Thomas Batchelor
@tobbinatorscw
Linguist @ Kyushu University Linguistics (Creoles, Australia, Asia-Pacific, morphosyntax, policy, endangerment), politics (Syria, Taiwan, Australia in particular ig), history and other ramblings Anarchist at heart @tobbinatorscw in most places
Booking dot com has an "AI assistant" to help you plan transport between hotels on a trip, which apparently thinks that taking the bus means chartering the whole thing for each person?
don't want to mark student papers any more so had a crack at a very provisional Kununurra Kriol trial translation of the Very Hungry Caterpillar
Every now and then I think about this absolutely insane linguistics experiment that somehow got university ethics approval but had its funding cut
i wonder what else happened in 2014 to tank the KMT's popularity ever since, nothing policy-wise worth reflecting on i'm sure
What kind of insane routes are they doing for a slight hike to be more expensive than buying, insuring and fuelling a car every week. A weekly Plymouth area ticket is only £30
please someone explain why doing this is necessary for israel's security
Got some Limited Edition® Fuel Crisis™ crisps for the game tonight
An "invisible tax" for thee but not for me (do they not think for a moment that someone still has to pay those costs? Oh right, they don't regard the workers as human)
Manx has found itself stuck in a tricky spot against English for a long time and its people conscious of it. This 1835 dictionary describes a dedicated English-loan suffix for increasingly borrowed verbs, but also that this is not received well by many people using the language
A few years ago the Czechs elected a parliament with this seat map of four shades of blue
Despite that Palau seems to be one of the handful of former colonies (like Taiwan) where Japan has managed to turn around its reputation, and Japanese is still the third most widely spoken language behind English and Palauan, thanks to tourism
It's probably underdiscussed just how intense the Japanese colonial project was in the Pacific. Japanese settlers outnumbered Palauans within 5 years of Japanese administration and 8 Japanese for every Palauan at its peak in 1940 (and this excludes military personnel)
Look I don't want to be a partisan but these are the legislative agendas the two main parties have put forward this week (ahead of local elections this year)
I'm not sure exactly what message SCMP wants to be sharing with this but it's certainly not a good one
not the only party getting referendum brainworms in the world right now
Pro teaching tip: just draw the world map on the board from memory to get students to pay attention
Here he is about an hour after chasing us, thankfully heading across the river and away
You know what yeah that's exactly the language combination I needed (yes I bought)
It's great how the world continues to act like it's just those intractable Arabs blocking the way to a two-state solution www.bbc.com/news/article...
The median voter's mind is fascinating. The previous two governments were terrible, so I'm going to vote for the same party government again
"Had the KMT intended to sabotage Taiwan’s security, that record-high budget would never even have left the committee room" is a funny thing to say from a party that is currently making sure this year's budget doesn't leave (or even enter) the committee room. www.taipeitimes.com/News/editori...
KMT in English: we always support defence spending KMT in Mandarin: defence spending is evil