Language Log

一个叫KAHO的日本小姐姐模仿上海和潮汕口音，太好玩了。不但口音学得像，表情和面相都会跟着一起变😀 pic.twitter.com/Ye1IN9BVDK

— iPaul (@iPaulCanada) April 29, 2026

The speaker is a Japanese girl named Kaho.

This article by Niall Ferguson, "Texting Makes U Stupid" skipped my notice when it first appeared in Daily Beast (9/11/11).  I would have missed it again this time around had it not been called to my attention by Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.  Anyway, it's still a hot button issue, so better late than never.

Abstract

The good news is that today’s teenagers are avid readers and prolific writers. The bad news is that what they are reading and writing are text messages.

According to a survey carried out last year by Nielsen, Americans between the ages of 13 and 17 send and receive an average of 3,339 texts per month. Teenage girls send and receive more than 4,000.

It’s an unmissable trend. Even if you don’t have teenage kids, you’ll see other people’s offspring slouching around, eyes averted, tapping away, oblivious to their surroundings. Take a group of teenagers to see the seven wonders of the world. They’ll be texting all the way. Show a teenager Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi. You might get a cursory glance before a buzz signals the arrival of the latest SMS. Seconds before the earth is hit by a gigantic asteroid or engulfed by a super tsunami, millions of lithe young fingers will be typing the human race’s last inane words to itself:

‘Gilgamesh’ Review: Love and Death in Mesopotamia
The epic of Gilgamesh is more than 40 centuries old. Simon Armitage’s new translation feels thrillingly alive.
By William Giraldi, WSJApril 24, 2026

Much as I admire Simon Armitage's translation, I must say that I am overwhelmed by the excellence of the reviewer, William Giraldi.  He is much plauded for his fiction, literary criticism, and journalism.  Reading though this review, I often find myself celebrating his uncanny ability to find the mot juste at the very moment when I was wondering how he would extricate himself from a difficult, intricate sentence / thought.

There is something almost absurd about attempting to appraise “Gilgamesh,” as though one were asked to appraise wind, or love, or that first human thought that trembled toward language. And yet here comes Simon Armitage, the poet laureate of the U.K., with his stunning new verse translation, not as a vandal of antiquity but as a lucid accomplice to its endurance. As he does with his unimprovable versions of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (2008) and “The Death of King Arthur” (2012), Mr. Armitage understands that the oldest stories are never old, only waiting for a new singer.  

Below is a guest post/email by Preston C.:

I wanted to share a compact ambiguous sentence in the spirit of “Buffalo buffalo…,” but built from more ordinary English resources:

In Buttons’ Buttons, Buttons Buttons buttons Buttons Buttons’ buttons Buttons Buttons’ buttons’ buttons button.

One workable parse treats “Buttons Buttons” as a proper name, “Buttons’ Buttons” as a store, and button/buttons as verbs (“to fasten”). On that reading, the sentence means roughly:

In the store Buttons’ Buttons, Buttons Buttons fastens the buttons that his buttons’ buttons fasten.

Project Kino (3/23/26)

Last August and September, President Donald Trump asserted that his actions would reduce drug prices by as much as 1500%, and more recently claimed actual reductions by as much as 600%. On April 22, Elizabeth Warren questioned RFK Jr. about this. She registered a doubt about the mathematics of a reduction in price by greater than 100%, although she mainly focused on the fact that Costco's prices for some cited drugs are substantially less than those at Trump Rx.

The president pitched his Trump Rx website as the answer for Americans who are worried about healthcare costs. He claims that Trump Rx has reduced prices by as much as 600%, 600%, which I think means companies should be paying you to take their drugs.

A couple of days ago in the Oval Office, RFK Jr. left Costco out of it, and offered an odd defense of the president's percentage calculations.

Homer's Iliad Book 1 Recitation | Lines 1-21 | Restored Ancient Greek | Greek History

‘If This Be Magic’ Review: A Great Feast of Languages
Shakespeare has resonated with audiences in Swedish, Swahili and beyond. But translating the Bard requires some difficult choices.
By Henry Hitchings, WSJ (April 22, 2026)

Transferring Shakespeare's works into another language is hard work:

Samuel Johnson complained, more than 250 years ago, that William Shakespeare’s style was “ungrammatical, perplexed, and obscure.” Many students and theatergoers since have shared that view. Yet even if we agree with Johnson, it has become customary to celebrate instead the playwright’s linguistic resourcefulness and dazzle: his flair for coining words and twisting old ones into new shapes, his taste for double meanings and calculated ambiguity.

The obscurity condemned by Johnson derives in part from Shakespeare’s readiness to draw on vocabulary that would have struck even his contemporaries as bewilderingly nonstandard. Today many of us are as likely to be disorientated by his fondness for folklore and myth, his assumptions about religion and social order, and his immersion in the conventions of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater.

In "Poem in the key of what" (10/9/2006), I blogged about a paper by Maartje Schreuder, Laura van Eerten and Dicky Gilbers, "Speaking in major and minor keys". Its abstract:

In music the difference between sad and cheerful melodies is often indicated as a difference between a minor and a major key. In order to investigate whether the same difference can be found in language, we analyzed intonation contours in emotional speech. We made cluster analyses in order to find out which fundamental frequencies were most present in the contours. Furthermore, we analyzed the musical scores of sad and cheerful speech as well. In the pitch contours of all speakers we found intervals of three semitones in sad passages and intervals of four semitones in cheerful passages. We therefore conclude that emotional speech melody, just as musical melody, involves major and minor modalities.

I expressed some skepticism:

The idea behind this paper is that the pitch contours of speech naturally express the same sorts of melodic intervals that occur in music. This is an old idea, prominent already in Paṇini's work two and a half millennia ago, but Schreuder et al. have a new idea about how to look for the phenomenon. While it's clear that musical intervals are part of the stylized forms of speech that we call "chanting", I've always been skeptical that well-defined intervals (in the sense of small-integer ratios of pitch values) play a role in unchanted speech. I'll explain some reasons for my skepticism later in this post. However, it would be fun to be wrong on this one.

"Japan announces new name for days over 40C after hottest summer ever", by Ruth Wright, Euronews (4/20/26)

They have words for it.  The one that's taking the online media by storm is kokushobi  酷暑日.  That literally means "harsh / cruel + hot days".  I can attest to this characterization of scorching  days in Japan.  I remember one summer in Kyoto, which I wouldn't think of as a particularly hot city, when I stood on the sidewalk and was getting ready to cross the street, the pavement of which seemed to be melting under the shimmering heat waves.

The cited article gives other currently popular words for dog days (7/3/25-9/11/26 in America this summer) in Japan.

A note from Ambarish S.:

There’s an ongoing controversy in India with Prime Minister Modi being accused of blackface during an election campaign in the south, where people have darker skin on average. The Alert (a Hindi news website of unknown reputation) had the following Hindi sentence on it’s X:

तमिलनाडु रैली में मोदी जी का लुक वायरल!

where only the postpositions (में and का) and arguably the honorific जी are Hindi! तमिलनाडु and मोदी are proper nouns, while रैली, लुक and वायरल are respectively “rally", “look" and "viral”. The whole thing translates to “Modi Ji’s look at Tamil Nadu rally viral”.