Language Log

Designers Do a Double Take at the Lettering on Pope Francis’ Tombstone
Irregularly spaced letters spelling “F R A NCISC VS” have caused a stir among typography nerds who specialize in spacing and fonts. One called them “an abomination unto design.”
By Adeel Hassan, NYR (5/4/25)

It seems a small matter to get exercised over, but then it's the pope, after all, and for those who care about it, kerning is a serious business.

The simple slab has only 10 letters, but the spacing between them can make it read like “F R A NCISC VS.”

Mrs. Frazzled performs "gentle parenting" on the Signalgate group:

I was going very slowly down the stairwell of my house, especially slowly because I was carrying something bulky.  As a result, my left elbow was sticking outward, protruding  toward the wall.  When I was about halfway down, my elbow scraped against a pointed metal picture hanger, and it hurt like the dickens. 

As soon as the sharp metal object scraped against the skin on my elbow, I shouted "ow!", but then the momentum of my step carried me downward continuing to scrape against the picture hanger, and the "ow" became "owwwccchhhh!" 

From Elle Cordova, yesterday:

SMBC from a couple of days ago:

Ignore the super-slow video (if you can! — I watched it a dozen times).  Look at what is written on the man's t-shirt.

"Authoritarian attitudes linked to altered brain anatomy, neuroscientists reveal", PsyPost 4/19/2025:

A new brain imaging study published in the journal Neuroscience has found that authoritarian attitudes on both the political left and right are linked to specific structural differences in the brain. Young adults who scored higher on right-wing authoritarianism had less gray matter volume in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in social reasoning. Meanwhile, those who endorsed more extreme forms of left-wing authoritarianism showed reduced cortical thickness in the right anterior insula, a brain area tied to empathy and emotion regulation.

The research aimed to better understand the brain-based traits that might underlie authoritarian thinking. Previous studies have documented the psychological characteristics associated with authoritarianism—such as impulsivity, dogmatism, and heightened sensitivity to threat—but few have examined whether these traits are reflected in brain structure.

The cited paper is Jésus Adrián-Ventura et al., "Authoritarianism and the brain: Structural MR correlates associated with polarized left- and right-wing ideology traits", IBRO Neuroscience 5/24/2025.

"How the World's Largest Language Family Spread – and Why Others Go Extinct." Robinson, Andrew. Nature 641, no. 8061 (April 28, 2025): 31-33.

This is a review of the following three books:

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
Laura Spinney (William Collins 2025)

The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting their Story
J. P. Mallory (Thames & Hudson 2025)

Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of HiddenLanguages
Lorna Gibb (Atlantic 2025)

In the fourth comment to "Striving to revive the flagging sinographic cosmopolis" (4/26/25), I stated my observation of morphosyllabic kanji usage is that it has been declining over time at the expense of kana and other phonetic elements of the writing system, and I expressed the wish that a quantitative study of the actual usage be carried out.  It turns out that we already do have this information, and it is visually evident in these graphs which were called to my attention by Jim Unger.

They are from:

Zusetsu nihongo: Gurafu de miru kotoba no sugata kotoba o hakaru keiryō kokugogaku (Kadokawa ko jiten 9), Hayashi Ōki.

図説日本語: グラフで見ることばの姿 ことばを計る計量国語学 (角川小辞典 9), 林大.

Illustrated Japanese: The appearance of words in graphs, Quantitative Japanese linguistics to measure words (Kadokawa Small Dictionaries), Hayashi Ōki, ed. and comp. (1982), pp. 276-277.

The graphs are derived from a 1969 book by Morioka Kenji on Meiji period language.  Both graphs cover the years 1879-1968.

"Superficial auditory (dis)fluency biases higher-level social judgment." Walter-Terrill, Robert, et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 13 (March 24, 2025): e2415254122 

I am the proud possessor of the complete run of Mangajin (pun for "magazine") from #1-#70 (1988-1997).

Mangajin was the brainchild of Vaughan P. Simmons, whom I had conversations with at several meetings of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and corresponded with for a dozen years.  I have utmost respect for him as someone who had the vision and fortitude to make a truly effective pedagogical tool for learning Japanese a reality.

I dare say that I learned more Japanese language from Mangajin than from any other single source — just as I learned more Mandarin from Guóyǔ rìbào 國語日報 (Mandarin Daily), the Republic of China newspaper that had furigana-like bopomofo rubi phonetic annotations for all hanzi, than from any other single source.

If we take stock of the sinographic cosmopolis at the end of first quarter of the 21st century, it is evident that it is increasingly moribund.  Vietnam has jettisoned chữ Hán for the Latin alphabet; North Korea has switched exclusively to hangul; South Korea now uses very few hanja; the Japanese script currently consists of draconically limited kanji, many of which are simplified, often in ways that are different from the simplified characters adopted by the PRC, plus two types of syllabaries and roman letters; the PRC itself now uses radically simplified and limited characters and the Latin alphabet, not to mention that all of the hundreds of millions of students in China learn English, which is a primary index of success for rising in the world of education, and entering sinographs into computers and other digital devices is overwhelmingly accomplished through the alphabet (with resultant amnesia eroding the characters they do learn); while the ephemeral Sinoform scripts of Inner Asia (Tangut, Jurchen, Khitan) disappeared around a millennium ago; Sinitic Dungan speakers write their language in Cyrillic….  For those who are advocates of the sinographic script, naturally all of this would be cause for alarm.

If you do a search across the internet for this term, you will find it used here and there.  You will even find the extended expression Topolect Literature Movement (TLM), which is traced back to at least the mid-twentieth century.

For the lexical legitimacy and morphological construction of "topolect literature", see this comment to a previous post: 

"Topolect literature" may seem to be a contradiction in terms — fāngyán wénxué 方言文學 ("topolect literature"). On the other hand, "oral literature" is a well-established concept / term in global scholarship, the idea being that this is written literature transcribed / derived from oral sources.