Language Log

After having been away for a couple of months, when I returned home, I found this message from Maia Karpovich:

Yesterday, I ordered some 100 watt 'corn bulbs' from Amazon to deal with the darkness in my bedroom. The box came with some 'warm tips' included as an insert.

For the past five years or so, Jeffrey Barg has been writing a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer called "The Angry Grammarian". The last one appeared on February 23 of this year, and Barg moved his peeves to Substack. At about the same time, his musical rom-com premiered at Theatre Exile in Philadelphia.

Linguists are prone to feel that the word "grammarian" should belong to them, not to prescriptivist scolds like the one in Elle Cordova's skit. And we often object even more strongly to "grammar" being used as the justification for condemnation of non-standard spellings, punctuation, word usage, etc., both because of the prescriptivist stance and also because the issues involved belong to aspects of usage (like orthography and lexical semantics) that are not part of what we call grammar.

But the OED's primary definition for grammarian is

An expert or specialist in grammar; a person who studies, writes about, or teaches grammar. Also more generally: an expert in or student of language; a linguist, a philologist; (formerly also) †a person of great learning (obsolete).

Sometimes (esp. from the 17th to early 19th centuries) somewhat depreciative, implying that a person is pedantic, too focused on minutiae, or overly concerned with rules and conventions.

The depreciative sense is illustrated in an 1806 citation from Henry Kirke White:

All that arithmeticians know, Or stiff grammarians quaintly teach.

"Oldest Alphabet Discovered in Ancient Syrian Tomb Redefines History of Writing", by Chrissy Newton, Debrief (November 21, 2024)

A research team at Johns Hopkins University has discovered evidence of the world’s oldest alphabetic writing, carved onto finger-length clay cylinders, outdating other scripts by 500 years. 

Recovered during excavations in a tomb in Syria, the writing is believed to date to around 2400 BCE. This new finding disrupts how archaeologists understand where the alphabet originated, and how it was shared across civilizations, societies, and cultures, leaving anthropologists with new questions about what the findings mean for early urban civilizations.  

“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite,” said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders in a statement. “Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated.”

“And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now,” he added. Schwartz will share details of his discovery on Thursday, Nov. 21, at the American Society of Overseas Research’s Annual Meeting. 

The Bluesky Firehose is

…an authenticated stream of events used to efficiently sync user updates (posts, likes, follows, handle changes, etc).

Many applications people will want to build on top of atproto and Bluesky will start with the firehose, from feed generators to labelers, to bots and search engines.

Theo Sanderson has created a program to display the firehose "in the style of a Windows XP screensaver".

For those who do not read Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese, this will give you a taste:

惡惡（恶恶）

Forgive me for not telling you right away how to read these characters.  In truth, they are many different ways to pronounce them, and they all mean something different.  I will only go fairly deeply into two of the different readings and will just touch upon the others.

The first pair of characters are identical traditional forms of the same graph, the second pair are identical simplified forms of the same graph.

The strokes of the simplified form of the graph are easy to count (10), but those of the traditional form are beastly difficult to count accurately (different people count them different ways, but the standard total is supposedly 12 — go figure).

The four dots at the bottom of the character constitute the heart radical / semantophore, indicating that it has something to do with feelings / emotions, while the residual strokes at the top amount to the phonophore, giving a rough approximation of its sound.

Part 1 of this post appeared on 8/26/16.  The first two paragraphs read as follow:

Founded in 1858, Keio is the oldest university in Japan and one of the best, also ranking high in world ratings.  Its name is written 慶應 in kanji.  That's a lot of strokes to scribble down every time you want to write the name of your university, so Keio people often write it this way:   广+K 广+O (imagine that the "K" and the "O" are written inside of the 广).  That makes 6 strokes and 4 strokes instead of 15 strokes and 17 strokes respectively, 10 strokes total instead of 32.

In these character constructions, "K" and "O" are functioning as phonophores, and Kangxi radical 53 广 ("dotted cliff" or "house on cliff") is functioning as the semantophore.

Helen Lewis, "How one woman became the scapegoat for America's reading crisis", The Atlantic 11/13/2024:

Lucy Calkins was an education superstar. Now she’s cast as the reason a generation of students struggles to read. Can she reclaim her good name?

Until a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S. schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write. Two decades ago, her guiding principles—that children learn best when they love reading, and that teachers should try to inspire that love—became a centerpiece of the curriculum in New York City’s public schools. Her approach spread through an institute she founded at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and traveled further still via teaching materials from her publisher. Many teachers don’t refer to Units of Study by name. They simply say they are “teaching Lucy.”

But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for. A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years later, when the American Public Media podcast Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong accused Calkins of being one of the reasons so many American children struggle to read. (The National Assessment of Educational Progress—a test administered by the Department of Education—found in 2022 that roughly one-third of fourth and eighth graders are unable to read at the “basic” level for their age.)

Xi Jinping is celebrated as the first national leader of the People's Republic of China who speaks Modern Standard (MSM) rather than some heavily accented Sinitic dialect / topolect.  That is basically true, though he slurs and swallows his words, and is (in)famous for his numerous verbal gaffes (see "Selected readings" below).  Now the pseudoscience and fraud muckraker Fang Shimin / Fang Zhouzi has pointed out another alleged language error perpetrated by President / Chairman / Party Secretary of the CCP while he has been at the APEC meeting in Peru the last few days.

习主席访问了三次秘鲁，还是坚持把“秘鲁”说成密鲁，以后“秘鲁”的读音也要改了吗？央视还提醒过习主席要怎么读“秘鲁”，太大胆了。 pic.twitter.com/LtR0sGVwT3

— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) November 18, 2024

The protean particle zhī 之 (3 strokes, classifier / radical 丶) has more grammatical functions than you can shake a stick at, e.g.:

(literary) genitive or attributive marker

    indicates that the previous word has possession of the next one

    indicates that the previous word modifies the next one

    particle indicating that the preceding element is specialized or qualified by the next

(archaic)  particle infixed in a subject-predicate construct acting as a nominalizer or indicating a subordinate clause

(literary) the third-person pronoun: him, her, it, them, when it appears in a non-subject position in the sentence

—

(adapted from Wiktionary, with illustrative quotations for each type)

New article in Antiquity (05 November 2024):  "Seals and signs: tracing the origins of writing in ancient South-west Asia", by Kathryn Kelley, Mattia Cartolano, and Silvia Ferrara

Abstract

Administrative innovations in South-west Asia during the fourth millennium BC, including the cylinder seals that were rolled on the earliest clay tablets, laid the foundations for proto-cuneiform script, one of the first writing systems. Seals were rich in iconography, but little research has focused on the potential influence of specific motifs on the development of the sign-based proto-cuneiform script. Here, the authors identify symbolic precursors to fundamental proto-cuneiform signs among late pre-literate seal motifs that describe the transportation of vessels and textiles, highlighting the synergy of early systems of clay-based communication.