Language Log

When I first learned the name of this important port city in northeastern Taiwan, I was told that it was originally written with characters that mean "chicken coop; hen coop; rooster cage", Taiwanese "Kelang" (POJ Ke-lâng/Koe-lâng).  I found that to be rather droll and thought that it was probably derived from the cramped geological formation of the hilly city.  The actual story of the city's name, which has come back into the news today, is quite different, as I will explain below the break.

Keelung pranked by name change on Google Maps
Prankster used characters for 18th century rendering of Keelung's name
Duncan DeAeth, Taiwan News (Oct. 24, 2025)

That's the title of a 9:23 video by a mysterious figure named Ming that was posted a month ago and that I happened upon several days later:

Following upon our enthusiastic, productive discussions on the main East Asian word for "slave" (奴隷 J. ドレイ M. núlì) a few weeks ago and Chau Wu's drawing of parallels with the corresponding Greek word for a person of that status several days after that, I've become deeply interested in Greek δούλος ("slave").  (See the first three items in "Selected readings".)

"Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like" | Open Culture (10/14/25)

With two audio recordings.  If you want to hear them, click on the link embedded in the title.

…since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.

Julesy's knowledge of linguistics is not restricted to East Asia:

I could write an entire post about this euphemistic French oath (lit., "sacred blue"), but I leave it to LL readers to figure out how it fits in to what follows.  Nowadays it is used more in English than in French.  (Wiktionary; Wikipedia)

Italian blasphemy and German ingenuity: how swear words differ around the world
Once dismissed as a sign of low intelligence, researchers now argue the ‘power’ of taboo words has been overlooked 
Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian (10/19/25)

Do you remember Charlotte, who was selling authentic French style crepes in a Taichung night market five years ago?  Judging from this recent video she appears to have done quite well; from a night stand she has now opened a full-fledged crepe restaurant and established a flower-cum-tea bag business for export to France on the side.

Why Do Japanese Still Use Kanji? Complicated Writing System…

Over the years, I've posted several times about the problematic word (and concept) disfluency — there's a too-long list at the end of "Spontaneous (dis)fluency" (8/27/2025). Among other ideas, I've suggested using the term interpolations (see this 2019 post for example). But as far as I can tell, this suggestion has had no impact on other people's usage.

So here's another try: How about making a list of the ways in which fluent spontaneous speech is not like fluent reading, and calling them all spontaneities?

From Peter Daniels:

Do the 7 or 8 (or whatever) “dialects” of Sinitic constitute what Hockett called an “L-complex,” like Romance, such that you could traverse the entire domain and never encounter neighboring villages that didn’t understand each other, with cultural centers where the language described in the regional grammar book and dictionary is spoken, or are they distinct languages as far back as one can look?

We've been discussing simplified characters, both official and unofficial (believe you me, they're all out there).  They come and go as people find them useful or not.  This is one thing that makes characters very different from alphabets and syllabaries.  The latter two types of writing systems tend to settle down to a more or less fixed number of elements / letters / symbols (generally around 50-100 symbols for a syllabary and 20-40 or so for an alphabet, whereas morphosyllabographic / logographic writing systems tend to keep burgeoning out of control if they are a living, functioning script.

It has often been mentioned on Language Log that the simplification of Chinese characters by the PRC government did not come at one fell swoop in 1965, but was spread out over a long period of time, and had at least one additional formal stage, in 1977, that was retracted in 1986.

This has resulted in uneven acquisition of separate sets of simplified characters by students who went through primary and secondary education at different times.