Interestingly, the discourse around genocide is usually the same whether talking about the Armenians, Jews, Kurds, etc.

And we see the same discourse around current events

"A Problem from Hell" by Samantha Powers p210

How was the coining of the word 'genocide' by Raphael Lemkin inspired by Kodak (yes, the cameras).

He read George Eastman's reason for the word Kodak:
1. It's short
2. Easy to pronounce
3. Doesn't resemble anything else in the art

Lemkin sought to do the same as well and settled on Genocide.

Chinese skills leveling up. My wife told me a joke with a pun in Chinese and I got it!

Guess the sports brand if you take a cow to the north pole. . .

牛北冷死
(cow north freeze to death)

[Chinese pronunciation of New Balance]

Bill Labov made it possible for John Rickford and therefore Renee Blake and therefore me, to have a rich life in linguistics. He knew that Black students and speakers had so much to contribute. We will forever owe him a debt of gratitude for his contributions to the field, but also to all of us ❤️

This explains the general apathy of most students in my classes. I'd say on average 3-4 students out of 50 will show up on time and actually try hard, doing all classwork and study.

Many are shocked when they think just showing up, sitting on their cell phone doesn't help them pass.

There's an older Tibetan lady (who speaks 4 languages) who introduced me to Tibetan butter tea.

Traditionally made from yak milk, it's buttery, salty, and delicious!

She says in Tibet they sip butter tea all day long to stay warm.

#tea #tibet #culture

I'm on my second Taiwanese crime thriller and I'm beginning to see a pattern different from US / German /Nordic ones: they will make you cry.

They're heavy into gut-wrenching drama, exploring the lives of victims families and the aftermath as well as the detective's

Victim's Game
Copycat Killer

My daughter used a Chinese resultative complement in English, a second verb indicating a result.

She said, "I read finish the book." (看完）

I was giddy because the acquisition of NOT using such serial verb constructions was the topic of my masters thesis

#lingsky #langsky #acquisition #linguistics

I find these street food menus interesting. They function as both an advertisement and a menu.

And one if the few times writing is still shown top to bottom where most things are left to right, such as the blue text above
#lingsky #langsky #menu #Taiwan #nightmarket

I was trying to communicate with a nurse at work, but she failed to understand anything I said.

Despite being an intermediate Chinese speaker, many see a foreigner, get nervous and don't understand. They aldo do this to my daughter who is a native speaker.

My boss suggested doing a case study.

Here's the unlikely century-long story of how a non-gendered pronoun became gendered, and then got itself re-de-gendered.

This one's got everything! Poetry! Grammar! Love songs! Queer communities! Unicode! and ... Y.R. Chao!

What more could you want?

#langsky 🀄️📚
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An English teacher told me he wished he had the skill to learn grammar like I did with learning Finnish and Icelandic.

I informed him that learning a new language isn't down to skill; we all acquire language the same way.

He was shocked.

1 down, 6000 more English teachers in Taiwan to go!

This is my first post. I'll post about language and linguistics, food, culture, crazy stuff in Taiwan. It'll be fun.