Language Log

My graduate seminar on Middle Vernacular Sinitic has six M.A. students from the PRC in it.  They are all advanced in Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese  (LS/CC) .  In this seminar, which I have been offering for more than a decade, each time I focus on a different medieval text.  Because the texts I assign to the students are largely or wholly unannotated, the students are mostly sailing through uncharted waters.  For them to be able to read and understand these texts, their Sinitic philological skills have to be high, higher than for most students in Advanced LS/CC courses.

"A Conversation with Toby Kiers, World Champion of Fungus", NYT 1/14/2026 — lots of interesting science, and this bit of sociophonetics:

Q: How do you pronounce “fungi”? Is it “fun-guy,” or “fun-jai,” or “fun-jee,” or “fun-ghee”?

A: I’m all over the place. I’ll start a sentence with “fun-jee” and by the end I’ll say “fun-ghee.” There’s no wrong answer!

[This is a guest post by M. Paul Shore]

     Because my January 19th post about the pronunciation of "Davos" has attracted a number of comments on the general question of what degree of pronunciational authenticity mainstream and semi-mainstream broadcasters should attempt for foreign proper nouns and, occasionally, common nouns, and under what circumstances, I've decided to submit this new post on that general question rather than have my thoughts about it buried in that previous thread.

     Because discussions of the question tend to stagnate and become nearly meaningless as a result of the assumption or near-assumption that there can be only two categories of authenticity, namely "authentic" and "inauthentic", I’d like to take a stand against that binary thinking and propose that four basic levels of authenticity be recognized:

From M. Paul Shore (of partial Swiss German ancestry; former Linguistics major) to PBS News staff: 

Knowing full well that 漢文 ("Sinitic Writing; Classical Chinese; Literary Sinitic") is pronounced Hànwén in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM), Kanbun in Japanese, and Hanmun in Korean, I wanted to know how it is pronounced in Vietnamese, and was directed to this resource,  "Another Nôm Lookup Tool based on Unicode", where I learned that it is Hán văn.

In our discussion of part III of Elle Cordova's Grammarian Saga, "Grammarian vs Errorist showdown at the secret L'error", there was some back-and-forth about whether or not error could stand it for the nucleus of lair.

AntC wrote "I can't smudge 'error; into a single syllable", and I responded that "Elle Cordova does it by brute force — I don't think 'air' is her normal pronunciation of 'error'".

But looking into pronunciations of error on the internet, I've found that her "l'error" ~ "lair" pun is, in fact, pretty plausible.

I, for one, don't think it's the least bit funny.

Uyghur pronounciation

The way Uyghurs speak Mandarin is now a joke
For many it’s not funny, given the political heat around language choices

Economist (Nov 13th 2025)

The article begins with a viral joke, which Economist doesn't bother to explain (I will, though, at the end of the first paragraph):

Scroll through posts about Xinjiang on Chinese social media and an odd phrase soon appears: “Apple U”. It is a pun that mimics how some Uyghurs, the largest ethnic minority in Xinjiang, a region in China’s far north-west, pronounce “Hey, friend” in Mandarin. This meme is part of a growing trend online for using nang yan wen, or “naan Mandarin”—a way of writing and talking that wags have named after Xinjiang’s staple flatbread. Videos tagged with the term have amassed more than 1.7bn [VHM: !!!] views on Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China, since the start of the year.

Since Victor recently spent 1100 words on various people's "best approximations of how they think they are saying 'Canton'", "expressed in common spelling (not a phonetic alphabet)", and has resisted requests to provide audio, I thought I'd provide some examples of how a Canton resident pronounces the city's name. As I've explained many times, I don't think that IPA transcriptions are an effective way of representing how people actually talk, and this case will continue to support that view. Instead, a good place to start is a sample of audio clips along with graphical representations of waveforms, spectrograms and other kinds of acoustic analysis — and there are several possible directions to go from there.

All places in China have topolect terms, some more than others, and some are more influential outside of their own region than others.  One regional variety whose speakers create numerous memorable expressions they are proud of is Dōngběihuà 東北話 ("Northeastern topolect").  I was inspired to make this post after reading a collection of twenty Northeasternisms.

I showed the collection to Diana Shuheng Zhang, who is an authentic Northeasterner.  Diana not only translated and explained the entire collection, she added twenty more, for a total of forty, commenting, "Can't stop laughing. Hope everybody enjoys our native expressions. :)" 

Please note that I (VHM) have added all the pinyin romanizations and a few literal translations).  Because some of the characters are unusual and I'm not a Northeastern speaker, I cannot guarantee the accuracy, especially down to the tones (and their sandhi), of all the transcriptions I have supplied.  Pay attention to Diana's valuable phonological notes.

This is a follow-up to "How to pronounce the name of the ruler of the PRC" (10/26/25).  Surprised by the amount of dissension over how to pronounce his name and how to represent the pronunciation in romanization, I decided to try another approach.  I asked all of the students (undergrads and grads) in my Fiction and Drama and in my Language, Script, and Society in China classes to write down the best way that could think of to transcribe Xi Jinping's in roman or Cyrillic letters — other than the official Hanyu Pinyin version, Xi Jinping.

Only two of the students were linguistics majors, about a dozen were East Asian Languages and Civilizations majors.  The remainder were drawn from a wide variety of disciplines and fields (humanities, sciences, and social sciences) across the university.  About 90% had a Chinese background (ranging in ability from minimal acquaintance to full fluency).  There were a couple of students from Taiwan, a few from Cantonese and other topolect areas, one had a Korean background, and two or three had no prior exposure to any East Asian languages.

Xi Jinping.

There are countless online suggestions for how to pronounce the name of the Great Helmsman.  Most of them are well intended, but I fear that so far they have failed.  People who are well informed about Chinese affairs still murder the Paramount Leader's name.  So as not to muddy the waters, I will give a completely non-technical transcription.  No phonology, no semantics, no frills.

What I'm going to suggest on the next page is intended for the English-speaking layperson who has no specialized knowledge of Chinese language.  It will not be exactly the same as Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) spoken by a native, but it will get you close — sans tones, which would take a long time to explain and practice

Remember, there are countless Sinitic topolects, dialects, and idiolects, and endless variations even among MSM speakers.  Be confident.  If you pronounce the Paramount Leader's name the way I advise on the next page, any well-disposed/intended speaker of MSM will understand whom you're referring to.

Oh, by the way, if you haven't formally studied Mandarin and try to pronounce the "X" in some linguistically sophisticated way, you will most likely miserably fail.

Don't try to make it fancy or exotic.

Pronounce the words the way you would in English.

Here goes:

In an interview yesterday, Ty Cobb (the lawyer, not the baseball player) answered a question from Geoff Bennett:

GEOFF BENNETT: How do you assess the way President Trump in his second term has asserted control over the Justice Department and many of the prosecutors who work for it, as compared to the first term?

TY COBB: Well, he appointed people who were clearly slavishly devoted to him and willing to break any ethical barriers or legal barriers to do his bidding.

Today's For Better or For Worse:

April's "comftrable" is not dictionary-sanctioned — but maybe it should be?