The QWERTY Keyboard Will Never Die. Where Did the 150-Year-Old Design Come From?The invention’s true origin story has long been the subject of debate. Some argue it was created to prevent typewriter jams, while others insist it’s linked to the telegraph Jimmy Stamp; Updated by Ellen Wexler (Updated: February 25, 2025 | Originally Published: May […]
Various readers have pointed out to to me that the "QWERTY Effect" is back. (For coverage of the first QWERTY-Effect paper, see "The QWERTY Effect", 3/8/2012; "QWERTY: Failure to Replicate", 3/13/2012; "Casasanto and Jasmin on the QWERTY effect", 3/17/2012; and "Response to Jasmin and Casasanto's response to me", 3/17/2012.) The new paper is Casasanto, D., […]
LL readers will not be surprised to learn that Daniel Casasanto and Kyle Jasmin disagree with my evaluation of their work on the "QWERTY effect". Yesterday afternoon, they added a comment to that effect on the original post. Since relatively few of the people who read that post are likely to see their comment, I'm […]
Following up on "The QWERTY effect", 3/8/2012, I got this email earlier today from Peter Dodds:
Rebecca Rosen, "The QWERTY Effect: The Keyboards Are Changing Our Language!", The Atlantic: It's long been thought that how a word sounds — it's very phonemes — can be related in some ways to what that word means. But language is no longer solely oral. Much of our word production happens not in our throats […]
In Chinese they are called yùntú 韻圖 / 韵图. These tools are vitally important in the development of Sinitic phonology, but barely known outside of sinological specialists, so — for the history of world phonology — it is worthwhile to introduce them to linguists in general. A rime table or rhyme table (simplified Chinese: 韵图; traditional […]
From time to time, people of all nationalities mistype my given name as "Vicotr". The weird thing is that I myself fairly often mistype my name that way. Surely I and the people who write to me know how to spell and pronounce my name. So why does this mistyping happen so often? It garners […]
As Laura Morland said to me in a p.c., I am a "Swiftie" (I admit it, even though I'm a Penn prof), but there are plenty of things about pop culture that I do not know, including IJBOL. What Is IJBOL? A Korean word? A new boy band? This new acronym is replacing LOL and […]
The vast majority of people, both inside and outside of China, input characters on cell phones, computers, and other electronic devices via Hanyu Pinyin or other phonetic script. Naturally, this has had a huge impact on the relationship between users of the Chinese script and their command of the characters, since they are no longer […]
In "Voice recognition for English and Mandarin typing " (8/24/16), we took a brief look at a Stanford-University of Washington-Baidu study that showed, according to an NPR article, that voice recognition finally beat humans at typing. The title of the original study is "Speech Is 3x Faster than Typing for English and Mandarin Text Entry […]
This is a guest post by David Moser of Beijing Capital Normal University For those of us who teach and research the Chinese language, it is often difficult to describe how the Chinese characters function in conveying meaning and sound, and it’s always a particular challenge to explain how the writing system differs from the […]
Some clarifications about my Wall Street Journal article, which seems to have led to some misunderstandings among Language Log’s readers (as well as over at Languagehat). Since the readers here are the most well-informed audience that piece will ever reach outside of professional linguists, I thought it’d be useful to clarify what I based the […]
John McWhorter has an ambitious article in the Wall Street Journal for 1/2/15: "What the World Will Speak in 2115: A century from now, expect fewer but simpler languages on every continent." The article covers a lot of ground and includes much daring prognostication along the way. I won't attempt to summarize everything in this rich essay, […]