Language Log

The reason for this part 2 about VPNs in China is that so many good responses to my inquiries about VPNdom in China came pouring in just after the first post went out.  Also, there is such a wide variety of different viewpoints and experiences that you cannot expect there to be a single standard out there.  One thing has become very clear to me, and that is that the Chinese government wants to keep people on their toes and resort to a lot of self-policing.  This is common government policy in China, not just with regard to the internet, but to many aspects of social and political life.

For an up-to-date comprehensive primer about VPN usage in the PRC, I recommend that you read carefully this article:  "Are VPN's Legal in China?"  Not really.  It's a tricky business. You can be heavily fined and get in real trouble if the internet police catch you with one, especially if you use it to read / write something the CCP disapproves of.

The following sentence in this Bloomberg story

I’m of the mindset that no car payment is better than a new car payment – hence why my 2017 Volvo will likely stick around for a few more years – but I’ve been enticed more about the electric vehicles on the market.

…could lead the reader down a garden path of wondering why a new car payment is the best car payment.

"Interest(s)" (8/6/2025) engaged the often-unnoticed usage difference between "in the interest of" and "in the interests of". In a comment on that post, Yves Rehbein wrote

I would gamble that t is mistakenly inserted in in'eres[s], which is ambiguous to plural.

And I responded

Indeed. See "On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet", 4/19/2018, for an explanation of why /sts/ and /st/ and /s/ can be phonetically ambiguous. I've verified that this applies to interests / interest and will provide details in another post before long.

Julesy just keeps getting better and better:

China to restrict Tibetan language in region’s college entrance exam
Exclusion of core subject exam stokes fears Beijing is furthering campaign to ‘Sinicise’ region
John Reed, Financial Times (8/6/25)

Cantonese, Uyghur, Mongolian — they're all threatened.  And you can be sure that if China invades and occupies Taiwan, Taiwanese (and all of the aboriginal languages of the island) will be under duress.  What is being done to Cantonese, Uyghur, and Mongolian is the way the CCP deals with the majority languages of its various cultural regions, which together constitute approximately half of China's total land area.  Tibet alone occupies roughly 13% of the total land area of the PRC (Xinjiang is 1/6th [16.6% of the whole of China].  Since seven of Asia's major rivers (the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, and Indus) originate in Bod, and "The Roof of the World" possesses many other valuable natural and strategic resources, what happens to the native tongue of its inhabitants is no mean matter.

In an update to "Morpho-phonologically AI", I wrote

Ironically, since this puzzle was vocalically inspired by the term "AI" , I'm guessing that current AI systems are not very good at solving (or creating) puzzles like this. I'll give it a try later today.

But it seems that I was wrong.

Will Shortz, "Sunday Puzzle: Artificially Confused", NPR Weekend Edition 8/9/2025:

The theme of today's puzzle is A.I. every answer is a familiar two-word phrase or name in which the first word has a long -A vowel sound and the second word has a long-I vowel sound.

Do you speak Yukon English? These researchers want to hear it
'Linguists know very, very little about what's going on with Englishes in the Canadian North,' researcher says
CBC News · Posted: Aug 10, 2025

If you're not quite sure where Yukon is, it's way up there in northwest Canada, between British Columbia to the south, Alaska to the west, and Northwest Territories to the east.  It's cold, bitterly cold in winter, the coldest place in North America, with the abandoned town of Snag dropping down to −63.0 °C (−81.4 °F) in February, 1947.  Believe it or not, it gets extreme high heat in May and June, with the Mayo Road weather station, located just northwest of Whitehorse, recording a temperature of 36.5 °C (97.7 °F) in June, 2004.

As you might expect, the population of Yukon is sparse, with an estimated total of 47,126 as of 2025.  But now it gets interesting, at least to me.

"OpenAI Brings Back Fan-Favorite GPT-4o After a Massive User Revolt", Gizmodo 8/10/2025:

After a disastrous 72 hours that saw its most loyal users in open revolt, OpenAI is making a major U-turn.

In a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter) Sunday, CEO Sam Altman announced that the company is bringing back its beloved older AI models, including GPT-4o, and dramatically increasing usage limits for paying subscribers, a clear peace offering to a furious customer base.

A PubMed search for the phrase "lived experience" finds 11,139 papers within the past year. And an esperr search shows that the relative frequency of this phrase has been increasing rapidly on PubMed:

It's not just in the fields covered by PubMed — the Social Science Research Network finds the phrase in 1,376 papers within the past year, including titles like "Distant Writing: Literary Production in the Age of Artificial Intelligence", "Civil V. Common Law: The Emperor Has No Clothes", and "The implementation of senior high school in the Philippines: An advantage or disadvantage to students' future opportunities".

Avram Pitch, "Meet President Willian H. Brusen from the great state of Onegon", The Register 8/8/2025:

OpenAI's GPT-5, unveiled on Thursday, is supposed to be the company's flagship model, offering better reasoning and more accurate responses than previous-gen products. But when we asked it to draw maps and timelines, it responded with answers from an alternate dimension.

AI Is Helping Historians With Their Latin
A new tool fills in missing portions of ancient inscriptions from the Roman Empire

By Nidhi Subbaraman Aug. 6, 2025

In recent years, we have encountered many cases of AI assisting (or not) in the decipherment of ancient manuscripts in diverse languages.  See several cases listed in the "Selected readings".  Now it's Latin's turn to benefit from the ministrations of artificial intelligence.

People across the Roman Empire wrote poetry, kept business accounts and described their conquests and ambitions in inscriptions on pots, plaques and walls.

The surviving text gives historians a rare glimpse of life in those times—but most of the objects are broken or worn.

“It’s like trying to solve a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, only there is tens of thousands more pieces to that puzzle, and about 90% of them are missing,” said Thea Sommerschield, a historian at the University of Nottingham.

Now, artificial intelligence is filling in the blanks.

An AI tool designed by Sommerschield and other European scientists can predict the missing text of partially degraded Latin inscriptions made hundreds of years ago and help historians estimate their date and place of origin.