicised, or people just don't agree with the

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-37247230467145831202013-03-28T11:00:00.000-07:002013-03-28T11:00:04.004-07:00

While accommodation options abound in and around the town of Kohora, for visitors planning forays into neighbouring Kaziranga National Park, one place stands out for me. It came highly recommended by an Assamese friend who also had his wedding here at the end of December 2012, just a few weeks after my stay. The Wild Grass Lodge is located just east of the town of Kohora, a few

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-2754848120080716842013-03-16T08:30:00.000-07:002013-03-16T12:28:59.073-07:00

Even though I am not in NE India at the moment, I still have a couple of things I have been meaning to post. Back in December, after the Hornbill Festival in Kohima, I took my friend Simon to the Kaziranga National Park in neighbouring Assam. It was a convenient time to go since he was already in the area. However, February to April is usually a better time of the year to visit as the grass is

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-27280555968814063302013-03-11T11:00:00.000-07:002013-03-16T12:30:40.951-07:00

A few weeks ago, I visited the Singapore Night Safari with a friend who was visiting from Australia. We spotted some mugs at the souvenir shop which featured the names of 'popular' animals translated into various languages. Incidentally, this friend of mine is also a speaker of Hebrew, and quickly pointed out the glaring error on all of the mugs. For those of you who can read Hebrew, it's

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-89701190416000932982013-03-06T14:00:00.000-08:002013-04-03T19:20:26.216-07:00

I've been meaning to post this for a while now, since I saw this advertisement at my uncle's clinic here in Singapore. It's an ad for some type of hair loss treatment. In English, the ad reads: "Male pattern hair loss can be treated". In contrast, the Chinese (Mandarin) ad reads: 医生可以治疗你的脱发问题。yīshēng kěyǐ zhìliáo nǐ de tuōfà wèntí which can be roughly translated as 'The doctor

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-44244679782402765472013-03-01T05:00:00.000-08:002016-05-13T11:59:23.337-07:00

[If you've come to this post because you're wondering if a particular language is 'futureless' or not, skip down right to the bottom for a summary of the various points I make in this fairly lengthy post.] This post follows on from my previous one about the work of Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at Yale. To recap, Chen's central hypothesis is that the language you speak may affect your

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-52090972393624587222013-02-24T05:00:00.000-08:002013-02-25T03:28:43.565-08:00

There's been quite a bit of internet buzz this past week about the work of Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at Yale. You can see his TEDx talk here: Could language affect your way to save money? as well as an attention-grabbing and rather misleading BBC article about his work: Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire. Chen's central hypothesis is that the language you speak

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-12973838081625151422012-12-22T08:00:00.000-08:002013-03-03T17:35:46.557-08:00

As I prepare to leave India again (this time to spend Christmas at home with the family for the first time in years), I thought I'd share some photos from a visit to another friend's village in Nagaland. Like Khonoma village that we also visited, Khuzama is an Angami village. You can tell it's an Angami by the suffix -ma (corresponding to Sumi village names that end in -mi). However, most 

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-36771243543662838222012-12-15T05:00:00.000-08:002013-04-29T01:00:15.953-07:00

Two years ago I visited Khonoma village, which is about 2 hours from Kohima (depending on road conditions). Unfortunately, the day I visited was terribly foggy and it was hard to see anything (see here). This time, I visited again shortly after the Hornbill Festival. Thankfully the weather was much better, since I also came with a friend from Australia who may not have another chance to

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9126959044853739683.post-32951688340846584712012-12-09T14:30:00.000-08:002013-03-03T17:34:23.159-08:00

So the Hornbill Festival at Kisama has come and gone. This year I brought a friend from Australia along to enjoy the festivities. After my experiences at the festival last year and the year before, I didn't really want to spend all week in Kisama, since many of the shows start to feel repetitive after a few days. I thought it'd be best if we arrive on the 4th day for the last few days, then

Amoshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06601865011692540262noreply@blogger.com4