Language Log

Running down the road in Clarksdale, Mississippi, I screeched to a halt (felt like Rroad Runner) when I passed by a Chinese restaurant with the odd name Rice Bowl (in Chinese it was Fànwǎn lóu 饭碗楼 — the only characters I saw on the premises).  It was a tiny, nondescript establishment, with six or so chairs against the walls where you sat while you waited for your order to be prepared.  Most people, however, stood in line or just came in to pick up what they had ordered over the phone.

The owner did a brisk business, but it was strictly take out.  There were about 8 spaces for cars to park outside, though they were constantly coming and going.

That's the title of a valuable Wikipedia article.  I have no idea who wrote it, but I'm very glad to have access to this comprehensive article, since it touches on so many topics that concern my ongoing research.

Here are some highlights:

Before British colonisation, the Persian language was the lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent and a widely used official language in the northern India. The language was brought into South Asia by various Turkics and Afghans and was preserved and patronized by local Indian dynasties from the 11th century, such as Ghaznavids, Sayyid dynasty, Tughlaq dynasty, Khilji dynasty, Mughal dynasty, Gujarat sultanate, and Bengal sultanate. Initially it was used by Muslim dynasties of India but later started being used by non-Muslim empires too. For example, the Sikh Empire, Persian held official status in the court and the administration within these empires. It largely replaced Sanskrit as the language of politics, literature, education, and social status in the subcontinent.

The first two panels from SMBC a few days ago:

"Does GPT-4 Surpass Human Performance in Linguistic Pragmatics?" Bojic, Ljubiša et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (June 10, 2025). Ljubiša Bojić, Predrag Kovačević, & Milan Čabarkapa.  Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 12, Article number: 794 (2025) Cite this article

Abstract

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into everyday life as general-purpose multimodal AI systems, their capabilities to simulate human understanding are under examination. This study investigates LLMs’ ability to interpret linguistic pragmatics, which involves context and implied meanings. Using Grice’s communication principles, we evaluated both LLMs (GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Bard) and human subjects (N = 147) on dialogue-based tasks. Human participants included 71 primarily Serbian students and 76 native English speakers from the United States. Findings revealed that LLMs, particularly GPT-4, outperformed humans. GPT-4 achieved the highest score of 4.80, surpassing the best human score of 4.55. Other LLMs performed well: GPT-3.5 scored 4.10, Bard 3.75, and GPT-3 3.25; GPT-2 had the lowest score of 1.05. The average LLM score was 3.39, exceeding the human cohorts’ averages of 2.80 (Serbian students) and 2.34 (U.S. participants). In the ranking of all 155 subjects (including LLMs and humans), GPT-4 secured the top position, while the best human ranked second. These results highlight significant progress in LLMs’ ability to simulate understanding of linguistic pragmatics. Future studies should confirm these findings with more dialogue-based tasks and diverse participants. This research has important implications for advancing general-purpose AI models in various communication-centered tasks, including potential application in humanoid robots in the future.

From Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, "U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem Braces for Possible Israeli Strike on Iran" NYT 6/12/2025:

More recently, however, Mr. Trump has said he was less convinced that talks with Iran would yield a new nuclear deal.

“I’m getting more and more less confident about it,” he told The New York Post in a podcast broadcast on Wednesday.

In a comment on yesterday's post "A 12th-century influencer", Laura Morland wrote:

Thanks for sharing "to abelard," the new verb of the month! Note to AP: the grammarians will insist that it be spelled with a lower-case "a". (Verbs are never capitalized, not even in German, I don't believe.)

This is one where The Errorist might have the upper hand.

The first two panels of today's xkcd:

From Ting Fen Yik on Facebook:

From Ada Palmer, "Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age":

The new scholastic method was so exciting! that when Peter Abelard got kicked out of his monastery (for proving its founding saint didn’t exist—that pissed off the abbot, who’d have guessed?) and went to live as a hermit in the wilderness of Champagne, 100,000 people flocked there to form a tent city and listen to him teach. Abelard’s crowd wasn’t bigger than Woodstock but it was twice the size of Paris at the time, ample to make France fear that crowd + superstar preacher => private army? Later, when Thomas Aquinas was up for sainthood, his advocates argued that every single chapter in his Summa Theologica should be considered an individual miracle, and the judges agreed. (It’s official folks, 3,000+ miracles in one compact paperback, only \$12.99! Unless you want to buy it in the period, in which case it’s \$650,000; you don’t get scholarship before the printing press unless wealthy elites believe it’s really, really worth the \$\$\$!)

The latest xkcd:

Mouseover title: "With a good battery, the device can easily last for 5 or 10 years, although the walls probably won't."

Randy Alexander is not a professional Sinologist, but when it comes to reading Chinese poetry, he's as serious as one can be.  The following poem is by Du Fu (712-770), said by some to be "China's greatest poet".  In the presentation below, I will first give the text with its transcription, and then Randy's translation.  After that we will delve deeply into the grammatical exegesis of one line of the poem, the last.  

Current LLMs can answer questions or follow instructions in a way that makes them useful as cheap and quick clerical assistants. Many students use them for doing homework, writing papers, and even taking exams — and many journalists, government functionaries, lawyers, scientists, etc., are using them in similar ways. The main drawback from users' point of view is that LLMs often make stuff up — this seems to have happened a couple of weeks ago to the crew who composed the MAHA report, and is an increasingly widespread problem in court documents. Attempts at AI-detectors have totally failed, and so the current academic trends are either in the direction of testing methods that isolate students from LLM-connected devices, or in the direction of syllabus structures that directly encourage students to use LLMs, but try to teach them to use them better.

Launch of the Journal of Sinographic Philologies and Legacies & Call for Papers

The Institute for Sinographic Literatures and Philology at Korea University (Seoul, South Korea) is proud to announce the launch of the Journal of Sinographic Philologies and Legacies (JOSPL), a pioneering venue in the growing field of Sinographic studies. This quarterly, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal is dedicated to the study of the humanistic heritage of East Asia’s Sinographic sphere—a cultural region where Literary Sinitic (漢文) and Sinographs (漢字) functioned as the cosmopolitan language of government, religious institutions, scholarship, and belles-lettres. JOSPL invites submissions that engage critically with this legacy from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives.