Language Log

No. At least, there've been plenty of dumb articles over past decades and centuries, and plenty of smart ones recently. But I have some complaints about one particular recent article in The Economist, "Is the decline of reading making politics dumber? As people read less they think less clearly, scholars fear", 9/4/2025.

I Used to Know How to Write in Japanese:
Somehow, though, I can still read it
Marco Giancotti, Aether Mug (August 14, 2025)

During the last thirty to forty years, two of the most popular dictionaries for mastering sinographs were those of James Heisig and Rick Harbaugh.  I was dubious about the efficacy of both and wished that my students wouldn't use them, but language learners flocked to these extremely popular dictionaries, thinking that they offered a magic trick for remembering the characters.

The latter relied on fallacious etymological "trees" and was written by an economist, and the former was based on brute memorization enhanced by magician's tricks and was written by a philosopher of religion.  Both placed characters on a pedestal of visuality / iconicity without integrating them with spoken language.

I have already done a mini-review of Harbaugh's Chinese Characters and Culture: A Genealogy and Dictionary (New Haven: Yale Far Eastern Publications, 1998) on pp. 25-26 here:  Reviews XI, Sino-Platonic Papers, 145 (August, 2004).  The remainder of this post will consist of extracts of Giancotti's essay and the view of a distinguished Japanologist-linguist on Heisig's lexicographical methods.

The McGuffey Readers are a series of elementary-school texts first published in 1836, and widely used in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I'm not quite old enough to have to have experienced McGuffey in school, but I've been interested for a long time in the problems of early reading instruction, and so I did skim some dog-eared copies of McGuffey many years ago.

My involvement with the "Using Generative Artificial Intelligence for Reading R&D Center" (U-GAIN) has now involved me directly in relevant research, in collaboration with others at Penn, at Digital Promise, at mdrc, and at Amira Learning.  Wikipedia tells us that "The Science of Reading (SOR) is the discipline that studies the objective investigation and accumulation of reliable evidence about how humans learn to read and how reading should be taught". And the methods that have emerged from that process are similar in many ways to McGuffey's intuitively-derived methods — minus one interesting feature, namely McGuffey's emphasis on training students to produce a rhetorically effective performance of the passages that are given to them to read.

[This is a guest post by Mok Ling]

I happen to know a few students (of varying ages and learning experiences) who want to learn (or re-learn, for some of them) Mandarin the "right" way (that is, focusing on speaking and listening before reading and writing, unlike what is prescribed by most HSK courses). Right now, I've got them chewing on the revised Pinyin edition of Princeton's Chinese Primer (which is in pure Pinyin — not a single sinograph until halfway into the course), but they obviously need something outside of a textbook to read.

I'd planned on giving them a Pinyinized Kong Yiji as a "goal text" to read once they have a firm command of the spoken language, but thinking back this seems like a bad idea because of how flowery Lu Xun can get.

Upon first hearing, the very idea sounded preposterous, but when I searched the internet, I found it all over the place as "nonword reading / repetition", "nonsense words", "non word phonics / fluency", "non-word decoding", "pseudowords", etc.  In other words (!), it's a real thing, and lots of people take the concept seriously as a supposedly useful device in reading theory and practice, justifying it thus:

"as a tool to assess phonetic decoding ability" (here)

"contribute to children's ability to learn new words"  (here)

"a true indicator of the alphabetic principle and basic phonics" (here)

etc., etc., etc.

I would not have taken the topic of nonwords seriously and posted on it, had not AntC pointed out that it is actually being applied in the classroom in New Zealand.

In two successive comments on different posts (here and here), Jarek Weckwerth asserts that this garden path post is "a timely follow-up" to the exuberant discussion on the parsing of a Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic (CC/LS) book title that took place in this post and the plethora of readers' remarks that followed it.  This is an interesting proposition, and it makes me wonder if CC/LS is prone to this sort of ambiguity because of the inexplicitness of its grammar.

During the more than half a century that I have been studying and teaching CC/LS, it has always seemed to me that checking out different possible "garden paths" is a sine qua non for responsible reading of such texts.

In "Trends in book titles" (8/5/2022) I discussed the title-page complexity's of P. Sproson's 1740 work "THE ART of READING: OR, THE ENGLISH TONGUE MADE Familiar and easy to the meanest Capacity", and observed that "There's also more to say about Mr. Sproson's reader".

One thing to start with: Sproson provides a series of  reading lessons featuring sequences of words of increasing length and complexity. And some of them achieve a sort of accidental Seuss-ish poetry, e.g. this section of  a lesson "consisting of words not exceeding two letters in each":

is my ox to go
my ox is to go
of us or to us
of me or to me
to us or of us
to me or of me
is it to be so
it is to be so
to be so it is
is it so to be
it is so to be
is it so to me
is it so to us

From Barbara Phillips Long:

In the last week, I have read several "summer reading" columns. It occurs to me it might be interesting to know if there are books with linguists as major characters. Are there?

Here is a painting that is being exhibited in Taipei now:

[This is a guest post by Bernard Cadogan]

Epic comes from a Greek word for a word or spoken language, epos. Logos is another word like that which we know. The first emphasises articulation, the latter organisation.
 
Epic features in many cultures and comes in different varieties. China and the Sinitic civilisations lack it, as do the nomadic Semitic and Amazigh peoples of the Middle East and North Africa. Egypt had no epic. The hero form involving journeying –  Gilgamesh and the Odyssey and Beowulf – is one form. The most stringent form resembles the Iliad, which is the most perfect epic composed. It consists of multiple actors involved in a single action within the context of a wider struggle. This is what Crete 1941 resembles. There is no single hero. There is no single baddie. The complexity of war is fully invoked as well as the necessity to fight it.

I wrote to a colleague who helped me edit a paper that it had been accepted for publication.  She wrote back, "I’m glad it is excepted".

Some may look upon such a typo as "garden variety", but I believe that it tells us something profoundly significant about the primacy of sound over shape, an issue that we have often debated on Language Log, including how to regard typographical errors in general, but also how to read old Chinese texts (e.g., copyists' mistakes, deterioration of texts over centuries of editorial transmission, etc.).

Often, when you read a Chinese text and parts of it just don't make any sense, if you ignore the superficial semantic signification of the characters with which it is written, but focus more on the sound, suddenly the meaning of the text will become crystal clear.  In point of fact, much of the commentarial tradition throughout Chinese history consists of this kind of detective work — sorting out which morphemes were really intended by a given string of characters.

[The following is a guest post by Amara Hasa]

We are longtime fans of Language Log and wanted to share a project we've been working on that we believe might be right up your alley. We believe as much because it combines two subjects you've written about in the past: teaching languages through comprehensible input and compelling stories ("How to learn Mandarin"), and spoken and communicative Sanskrit ("Spoken Sanskrit").

Our project is a free online library of Sanskrit stories for learners. What makes these stories special is that they follow the current best practices from second language acquisition research.

Xi Jinping commits another pronunciation gaffe.  Even if you don't know Mandarin, you can hear it clearly here because it is repeated over and over again.  Instead of saying "pīngpāng wàijiāo 乒乓外交" ("ping-pong diplomacy"), he says "bīngbāng wàijiāo 冰邦外交" ("ice states diplomacy"), which some wits are further distorting as "bīngbàng wàijiāo 冰棒外交" ("popsicle diplomacy"):

https://twitter.com/RealEmperorPooh/status/1144817965008744448