Language Log

I have observed the author working on this 749 page volume for many years, so it is with great rejoicing that it is available in time to send to friends, colleagues, and students as a Yuletide gift:

South Coblin, Common Shē and Common Hakka-Shē: A Comparative Study
Language and Linguistics Monograph Series 68

Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica (Taipei:  November, 2025)

Introduction

The present work is divided into two parts. Part I is devoted to the reconstruction of the phonology of Common Shē, the ancestral form of the closely related Sinitic dialects spoken by the Shē ethnic minority of China. The approach applied is the classical comparative method, in which modern data from seventeen modern dialects are subjected to comparative reconstructive analysis. Data from additional Shē varieties are also adduced as needed. The end product of these procedures is a hypothetical phonological system, which for the sake of brevity we call Common Shē, though this term should more precisely encompass not only phonology but also syntax and lexicon.

The first part of this debate, "Abstand und ausbau" (10/28/25), was so spirited and prolonged, and has recently moved on to significant new ground, that I've decided to launch this part 2.

Before commenting here, please go back and review what was said in the previous o.p. and the subsequent comments thereto, some of which are quite substantial.  Here I copy one of the recent observations in the first thread that has not yet been adequately responded to there:

"New Autism Data Challenge Long-Held Assumptions", MedPage Today 10/3/2025:

Autism diagnosed during early childhood had a distinct genetic and developmental profile compared with autism diagnosed later, a large analysis of multiple cohorts showed.

[…]

The results challenge a long-held assumption that autism has a unified underlying cause.

Alexei S. Kassian and George Starostin, "Do 'language trees with sampled ancestors' really support a 'hybrid model' for the origin of Indo-European? Thoughts on the most recent attempt at yet another IE phylogeny".  Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, no. 682 (May 16, 2025).

Abstract

In this paper, we present a brief critical analysis of the data, methodology, and results of the most recent publication on the computational phylogeny of the Indo-European family (Heggarty et al. 2023), comparing them to previous efforts in this area carried out by (roughly) the same team of scholars (informally designated as the “New Zealand school”), as well as concurrent research by scholars belonging to the “Moscow school” of historical linguistics. We show that the general quality of the lexical data used as the basis for classification has significantly improved from earlier studies, reflecting a more careful curation process on the part of qualified historical linguists involved in the project; however, there remain serious issues when it comes to marking cognation between different characters, such as failure (in many cases) to distinguish between true cognacy and areal diffusion and the inability to take into account the influence of the so-called derivational drift (independent morphological formations from the same root in languages belonging to different branches). Considering that both the topological features of the resulting consensus tree and the established datings contradict historical evidence in several major aspects, these shortcomings may partially be responsible for the results. Our principal conclusion is that the correlation between the number of included languages and the size of the list may simply be insufficient for a guaranteed robust topology; either the list should be drastically expanded (not a realistic option for various practical reasons) or the number of compared taxa be reduced, possibly by means of using intermediate reconstructions for ancestral stages instead of multiple languages (the principle advocated by the Moscow school).

[This is a guest post by June Teufel Dreyer, with an added note by VHM]

Watching a Netflix detective film entitled Capitani with instructions that I could listen in either English or Luxembourgish. Never having heard of the latter, I chose Luxembourgish, discovered it was mostly German with some French (always ‘merci,’ never danke), several words with long vowels like Dutch, a few words that seemed neither (nay for no; dai for das) and some words I didn’t get at all.  Still wondering why Luxembourgish is considered a language, I googled, found that it was actually classified as a language only in the 20^th century.  One has to become fluent to obtain citizenship.

[This is a guest post by Robert S. Bauer in response to the video and paper featured in this recent Language Log post:  "Cantonese is both very cool and very old" (4/1/25)]

After I read the paper the first word that came to mind was “Cringeworthy” in regard to the author’s phrase “purer descent”; and the second word was “Superficial” in regard to the author’s knowledge of Cantonese and Chinese linguistics. For instance, the author who has narrowly focused on just those items that support his claims doesn’t seem to know that the Ancient Chinese tone category of Rusheng/Entering Tone which has disappeared from Mandarin was not a particular tone contour; the distinctive feature of Rusheng was that the monomorphosyllables belonging to it had as their finals or endings the three stop consonants -p, -t , -k, all of which have been retained in Cantonese, as well as in various other Chinese topolects of South China.

Danny L. Bate has a new article declaring that "PIE was not SOV" (2/20/25), in which he attempts to demonstrate under three objections why "SOV" is not a useful term for describing and summarizing the word order of Proto-Indo-European clauses:  1. "clausal bias", 2. "changing the subject", 3. "discourse dominates".

 

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

Overview: Here we look at some technical terms and how they’ve fared since their release to, or adoption by, the public: information theory; (TW) the colored quarks of Nambu and Han; cosmic‑ray decay according to Millikan; the Sinitic languages (Mair) vs. ‘the Chinese language’ (misnomer); Wu’s cosmic chirality as the violation of a nonNoetherian principle.

① information theory is the mother of all factoids. Why would one call it that? Because there is no such thing, only the following phantom utterance that is ubiquitous: “Shannon’s information theory.” In 1948, Shannon wrote a paper on the mathematics of data‑communication technology, and named it accordingly. Put off by its name, science journalists introduced it to the world as “information theory.” The name stuck, suggesting in the minds of innocents something so deep and epochal that it might even shed light on Mozart. Shannon 1948 is the big example of how of data and information have been confounded for 3/4 of a century, but it is accompanied by innumerable smaller cases, as when Susskind argues that “in physics we treat them as pretty much the same thing” (paraphrase; details in Appendix A). Here is a rough‑and‑ready demonstration of how different they actually are: “Go.” ←That’s just data, but place it in a context, and a layer of information now “rides on it” (or floats above it, on a different plane) such that this is conveyed: “Go to the store now before it closes”; or this: “Fly now to Hiroshima and drop the bomb.” True, in shop‑talk and hallway conversations, a database developer or data‑comm engineer might toss the terms data and information around as if one believed them to be interchangeable. Then, overheard by someone in the world at large, such casual usage is easily misconstrued, leading astrophysicists to fret in public over the “information” that might be “lost” in a black hole. (As for an actual Theory of Information, we must wait for a superintelligent computer to produce it since that task is far beyond human ability. And once coughed up, it will be so lengthy as to require several lifetimes to read it, and in any case, largely incomprehensible to us.)

[This is a guest post by Meme Master Mark (MMM), who says he's honored that I call him that:  "3M is also from Minnesota" (see the first sentence).]

Having spent many of my formative years in Minnesota, "crab raccoon" makes perfect sense.

This was a pretty disturbing tattoo:

The question of what to call the languages of Taiwan and how to classify them with regard to their sister languages on the mainland has become one of the most exciting areas of discussion on Language Log, and it shows no signs of quieting down yet, especially not when we keep getting stimulating infusions from the press like this article:

"Language naming is complicated", by Lee Hsiao-feng 李筱峰, Taipei Times (8/17/24)

Recently, the Ministry of Education announced that it would adopt the term “Taiwan Taiwanese” (台灣台語), to replace the term “Minnanese” (閩南語, “Southern Min”), as a unifying name for the language spoken in Taiwan.

I discussed this issue with some friends.

"Taigi a political question of identity", By Hugo Tseng, Taipei Times (7/27/24)

The issue of whether to call the language spoken in Taiwan “Minnanese” (閩南語) or “Taigi” (台語, taiyu, also called Hoklo or Taiwanese) has long been a subject of debate. On the surface, it seems to be a simple question about language, but in essence it is a political question of identity.

Perhaps we could gain some inspiration from the duality of English as a language. English was, at its earliest, the language of the Angles — the Germanic people from the German-Danish border who invaded and settled in what is now known as England, whose name meant the “Land of the Angles.”

Through colonization and the spread of the language across the world, English — even as it melded with and adopted local characteristics and traits from other languages — remained essentially the same. In the US, Australia and other Anglophone countries, English is the name of the language, but the name is appended with a qualifier — the name of the country where it is used — such as American English or Australian English.

[Serendipitously, right while we are in the midst of energetic discussions over the classification of and terminology for the languages of Taiwan, I received a communication from the international body that is charged with such matters for all the languages of the world, namely, an arm of the ISO.

The following (after the page break) is a guest post by Janell Nordmoe, Registrar of ISO 639-3 Language Coding Agency.  For those who are not familiar with it, "ISO 639 is a standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) concerned with representation of languages and language groups." (source)

There have been significant changes with the publication of 639:2023, including that the decision on CRs rests with the Maintenance Agency, not SIL as Language Coding Agency for 639-3.

This link describes the four sets within ISO 639, the Maintenance Agency.

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

"A Historical Perspective on the Central Asian Kingdom of Kucha," by Angela F. Howard.

http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp348_kucha.pdf

ABSTRACT

The article reexamines the dating of the earliest Buddhist cave paintings in the ancient Kingdom of Kucha, which was located in what is now Xinjiang, paying particular attention to the site of Kizil. Based on multiple Carbon-14 results spanning thirty years, historical and religious documents, and the author’s in situ research, the dating proposed is earlier than the traditional one, considered to be circa 500 AD. The latter was formulated, close to a century ago, by the scholar-explorer Ernst Waldschmidt on the basis of the “Indo-Iranian” style and is still used in art historical literature. Relying especially on Kucha’s comprehensive history, this paper suggests that the earliest cave paintings might have been coeval with the flourishing of Buddhism in Kucha during the fourth century. Given the centrality of the Tocharian language to the Sarvāstivādin Buddhist school associated with Kucha’s monasteries and the relative stylistic independence of Kucha from India, the author recommends adopting the term “Tocharian style” rather than “Indo-Iranian style” to describe artistic production in Kucha prior to the Tang.

Keywords: Tocharian, Central Asia, Caves

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All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.

To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/