Archive for the ‘Bilingualism’ Category
September 7, 2026
You say it’s your birthday / We’re gonna have a good time
— the Beatles, Birthday (1968, from The White Album)
[evoked for me in e-mail by Brian Joseph]
💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻 for (US) Labor Day, the flexed biceps of a manual worker (like my two grandfathers: Bethlehem Steel (maternal), Textile Machine Works (paternal); Melchior Zwicky doubled as a small-farmer as well). I’m two generations down and have ascended, as a professor and writer, to  the status of scholar and artist rather than worker and peasant — socioculturally if not financially in the upper middle class. With a thick veneer of high culture, but also fiercely egalitarian. It’s a balancing act.
Birthday greetings. I now veer onto something completely different (but hang on; things will come together): amidst the great avalanche of well-wishing for my birthday, #86, yesterday, an especially charming pair that came as a package. (more…)
Posted in Academic life, Bilingualism, Events and occasions, Language and culture, Languages, Linguists, Music, My life, Names, Ohio State, Social class, Social life, Teaching and learning | Leave a Comment »
August 23, 2025
In the 8/22 Bizarro strip, Wayno presents us with Johnny Peso, an intricately constructed Mexican-Spanish and Mexican-culture counterpart  to Johnny Paycheck as a performer on the Grand Ole Opry stage. If you don’t know about Johnny Paycheck and the Grand Ole Opry, you’re doomed; the cartoon will be incomprehensible. If you know who they are, you’ll get the joke; and the more you know about them, the more you’ll see in Wayno’s cartoon (I suspect there are still more things that I’ve missed). And then there’s a lot to say about the way Johnny Peso introduces himself. The cartoon:
(#1) The joke in the cartoon comes the two bilingual puns: Spanish peso punning on English paycheck, Spanish olĂ© punning on English vernacular ole; the puns are, in addition, what I’ve called (semiotically) satisfying puns (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
And then there’s a lot more.
(more…)
Posted in Bilingualism, Clothing, Hats, Interjections, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Puns, Spanish, Understanding comics | 7 Comments »
October 18, 2021
That’s the personal name /Ă©mÇťn/, in a fully anglicized rendition of either of two very different names: the (Egyptian) Arabic name of MSNBC commentator Ayman Mohyeldin; or the Irish name of Google software engineer Éamonn McManus (who’s also a friend of mine). Time for a multicultural, multilingual moment.
(more…)
Posted in Bilingualism, Linguists, Names | 9 Comments »
February 7, 2020
This posting represents the intersection of two posting topics that have pretty much gotten out of hand for me, so I’ll be extracting pieces from the larger material.
Topic 1 is the 1993 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, at which I gave (on 1/9/93) my 1992 Presidential Address to the society, “Mapping the ordinary into the rare: Basic/derived reasoning in theory construction”. In trying to retrieve memories of the event, I discovered that my computer files for the paper (the BSDR files) were in a format that was inaccessible to me and that all my paper files had been destroyed. So I put an appeal out on 12/21/19, on several sites, for help in finding a copy of (at least) my (very detailed) BSDR  handout.
Topic 2 is recent gifts to me of many kinds: symbolic roses for me, in accord with a 1/29/20 posting of mine on a line from the Sacred Harp:Â “Give me the roses while I live” (SH340 Odem (Second)). I’m an old man, currently writing things under the Python Queen of Scots cry “Not Dead Yet”. I have been given some excellent roses.
One of these wonderful gestures to me was a reconstruction of the BSDR handout — with formatting preserved — done for me, purely in the spirit of colleagueship, by Luigi Talamo, now at the Univ. of the Saarland. Whose labors I will celebrate here, with some notes about Luigi and his interests. But first I exhibit his gift.
(more…)
Posted in Academic life, Bilingualism, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, My life, Sardinian, Syntax | Leave a Comment »
December 6, 2017
Though today is one of the dark days of early December alluded to in my recent posting — it’s Mozart’s death day, a sad occasion indeed — it’s also St. Nicholas’s day (gifts!), and Chris Waigl’s birthday (eggcorns, remote sensing of wildfires in the Arctic, Python, knitting, and more, in three languages!), and Independence Day in Finland. As Riitta Välimaa-Blum reminds me, this year’s Independence Day is something spectacular: the centenary of Finland’s declaration of independence from Russia.
(#1) The Finnish flag
So raise a glass of Lakka (Finnish cloudberry liqueur) or Finlandia vodka, neat, to honor that difficult moment in 1917 — the year should call to your mind both World War I (still underway then) and the Russian revolution, and these enormous upheavals were in fact crucial to Finland’s wresting its independence from Russia.
(more…)
Posted in Art, Bilingualism, Books, Constructions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Language and politics, Linguistics in the comics, Linguists, Pragmatics, Prosody, Syntax, Word order | 4 Comments »
October 3, 2016
From univision news:
The New York Times prints first editorial in Spanish, asks Latinos to vote
On Sunday [October 2nd] the paper published an editorial in Spanish and English asking Hispanics to register to vote. The idea came from two writers who wanted to highlight the importance of the Latino vote in November.
(more…)
Posted in Bilingualism, Language and politics | 3 Comments »
March 17, 2016
A Daily Jocks ad (for their underwear club, but featuring Pump! wear) from the 14th, with the man we know as Lukas (sometimes as Joe) in the Pump! Cruise Boxer (with pockets), in Pump!’s home town of MontrĂ©al:
(#1)
And Lukas’s boyfriend Ken, doing a cock tease in his Pump! Touchdown Cruise Boxer (with a fly):
(#2)
My caption for #1:
He boasted he was
Monosexual – “Only guys,
All the time” – not any kind of
Multisexual, but he was
Aggressively multicultural,
Multilingual, working in
Gay porn in several languages,
Hustling guys in many countries,
Lukas in Czech in his
Native land, Joe in English with his
Boyfriend Ken in San Francisco.
Eventually, proudly, Lukas everywhere:
Finland (for Helsinki Athletica),
Montréal (for Pump!), and he’s a damn good
Papi.
(more…)
Posted in Bilingualism, Captions, Gender and sexuality, Language of advertising, Underwear | 1 Comment »
