Language Log

Sylvain Farrel is a student nurse from Indonesia.  He came to America four years ago and speaks perfect English.  I asked him how that is possible, how did he learn English so quickly?

Sylvain said that he studied English during his elementary and middle school education.  His national language is Bahasa (Indonesia), i.e., Indonesian.

By ethnic heritage, Sylvain is Chinese, Hokkien / Fujian on one side, and I think Hakka on the other side, but I'm not sure.

John Burn-Murdoch, "Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite", Financial Times 3/28/2026:

Every media revolution has transformed who distributes information, what messages are distributed and what form they take. As such, some media are fundamentally democratising and polarising, widening the pool of publishers and views beyond a narrow elite and amplifying radical and anti-establishment voices. TikTok and the printing press arrived almost 600 years apart but share these characteristics. Others push the opposite way: radio and television had high barriers to entry, creating a monopoly for the voices and views of elites and experts.

As the use of AI chatbots takes off, it’s worth pausing to ask which of these categories they fall into. There is good reason to believe it is the latter.

China to Enshrine Xi-Era Ethnic Policy in New Law
by Chenghao Wei, NPC Observer (3/5/26)

The following is the introductory paragraph to the prospectus for the NPC's proceedings next week:

Next week, China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) is expected to adopt a Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (Law) [民族团结进步促进法]—designed to codify General Secretary Xi Jinping’s new orthodoxy for governing China’s ethnic minorities. That doctrine, known as the “Important Thinking on Improving and Strengthening Ethnic Work,” reflects the “Second-Generation Ethnic Policies” promoted by several prominent scholars. In a nutshell, this new “assimilationist” approach aims “not just to strengthen citizens’ sense of belonging to a larger, unified Chinese nation under the Party but also to mute expression of other—in the Party’s view, competing—identities.”

China to Enshrine Xi-Era Ethnic Policy in New Law

by Chenghao Wei, NPC Observer (3/5/26)

The following is the introductory paragraph to the prospectus for the NPC's proceedings this week (starting on the 5th and lasting for eight days):

Next week, China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) is expected to adopt a Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (Law) [民族团结进步促进法]—designed to codify General Secretary Xi Jinping’s new orthodoxy for governing China’s ethnic minorities. That doctrine, known as the “Important Thinking on Improving and Strengthening Ethnic Work,” reflects the “Second-Generation Ethnic Policies” promoted by several prominent scholars. In a nutshell, this new “assimilationist” approach aims “not just to strengthen citizens’ sense of belonging to a larger, unified Chinese nation under the Party but also to mute expression of other—in the Party’s view, competing—identities.”

Androcentric China will have to live with this potentially formidable woman, just as they're having to deal with Prime Minister Takaichi.

"Is North Korea's 'princess' walking a path toward succession?", Nikkei staff writers, NikkeiAsia (11/25/25)

This is a most impressive article, based on AI analytics of more than 14,000 hours of footage that highlights the elevation of Kim Jong Un's daughter.

Jesse Ventura has had a successful career as a pro wrestler, actor, and politician — all largely built on the foundations of his mastery of pro wrestling rhetoric.  And recent events have brought him back into the public eye. His Jan. 8 interview on the Minneapolis Fox News channel got 2.7 million likes and more than 47 thousand comments on TikTok, lots of play on other news-ish outlets, 295k views and more than 7400 comments on YouTube,  and 3.7 million views and more than 1400 comments on X.

See "The art of the promo" (10/31/2020) for some background on this rhetorical style, including its role in Donald Trump's career. And if you haven't listened to Ventura's interview, you should do so as background for this post.

Trump's Wednesday evening speech got a lot of media coverage, as expected — but along with descriptions of (and responses to) the content, there were also many references to the tone, and specifically to the pace.

At State Dept., a Typeface Falls Victim in the War Against Woke
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the Biden-era move to the sans serif typeface “wasteful,” casting the return to Times New Roman as part of a push to stamp out diversity efforts.
By Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz (Dec. 9, 2025)

The "what we do" page for the  CANTWINVICTORYFUND starts by explaining that they "Run Cant-idates to lose spectacularly in gerrymandered districts".

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:

Imagine running propaganda and forgetting to blur the Top Gun logo. Peak CCTV. Even the Chinese can’t bear to see it! #TopGun pic.twitter.com/p0gs5X1MK7

— The Great Translation Movement 大翻译运动 (@TGTM_Official) September 23, 2025

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

“Relations between Persia and Central Asia in Antiquity: An Examination of the Written Sources,” by Yu Taishan. (pdf)

Liam Julian, "Putting Fowler back in Fowler's" (Hoover Institution, 2009) presents a perspective that used to be more common that it is today, I think: linguistic prescriptivism as (a particular kind of) cultural conservatism, in explicit association with right-wing politics. Julian wrote:

Burchfield, in his preface to Fowler’s third edition, called the first edition “this extraordinary book, the Bible of presciptivists.” But in the early 20th century, when Fowler was writing the extraordinary book, the trend was away from prescriptivism and toward a descriptive, academic linguistics that, like Burchfield himself, observed rather than decreed.1 Burchfield stressed the extent of “the isolation of Fowler from the mainstream of the linguistic scholarship of his day” and highlighted “his heavy dependence” on English school textbooks and the classics of ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, and post-Renaissance English literature. For Fowler, Burchfield wrote, these influences composed “a three-colored flag” that “was to be saluted and revered, and, as far as possible, everything it represented was to be preserved intact.”