Language Log

From the renowned cartoonist, Rebel Pepper

Taipei City Council forms Taiwanese Language Revitalization Caucus

Civic groups call for wider everyday use of Taiwanese

Keoni Everington, Taiwan News (5/6/26)

(in Mandarin)

statistics show that in 2020, 66.4% of people primarily used Mandarin, while 31.7% used Taiwanese as their main language, CNA reported. However, 54.3% reported using Taiwanese as a secondary language, indicating that many people have some ability in the language but lack an environment in which to use it.

I was planning to write a post on this chain of phenomenal gas stations cum country / convenience stores (gives a new meaning to that expression), so was tickled when jhh beat me to mentioning it in this comment.

Several days ago, i visited one in the outskirts of Dallas.  As per many things Texas, it was BIG.  Outside, it had more than 80 pumps, and inside it had more than 80 cashiers.  The store stretched on and on and on, longer than a football field.  I felt like I was in a Star Wars space ship cantina.  The store-station was equal to ten of our biggest Wawa station-stores, which I treasure.  It had a parking lot that accommodated hundreds of cars.

The Canadian English Dictionary

is a project being developed by the Society for Canadian English, a not-for-profit consortium including Editors Canada, the Canadian Word Centre at UBC and the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University.

And as of yesterday, they announced their first Word of the Year.

Launch of the Journal of Sinographic Philologies and Legacies & Call for Papers

The Institute for Sinographic Literatures and Philology at Korea University (Seoul, South Korea) is proud to announce the launch of the Journal of Sinographic Philologies and Legacies (JOSPL), a pioneering venue in the growing field of Sinographic studies. This quarterly, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal is dedicated to the study of the humanistic heritage of East Asia’s Sinographic sphere—a cultural region where Literary Sinitic (漢文) and Sinographs (漢字) functioned as the cosmopolitan language of government, religious institutions, scholarship, and belles-lettres. JOSPL invites submissions that engage critically with this legacy from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives.

A letter to the editor on the essential nature of LLMs from the Times Literary Supplement (5/30/25):

 Large language models

This elevator panel image was sent to me by Nick Kaldis:

Other video angles and edits are available on YouTube.

From François Lang:

This headline (WP [11/1/24]) completely garden-pathed me–especially because of "watch strikes"!

I've rarely encountered a garden-path sentence in the wild, i.e., not in the context of a linguistic discussion of garden-path sentences.

"On Baalbek’s edges, the displaced watch strikes rain down on their city"

And why doesn't she have a Wikipedia page?
[Update– and now she has one, thanks mainly to commenter Jessamyn.]

I came across her works in a recent search for background information. The Penn Library's Online Books Page offers links to 35 of her publications; The Internet Archive offers 90 results, 87 of which seem to be valid;  Amazon offers links to 92 (versions of her) publications; Google Books oddly returns only 7 results.

All of Johnsen's works, as far as I can tell, were published by the H.W. Wilson Company, which does have a Wikipedia page. And most of her publications were (annotated) compilations of works by other authors, published as part of the company's "Reference Shelf":

(though some seem to have been published before that series was started.)

There's a chain of about half-a-dozen fast food restaurants called Gyro Shack in Boise, Idaho, where I find myself now.  They're cool little shops, just as Boise is a cool (big-)little city spread across a broad, flat plain (nearly three thousand feet in elevation) that lies at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Several things about gyros perplex me.  One is how the cones of meat on the vertical, rotating spit cohere and do not fall to pieces, but docilely hang in place oozing their mouthwatering juices waiting to be sliced off, layer after layer.  One traditional gyro meat recipe states:  "Processing the meat in the food processor and overworking it ensures that the proteins in the meat stick together, like sausage." (source)  I still don't get it, since sausage has a casing to hold it together.

Never mind about that physical matter for now,  What really bothers me (and lots of other people), is how to pronounce that four-letter word.

My mental image of Berbers is one of brave, noble people of the Maghreb (western and central North Africa, comprising Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia) who were there before the advent of the Arabs, whose migration into the region took place largely in the 7th and later centuries.  As happened in Southeast Asia (including Taiwan) with the Han people from the north pushing the indigenes into the mountainous areas from the lowlands to become montagnards, the Berbers also substantially retreated into the mountains of northern Africa.

When my Uber driver told me last Sunday in Philadelphia that he was a Berber, I told him that he must be proud of his heritage, he responded, "Actually, we don't like that name.  It was imposed on us by Arabs, and it means the same thing as 'barbarian'.  We prefer to call ourselves 'Amazigh'."

Economics buzzword.  From the Wall Street Journal's China newsletter: