Language Log

"It cannot read the human heart" by Yan Ge (b/1984), London Review of Books Blog (2/20/26)

"How toddlers in Finland are saving an endangered Sámi language"
by Erika Benke, BBC (5 days ago)

Special nurseries are helping the Sámi people in Finland to bring their almost-lost language back from the brink of extinction.

When I stayed in the Arctic Circle to finish writing The True History of Tea with Erling Hoh, I was amazed by the symbiotic relationship the Sámi there had with their vast herds of reindeer.   And, yes, they do ride them, which someone was asking about here recently.

@kattoksthai

Replying to @Mamba Did you know that Bangkok has the longest city name in the world? I dare you to say it too! #bangkok #thailand #thai

♬ original sound – Kat Talks Thai

That's the title of an essay that appeared in my e-mail today from an outfit called Cantonese Script Reform 粵字改革.  Here's what they say:

Written Cantonese must have spaces, like Korean. The calligraphic issue must give way. For the space itself is a grammatical marker that marks the beginning and the end of a word. This tool of demarcation will allow poet and playwright to invent new words by putting words together within the confinements delineated by the spaces between words. Written Cantonese needs all the tools imaginable for it to revitalise and resurrect its lost vocabulary. A Hebrew-esque recycling off ancient words for purposes anew is the way to go. But we can’t do that if we can’t tell if this is a new word because we can’t tell if these characters familiar so and so sequenced are merely a fanciful poetic playful arrangement or other mark of the invention of a new word, where a familiar noun is turned into a verb or verb is turned into an adjective or an adjective is now henceforth interpreted as a noun in this particular context.

Talk in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania:

"The Calendarized Onomasticon and the Arrival of Birthday Celebration from the Ancient Near East to China", by Sanping Chen, author of Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages

Dr. Chen's talk will be Wednesday, February 25th from 12:00 – 2:00pm in the Wolf Humanities Conference Room (WILL 623).

New book in the Cambridge Elements Series
Yuanfei Wang and Victor H. Mair
Early Globalism and Chinese Literature
Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2026 

The entire book, richly illustrated in color, is available open access online.

Summary

Exploring 'early globalism and Chinese literature' through the lens of 'literary diffusion,' this Element analyzes two primary forms. The first is Buddhist literary diffusion, whose revolutionary impact on Chinese language and literature is illustrated through scriptural translation, transformation texts, and 'journey to the West' stories. The second, facilitated diffusion, engages with the maritime world, traced through the seafaring journey of Cinderella stories and the totalizing worldview in literature on Zheng He's voyages. The authors contend that early global literary diffusion left a lasting imprint on Chinese language, literature, and culture.

From AntC:

Warnings snapped on a terrace overlooking a wooded hillside at a frantic Lunar New Year Shoutiangong Temple, Nantou County, Taiwan.

The 'Umbrellas' were sunshades over the tables. I guess the terrace can get plenty windy. The pot-noodles were unavoidable/give authentic colour.

Or at least another pattern of its usage.

According to Herbert Clark and Jean Fox Tree, "Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking" (Cognition 2002),

"[S]peakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking. Speakers can use these announcements in turn to implicate, for example, that they are searching for a word, are deciding what to say next, want to keep the floor, or want to cede the floor."

As they note, the actual patterns of pause and filler durations are somewhat complicated — a larger-scale empirical survey can be found here. Extending many LLOG posts, Wieling et al. (2016) document a historical change in relative UM/UH frequencies across various Germanic languages, associated with sociolinguistic dimensions of gender, age, education, and so on. And there are well-established individual patterns of usage, as well as evidence for conversational accommodation.

But listening to a recent YouTube interview, I noticed a somewhat different pattern. An extremely fluent speaker uses a very brief "uh" as the first syllable in many of his prosodic phrases, following a brief inter-phase silence,  with no post-UH silence. There's no indication that he is "searching for a word,  deciding what to say next, wants to keep the floor, or wants to cede the floor",  and I noticed no other filled pauses on his side of the interview. So for this speaker, phrase-initial UH seems to have become something of a habit. It's unclear what his UH-or-not choice signals, if anything.

[VHM:  N.B.:  I had nothing to do with this.  It's all between Gemini and Gemini, with J. P. Mallory acting as the amanuensis.  He can also evoke the woman from Xiaohe or Cherchen Man (Ur David) via Gemini or one of the other platforms if you'd like to hear "Mair" conversing with them.]

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Chinese military urged to overhaul English teaching to improve language skills
Senior lecturers warn that troops are not being given the communication skills they need to operate on the international stage
William Zheng, SCMP (18 Feb 2026)

You can read this many different ways.

The report said English language skills were important for UN peacekeeping missions.

The People’s Liberation Army has been urged to overhaul English language teaching at its military schools and recruit professionals to improve soldiers’ communication skills on the international stage.

This is a story about the love between a man and a woman who don't know each other's language and haven't learned it either.  The man is an American from New Haven, and the woman is a Chinese from Xi'an, China.  He speaks English and she speaks Mandarin.  They converse through Microsoft Translator.

They met in Xi'an in 2019 when the man went to see the sights (Terracotta warriors, Buddhist temples, and so on).  After he came back to America, they continued to communicate through messaging.  But then Covid struck and they were cut off from each other.  After Covid restrictions were relaxed, she decided to come to America in 2022 on a one-way ticket and stayed here.

This is the regular script form of the Chinese character for horse:  馬.

When I used to give talks in schools, libraries, and retirement homes, anywhere I was invited, I would write 馬 (10 strokes, official in Taiwan) on the blackboard or a large sheet of paper and show it to the audience, then ask them what they thought it meant.  Out of the hundreds, if not thousands, of people to whom I showed this character, not one person ever guessed what it signified.  When I told those who were assembled that it was a picture of something they were familiar with, nobody got it.  When I said it was a picture of a common animal, nobody could recognize what it represented.  

All the more, when I showed the audiences the simplified form of the character, 马 (3 strokes, official in the PRC), nobody could get it.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-eighty-first issue:

“Relations Between Greece and Central Asia in Antiquity: An Examination of the Written Sources” (pdf) by Yu Taishan.