Language Log

A memorial service for Victor Mair will be held at Swarthmore Friends Meeting (12 Whittier Place, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania) on the afternoon of Saturday, October 10, between 2:00 and 5:00. 

In "A correlate of animacy" (9/27/2008) I noted that "A traditional and characteristic example of the role of animacy in English syntax is the way it affects the choice between the two ways of expressing genitive relations, X's Y vs. the Y of X.". I illustrated the effect with this table (from the days when Google gave estimated counts for search results):

Among the many interesting takes on OpenAI's claimed solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, I've been most interested in Sabine Hossenfelder's discussion on YouTube., partly because of the content but mainly because of Google AI's weird transcription. Its first sentence has two odd errors:

Open eye claims to have solved the Navia Stokes Millennium problem.

Elsewhere in the transcript we get 'OpenMai', 'openi', and 'Omei' as references to OpenAI, which you'd think Gemini would "know" about. And Gemini somehow "knows" to capitalize "Navia Stokes Millennium", but not to spell Navier correctly.

There are plenty of other errors, some odder than others, e.g. 'Sam Outman' for "Sam Altman", as you can see for yourself in the transcript and subtitling.

Wikipedia's entry on Univerbation tells us that "The univerbating process is epitomized in Talmy Givón's aphorism that 'today's morphology is yesterday's syntax'." Google hands the quote off to Gemini, at least in "AI mode", and explains:

The maxim "today's morphology is yesterday's syntax," coined by linguist Thomas Givon, means that grammatical word endings and affixes (morphology) evolve over time from separate, independent words once used together in phrases and sentences (syntax).

Alaina Demopoulos, "Women are giving their partners the ‘Illiterate Boyfriend’ test: ‘Do your best to pronounce these words’", The Guardian 9/3/2026:

There are common non-negotiables we look for in a prospective partner. They should be kind, caring and thoughtful. Having a shared interest helps. So does remembering important dates and anniversaries. But how much does it matter if they know how to pronounce the word “gnocchi”?

Turns out that’s a potential dealbreaker, at least according to a (rather judgy) cohort on TikTok. See: the “Illiterate Boyfriend” trend, which is testing some couples on the app. Users have compiled a list of what are essentially SAT words for women to ask their male partners to read. Many of these men – this is an overwhelmingly heterosexual activity – fail to finish the list unscathed. They trip over entries such as “hyperbole”, “cynicism”, “diaphragmatic” and the oft-butchered French term, “hors d’oeuvres”.

“I want you to do your best to pronounce these words,” one woman asks her boyfriend in a clip viewed more than 8.8m times. He gamely nails his first attempt, reading off the herb “thyme”. But he’s less successful with “epitome”, “challah” and “fuchsia”. (“Foo-chia?” he guesses). “Conscientious” and “faux pas” also prove tricky. He ends up with a score of five out of 17, or 29% – very much a failing grade.

…is ACHOO — "Ever sneeze immediately after stepping into the sun? It's not a coincidence":

Picture this: You walk out the door on a bright, sunny morning. And before you’ve even reached the car, you sneeze. Maybe even two or three times in a row.

It’s not allergies, and it’s not a coincidence. It’s a real reflex, called the photic sneeze reflex.

By some estimates, it affects roughly one in four people.

Researchers have studied it for decades and have even given it a punny name: ACHOO syndrome, short for Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst

Dolly Parton's passing inspired Josh Marshall to dive deeper into one of the adjacent "Mysteries of Americana", namely how Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk "hopped off a ship in New York City" at the age of 20, in 1929, and eventually managed to set himself up as Elvis Presley's manager Colonel Tom Parker, a "cigar-chomping, hard-charging good ole boy, someone out of central casting or perhaps a comic book", allegedly born in West Virginia rather than in Breda.

Marshall's focus is linguistic: "How is it that Parker, a quite prominent public figure for decades, managed to maintain his false identity as well as the fact that he was in the country illegally and pull off his Southern good ole boy persona? He had a Dutch accent, albeit a relatively mild one. "

…and speech? or at least "vocal control"?

Chiara De Gregorio, Marina Davila-Ross, & Adriano R. Lameira, "Rhythm and timing in laughter reveal that human vocal plasticity falls on a hominid continuum", Nature Communications Biology, 6/25/2026:

Laughter is an important, universal form of human non-linguistic vocal expression and, being shared by all extant great apes, offers a valuable proxy for tracing the evolution of vocal control that ultimately enabled language. Yet surprisingly little is known about the evolution of its defining feature, rhythm. Here we show, through comparative analyses of laughter across all extant great apes (orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, humans), that the laughter of the last common ancestor was already isochronous, becoming faster, more variable, and increasingly context-sensitive over hominid evolution. The evolution of laughter’s rhythm reveals a progressive increase in vocal rhythmic plasticity, with humans following the overall trajectory toward enhanced vocal control.

The title of Sal Mercogliano's latest "What's Going on With Shipping?" vlog offers two idiom extensions: "Understanding Global Shipping Risks: Black Swans, Black Jellyfish & Black Elephants".

The "black swan" metaphor starts from Juvenal (Satire VI, line 165), who described a virtuous wife as "Rara auis in terris, nigroque simillima cycno ("a rare bird on earth, and very like a black swan"). This made sense in 1st-century Rome, because the only swans the Romans knew were white.

Stephen Collins' August 14 comic in the Guardian, "Meet David Advance Plus+, genius of toothpaste marketing", starts with these four panels:

The latest xkcd:

[SORRY for previously writing "the Economist" instead of "the Guardian" "-)…]

Steven Collins' January 9 cartoon from the Guardian starts with a man's sudden displacement after he places a simple fast-food order:

Paul Krugman's latest Substack echoes Winston Churchill's famous 1940 speech: