This week’s roundup focuses on Chinese and adds a splash of linguistics.
Languages don’t always change the way one wants. Trying to stop the changes is futile. More Intelligent Life discusses the phrase “beg the question”, which has shifted from its original meaning.
Frontal Cortex blogs about dreaming and it’s relationship to memories.
Chinayouren (via sinoglot) talks about the excessive use of exclamation marks(！！！！) by Chinese writers. Chinese punctuation is like an crocodile and English punctuation is like an alligator. Just because it looks the same does not mean it is the same. Be careful with your usage of punctuation in Chinese!!
Skritter’s blogger Ben discusses tongue-twisters and palindromes in Chinese.
Chinayouren‘s Language Thursdays has a good post on reading Chinese. I agree that reading is a quick way to master Chinese. ( and I always noticed the speed differences between myself and Japanese classmates when reading Chinese.) According to Chinayouren, much of the difficulty lies in parsing Chinese. While Parsing Chinese is an annoying problem when writing programs that deal with Chinese, I never noticed a major issue parsing Chinese while reading. Chinayouren also discussed reading a year ago.