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Overall, why do Mandarin enrollments continue to decline?

This is a problem that has been troubling colleagues across the country. "Why fewer university students are studying Mandarin" Learning the difficult language does not seem as worthwhile as it once did Economist (Aug 24th 2023) China | How do you say “not interested”? Ten years ago Mandarin, the mother tongue of most Chinese, was […]

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Language change (about to be?) in progress

Current big news around here is the collapse of an elevated section of Interstate 95 due to a tanker truck fire. As Wikipedia explains, I-95 "is the main north–south Interstate Highway on the East Coast of the United States, running from U.S. Route 1 (US 1) in Miami, Florida, north to the Houlton–Woodstock Border Crossing […]

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Five stars over China: Central Kingdom in Central Asia

新时代祥瑞层出不穷 pic.twitter.com/bVm5Vn4XC4 — 方舟子 (@fangshimin) April 9, 2023

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Vignettes of quality data impoverishment in the world of PRC AI

Some snippets: Limited data sets a hurdle as China plays catch-up to ChatGPT Lack of high-quality Chinese texts on Internet a barrier to training AI models. Ryan McMorrow, Nian Liu, Eleanor Olcott, and Madhumita Murgia, FT, Ars Technica (2/21/23) … Baidu struggled with its previous attempt at a chatbot, known as Plato, which analysts said […]

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Time, tense, and gender in Estonian

Size-wise, Estonia (45,339 sq. km; 17,500 sq. m) is much larger than Philadelphia (369.59 sq. km; 142.7 sq. m), but, in terms of population, Philadelphia (1,603,797) is slightly bigger than Estonia (1,313,796).  I have been to Estonia, and was utterly captivated by the wealth of its art and architecture, the depth of its history, the […]

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Indirect archeological evidence for the spread and exchange of languages in medieval Asia

The title of this article about the Belitung shipwreck (ca. 830 AD) is somewhat misleading (e.g., there is no direct evidence of Malayalam being spoken by any of the protagonists, but it is broadly informative, richly illustrated, and well presented. "Mongols speaking Malayalam – What a sunken ship says about South India & China’s medieval […]

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When intonation overrides tone, part 4

Some folks think that intonation never overrides tones, but I'm convinced on the basis of empirical evidence that it does. For example: Nǐ xiǎng gàn hā 你想干哈 –> Nǐ xiǎng gàn há 你想干哈 ("what do you want to do?") — especially in the Northeast. Here are some other examples — all of them provided by […]

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Central government control over words for grandmother

Recently there was quite a ruckus over the correct word to be used for "maternal grandmother" in second-graders' textbooks in Shanghai: "Much Ado About Grandma: Textbook Change Sparks Linguistic Debate:  Critics call ‘waipo’ to ‘laolao’ change ‘cultural hegemony’ from the north", Kenrick Davis, Sixth Tone (6/22/18) "A debate over the word for ‘grandmother’ in China […]

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Linguists and change

In recent years, a rapid and important cultural change in the understanding of gender has been taking place in American society and beyond. A Harris poll from this year, reported in a Time Magazine cover story, found that “20% of millennials say they are something other than strictly straight and cisgender, compared to 7% of […]

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Evangelical over/under

Ross Douthat, "Is There an Evangelical Crisis?", NYT 11/25/2017 (emphasis added): But it’s also possible that evangelical intellectuals and writers, and their friends in other Christian traditions, have overestimated how much a serious theology has ever mattered to evangelicalism’s sociological success. It could be that the Trump-era crisis of the evangelical mind is a parochial […]

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Has the style book changed?

Reading Remy Tumin's article today discussing Stephen Colbert's guest appearance in Michael Moore's Broadway play ("Stephen Colbert Uses Profanity to Describe President Trump’s ‘Soul’", NYT 10/5/2017), I was struck by this passage: “Trump keeps summoning monsters of abstraction — things that aren’t real — they’re extensions of the ordinary, fears that you have that he […]

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On the short periods of Trumpian time

On Friday, at a joint press conference with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, Donald Trump begrudgingly took questions from Jon Karl of ABC News. Karl asked whether there are indeed recordings of Trump's conversations with former FBI director James Comey, as Trump once suggested on Twitter. Here is how he replied (emphasis mine): KARL: And you […]

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Court fight over Oxford commas and asyndetic lists

Language Log often weighs in when courts try to nail down the meaning of a statute. Laws are written in natural language—though one might long, by formalization, to end the thousand natural ambiguities that text is heir to—and thus judges are forced to play linguist. Happily, this week's "case in the news" is one where the lawyers managed to […]

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