Language Log

This is a follow-up to "How to pronounce the name of the ruler of the PRC" (10/26/25).  Surprised by the amount of dissension over how to pronounce his name and how to represent the pronunciation in romanization, I decided to try another approach.  I asked all of the students (undergrads and grads) in my Fiction and Drama and in my Language, Script, and Society in China classes to write down the best way that could think of to transcribe Xi Jinping's in roman or Cyrillic letters — other than the official Hanyu Pinyin version, Xi Jinping.

Only two of the students were linguistics majors, about a dozen were East Asian Languages and Civilizations majors.  The remainder were drawn from a wide variety of disciplines and fields (humanities, sciences, and social sciences) across the university.  About 90% had a Chinese background (ranging in ability from minimal acquaintance to full fluency).  There were a couple of students from Taiwan, a few from Cantonese and other topolect areas, one had a Korean background, and two or three had no prior exposure to any East Asian languages.

Zhaofei Chen recently came across a Japanese bath bucket (湯桶 yuoke) with a big “あ” carved inside. She says that it’s literally called “あゆおけ (ayuoke),” which sounds just like “Are you OK?”, a perfect mix of Japanese and English.

Let's see how many LL readers get this one.

This man is a Punjabi Hindu, speaking some Punjabi, some Hindi, with a lot of English mixed in, so you might be able glean a bit of what he is trying to say (he's being interviewed about a flood).

"Punjab flood: Man got interviewed, but no one could understand him"

On Language Log and in Sino-Platonic Papers, we have often focused on the rise of romanization for Sinitic languages, especially as engendered by the Jesuits and other Catholic orders.  In this post, I would like to introduce an Italian Ph.D. thesis that does a commendable job of surveying what transpired in this regard during the 16th through 18th centuries:

Emanuele Raini, "I Sistemi di Romanizzazione del Cinese Mandarino nei Secoli XVI-XVIII"

Sapienza – Università di Roma, Facoltà di Studi Orientali, Studi Asiatici, XXII ciclo, 2009/2010, published 2012

The Vastness of Language Variation Across the Globe
Panel. AAAS 2026 Annual Meeting.  Coming in February, 2026.

Organizer:  Lenore Grenoble, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Co-Organizer:  Jeff Good, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY
Moderator:  Jeff Good, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY

Panelists

"Multilingual Language Ecologies and Linguistic Diversity",
Wilson de Lima Silva, Linguistics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

"AI Approaches to the Study of Gesture, Prosody, and Linguistic Diversity",
 Kathryn Franich, Linguistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

"Sometimes Big Questions Call for Small Data",
Gareth Roberts, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

Back in early April of this year, Kirinputra brought up this distinction at the end of a comment thread on Cantonese, but it came at the conclusion  of the thread, so — though it deserved discussion — there was no opportunity to hold one at that time.  Consequently, I reopen the deliberations now by quoting Kirinputra's final comment:

"Sinitic is like Romance" is not a working, truth-bearing analogy, esp. not for a layman audience. (Maybe some subset of Sinitic is like Romance, though.) "Sinitic" arguably harbors much more abstand diversity than Romance, for one thing. More importantly, Romance is by now evidence-based. Humans have a detailed understanding of the mechanics & timing of the divergence from a common ancestor. Sinitic is belief-based. The approach to the detailed reality is largely speculative & often circular.

[This is a guest post by Diana Shuheng Zhang]

When I first learned the name of this important port city in northeastern Taiwan, I was told that it was originally written with characters that mean "chicken coop; hen coop; rooster cage", Taiwanese "Kelang" (POJ Ke-lâng/Koe-lâng).  I found that to be rather droll and thought that it was probably derived from the cramped geological formation of the hilly city.  The actual story of the city's name, which has come back into the news today, is quite different, as I will explain below the break.

Keelung pranked by name change on Google Maps
Prankster used characters for 18th century rendering of Keelung's name
Duncan DeAeth, Taiwan News (Oct. 24, 2025)

That's the title of a 9:23 video by a mysterious figure named Ming that was posted a month ago and that I happened upon several days later:

Following upon our enthusiastic, productive discussions on the main East Asian word for "slave" (奴隷 J. ドレイ M. núlì) a few weeks ago and Chau Wu's drawing of parallels with the corresponding Greek word for a person of that status several days after that, I've become deeply interested in Greek δούλος ("slave").  (See the first three items in "Selected readings".)