Language Log

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-third issue:

“Xizi Qiji 西字奇跡The Miracle of Western Words: Matteo Ricci’s Innovations in Language and Faith,” by Zhaofei Chen.

https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp363_matteo_ricci_xizi_qiji.pdf

Classrooms Beneath the Himalayas: Why China’s “Migrant Learners” Are Turning to Nepal
Zheng Yiwen, The World of Chinese (8/13/25)

As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, I find this phenomenon of Chinese going to Nepal to learn English to be somewhat cognitively dissonant.

Here's what goes on in one such Kathmandu crammer:

Inside, around 10 young Chinese students sit in a classroom, hunched over as they complete English listening exercises. Leon Row, the school’s British founder and lead instructor, steps out of the classroom, and with a crisp London accent, gently asks the crowd outside to keep their voices down—the noise is disrupting them.

Several people have asked me about this paper — Maya Inbar, Eitan Grossman, and Ayelet Landau, "A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms", PNAS 8/19/2025:

Intonation units (IUs) are a hypothesized universal building block of human speech [W. Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing (1994); N. P. Himmelmann et al., Phonology 35, 207–245 (2018)). Linguistic research suggests they are found across languages and that they fulfill important communicative functions such as the pacing of ideas in discourse and swift turn-taking. We study the rate of IUs in 48 languages from every continent and from 27 distinct language families. Using an analytic method to annotate natural speech recordings, we identify a low-frequency rate of IUs across the sample, with a peak at 0.6 Hz, and little variation between sexes or across the life span. We find that IU rate is only weakly related to speech rate quantified at the syllable level, and crucially, that cross-linguistic variation in IU rate does not stem from cross-linguistic variation in syllable rate.

Note that 0.6 Hz is 1/0.6 ≈ 1.7 seconds in the time domain.

'Tis the season of sneezing, and I'm doing a lot of it these days.  At 5 AM this morning, I was awakened by my own sneezing.   It was completely unpremeditated and unexpected.  The sounds that came out were aaah-HOOOOO!!!!!  Low level / high rising.  

The conventional representation of this sound in writing is "achoo".  Other variations include "kerchoo" and "hachao", etc.  In German, I think that the sound of a sneeze is represented as "hatschee" and in Japanese it is "hakushon".

This morning, the sound that I explosively emitted was aaah-HOOOOO!!!!!  Twice.

Since I have a large, Alpine schnoz that acts as an echo chamber, causing the sound to reverberate in my nasal passages, it is extremely loud and ends shrilly.  It can be heard a block away, or all the way down the turn of the corridor from my office to the departmental office about 40 paces distant.

What are the most American and most British words?
Is American English really that different than its British ancestor? And if so, what words truly separate the American from the Brit? The Department of Data is on the case.
Washington Post (August 22, 2025), Column by Andrew Van Dam

Depending on the date and time when it appeared online, this article has a different title and format (e.g., fewer or more graphs / charts, but the textual content remains basically the same.  The published version is much longer than the extract I have given here, and provides much more data.

Back in the 1940s, Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann came up with the idea of "Cellular automata", which started with models of crystal growth and self-replicating systems, and continued over the decades with explorations in many areas, popularized in the 1970s by Conway's Game of Life. One strand of these explorations became known as Agent-based Models, applied to problems in ecology, sociology, and economics. One especially influential result was Robert Axelrod's work in the mid-1980s on the Evolution of Cooperation.  For a broader survey, see De Marchi and Page, "Agent-based models", Annual Review of Political Science, 2014.

A road sign at the Gwadar Free Zone, operated by China Overseas Ports
Holding Company, in Gwadar, Balochistan, Pakistan. This port is a crucial part
of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. (Photograph dated July 4, 2018)

If you're in museum administration, you will certainly know the meaning of "restitution".  But what do you do with a headline like this?

"Ethiopian Heritage Authority Intensifies Push to Restitute Looted Artifacts." ENA English.

Ted McClure asks:

Back-formation from "restitution"? Or verb origin of "restitution"? I would have thought the verb form was "restore".

Email from J.P.:

This word caught my attention on the news this morning.  It was said to be a gigantic dust/sandstorm that was passing through the central Arizona area.  As soon as I heard the sound of the word, with a probable triliteral Semitic root and the fact that it was some sort of sandstorm, I thought that it was most likely Arabic.  And indeed it is.

In "Reading Instruction in the mid 19th century" (8/16/2025), I underlined the old-fashioned focus on "elocution", in which readers were trained "to convey to the hearer, fully and clearly, the ideas and feelings of the writer". Much of today's reading instruction turns that into measures of "oral reading fluency", measured as words correct per minute ("wcpm"). This can result in high-scoring readers like those described in this passage from the Introductory Remarks in 1844 edition of McGuffey's Rhetorical Guide, which warns against the consequences of failure to teach "elocution" from the very start:

Adam Aleksic, "The insidious creep of Trump's speaking style", NYT 8/17/2025:

“Many such cases.” “Many people are saying this.”

You may recognize these phrases as “Trumpisms” — linguistic coinages of President Trump — but they’ve also become ingrained in our collective vocabulary. Since they became popular as memes during his first presidential campaign, we have begun using them, first sardonically, and then out of habit.

If you search for “many such cases” on X, you’ll see new posts of the phrase seemingly every minute, primarily applied to nonpolitical contexts like work anxiety or the real estate market. Google Trends shows both expressions increasing in usage since the mid-2010s.

[This is a guest post by Mok Ling]

Someone asked me why shìhé 適合 ("to suit") and héshì 合適 ("suitable") aren't exactly reversible.  [VHM added the romanizations and parenthetical definitions for those who do not know sinographs.  Ibid. below.]  A quick search online got me this explanation:  

"They [適合 and 合適] mean more or less the same thing, but the former is a verb, while the latter is an adjective." (Chinese Grammar Wiki)

I could not figure out why this is the difference they find. Both the Wiktionary and Baidu entries for 適合 give 合適 as a synonym and vice versa.

Giles' Chinese-English Dictionary has neither word, but does have héshì 合式 ("suitable") under both 合 (3947) and 式 9948. The spelling with 式 is also considered a variant form by DeFrancis.