Language Log

This morning, as is my wont, I stepped out on my stoop to test the weather.  Across the street, I saw children running around picking up eggs that had been hidden in the grass here and there and delightedly putting them in the baskets they held with one hand.  These eggs were colored, all right, but made of plastic, not the kind of natural eggs we used to spend a lot of time on boiling and dyeing and, if we were fancy and clever, making designs and even using multiple colors through a combination of melted wax and various tools and techniques.  I fondly recall the olfactory and tactile sensations of vinegar, melted wax used during the process, and smooth egg shells.

Really elaborately decorated Easter eggs are called pysanky (plural form of pysanka from the Ukrainian word pysaty meaning "to write" (source), cf. Russian письменность ("writing").  You don't have to be a pro and make pysanky like the ones shown here, but you can derive a lot of fun and satisfaction making your own colored Easter eggs that are dyed and decorated in a fashion that is commensurate with your time and talents.

Feast your eyes on a small segment of the total number of interjections in English:  Aha, Hurray, Oh, Ah, Aw, Ouch, Wow, Alas, Boo, Hey, Oh my God, Ahem, Bah, Cheers, Hmm, Huh, Huzzah, Oops, Yay, Agreement, Amen, Argh, Awesome, Boy….

Interjections may be exclamatory, quizzical, condemnatory, laudatory, and so forth and so on.  They may convey pain, delight, dismay; approbation, disapproval.

Some interjections are neutral:  uh, um.

Some are positive:  woo-hoo, bravo.

Some are negative:  duh, which is disdainful, demeaning, and even insulting.

April is Autism Acceptance Month:

Autism Acceptance Month celebrates and honors the experiences and identities of Autistic individuals. It emphasizes understanding, inclusion, and support, moving beyond awareness towards meaningful acceptance.

On April 16, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. put out this not-very-supportive set of claims about Autism:

[The news conference that this was taken from is here.]

These are remarks by Ron Vara from here:

ᱮᱞᱚᱱ ᱨᱤᱣ ᱢᱩᱥᱠ ( /ˈiːlɒn/ EE-lon; ᱡᱟᱱᱟᱢ ᱡᱩᱱ ᱒᱘, ᱑᱙᱗᱑) ᱩᱱᱤ ᱫᱚ ᱢᱤᱫ ᱵᱮᱯᱟᱨᱤᱭᱟᱹ ᱠᱟᱱᱟᱭ ᱚᱠᱚᱭ ᱫᱚ ᱩᱱᱤᱭᱟᱜ ᱢᱩᱲᱩᱫ ᱵᱷᱩᱢᱤᱠᱟ Tesla, Inc., SpaceX, ᱟᱨ ᱴᱩᱭᱴᱚᱨ (ᱡᱟᱦᱟᱸ ᱩᱱᱤ ᱮᱠᱥ ᱞᱮᱠᱟᱛᱮ ᱧᱩᱛᱩᱢ ᱵᱚᱫᱚᱞ ᱮᱱᱟ) ᱨᱮ ᱵᱟᱰᱟᱭᱚᱜ ᱠᱟᱱᱟ᱾

This is the first sentence in the article Elon Musk in Santali alphabet (Ol Chiki). Yes, it's an alphabetic writing system, not an abugida. What makes the Santali alphabet really elusive is that it resembles the shapes of the undeciphered Indus Valley script. Soviet archaeologists once tried to decipher IVC seals using Santali alphabet. Sounds ridiculous, but it's a sad truth that Santali is a unique language with little to no academic attention having been paid to it.

Some folks seem to think so, but not Benjamin James who wrote this letter to the London Review of Books, 47.6 (April 3, 2025), p. 4:

Simple Script

In his fascinating article on the recent decipherment of Linear Elamite, Tom Stevenson finds it difficult to accept that 'the Latin or Greek writing systems are simpler or "more precise" than mostly logographic writing systems like written Chinese' (LRB, 6 March). Does he really believe Chinese script is just as suited as Latin to the rendering of foreign words? 'Tom Stevenson' is far simpler and more phonetically precise than 汤姆•史帝⽂森，'Tangmu Shidiwénsen', which adds two syllables, six tones and six individual character meanings. The Committee for Language Reform in China acknowledged the relative simplicity of the Latin script as one of the factors behind its abandonment in 1956 of the attempt to develop a phonetic script based on Chinese characters.

"Constructed Languages Are Processed by the Same Brain Mechanisms as Natural Languages." Malik-Moraleda, Saima, et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 12 (March 17, 2025): e2313473122.

Last weekend, a number of crosswalk buttons in Silicon Valley were hacked so as to play (faked) messages from Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. This got lots of (social and mass) media coverage — for one useful summary, see Zoe Morgan, "Silicon Valley crosswalk buttons apparently hacked to imitate Musk, Zuckerberg voices", Palo Alto Online 4/12/2025, or check out various other sources…

Some audio samples:

For the record:

"Do Inuit languages really have many words for snow? The most interesting finds from our study of 616 languages", The Conversation (4/10/25); rpt. in phys.org/news (4/13/25)

Authors:

Charles Kemp
Professor, School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne (PhD MIT)
Ekaterina Vylomova
Lecturer, Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne (The University of Melbourne, PhD/Computational Linguistics)
Temuulen Khishigsuren
PhD Candidate, The University of Melbourne (National University of Mongolia, M.A. in linguistics)
Terry Regier
Professor, Language and Cognition Lab, University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., Computer science, UC Berkeley, 1992; frequent co-author with Paul Kay; among his most-cited work is:

"Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left",
Aubrey L. Gilbert; Terry Regier; Paul Kay; Richard B. Ivry.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2006)\

These two articles (The Conversation and phys.org/news) are journalistic accounts of the scientific study by Kemp, Vylomova, Khishigsuren, and Regier.

Thirty-five or so years ago, Allyn Rickett (1921-2020), my old colleague at Penn, referred to a certain person as "pópomāmā 婆婆媽媽" ("mawkishly maudlin" [my translation of Rickett's Mandarin]; "old-lady-like").  This is such an unusual expression, and it so perfectly characterized the individual in question, that it's worth writing a post on it.

In the years around the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Rickett ("Rick") was in China doing research for his doctoral dissertation on the Guǎn Zǐ 管子 (Master Guan), a large and important politicophilosophical text reflecting the thought and practice of the Spring and Autumn period (c. 770-c. 481 BC), though the received version was not edited until circa 26 BC.  Rickett was accused of spying for the US Office of Naval Intelligence and imprisoned by the PRC government.  There he underwent four years of "struggle sessions".  Call them what you will, he had ample opportunity to become familiar with such colloquial terms as "pópomāmā 婆婆媽媽".

I should also note that Rickett, who was a student of the distinguished Sinologist, Derk Bodde (1909-2003), was an outstanding scholar in his own right, and his densely annotated translation of the Guan Zi is a monumental achievement, one that he worked on for most of his professional life.

Jeffrey Weng, "What Is Mandarin? The Social Project of Language Standardization in Early Republican China", Journal of Asian Studies, 77.3 (August 2018), 611-633.

Abstract

Scholars who study language often see standard or official languages as oppressive, helping the socially advantaged to entrench themselves as elites. This article questions this view by examining the Chinese case, in which early twentieth-century language reformers attempted to remake their society's language situation to further national integration. Classical Chinese, accessible only to a privileged few, was sidelined in favor of Mandarin, a national standard newly created for the many. This article argues that Mandarin's creation reflected an entirely new vision of society. It draws on archival sources on the design and promulgation of Mandarin from the 1910s to the 1930s to discuss how the way the language was standardized reflected the nature of the imagined future society it was meant to serve. Language reform thus represented a radical rethinking of how society should be organized: linguistic modernity was to be a national modernity, in which all the nation's people would have access to the new official language, and thus increased opportunities for advancement.

Stumbled upon an earliest surviving partial bible translation into Japanese made by Manuel Barreto in 1591 (known as バレト写本 or Reg. lat. 459), here's the first paragraph.

Scans can be found here:https://t.co/pW2nH8Udtj pic.twitter.com/HMehP0F6qd

— Maxim Persikov (Panates) (@gyankotsu) December 5, 2024