Language Log

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

“Horses and Humans: A Consequential Symbiosis,” edited by Victor H. Mair.

I don't know why, but the first time I came upon this marvelous site, in Mark's March 5, 2021 post, it didn't make much of an impression on me.  Maybe I was too busy to explore it at that time or was just not in the right mood.  Four days ago, however, when my old Peace Corps buddy, Bob Kambic, called it to my attention, Radio Garden just blew my mind away.  I kept exclaiming, "This is the most exciting, happiest day of my life!"

The origins of language
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (May 9, 2025)

Summary:

    Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite generation of meaning by combining phonemes into words and words into sentences. This contrasts with the very few meaningful combinations reported in animals, leaving the mystery of human language evolution unresolved. 

Something for everyone

"A path towards freedom: the new route to Europe for desperate Chinese migrants
Revealed: a small but growing number of Chinese people are travelling to the Balkans with the hope of getting into the EU" Amy Hawkins," The Guardian (9/24/24)

In a sleepy Bosnian town, barely five miles from the border with the European Union, a crumbling old water tower is falling into ruin. Inside, piles of rubbish, used cigarette butts and a portable wood-fired stove offer glimpses into the daily life of the people who briefly called the building home. Glued on to the walls is another clue: on pieces of A4 paper, the same message is printed out, again and again: “If you would like to travel to Europe (Italy, Germany, France, etc) we can help you. Please add this number on WhatsApp”. The message is printed in the languages of often desperate people: Somali, Nepali, Turkish, the list goes on. The last translation on the list indicates a newcomer to this unlucky club. It is written in Chinese.

According to Wikipedia, word salad

is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases", most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The name schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but they are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry as well as in theoretical linguistics to describe a type of grammatical acceptability judgement by native speakers, and in computer programming to describe textual randomization.

The phrase {word salad} has become increasingly common recently in the popular press, most often as an insulting description of Donald Trump's spontaneous speech. See for example Sahil Kapur and Peter Nicholas, "'Incoherent word salad': Trump stumbles when asked how he'd tackle child care", NBC News 9/6/2024.

"The mysterious slowdown of VPNs in China", Drum Tower, The Economist (newsletter), Gabriel Crossley (China correspondent) (8/15/24)

Every summer Communist Party bigwigs leave Beijing and go to recharge in the resort town of Beidaihe on the coast. This coincides with the silly season for China watchers. There is little hard news, so rumours fly. Some are baseless speculations about the health of Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader. Others are more well-founded, such as a report that Hu Xijin, a prominent nationalist commentator, has been muzzled on social media (probably for accidentally overstepping the party line). And some are true but harder to explain: like the fact that virtual private networks (VPNs) are getting slower.

It seems that ChatGPT still has a few things to learn, about conversational dynamics as well as about interlocutor modeling:

@risthinks ChatGPT chatting each other about AI ! #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #TechTalk #FutureTech #Conversations #Innovation ♬ original sound – RisThinks

From "Lost Futures: A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000", The Public Domain Review, 6/30/2012:

What did the year 2000 look like in 1900? Originally commissioned by Armand Gervais, a French toy manufacturer in Lyon, for the 1900 World exhibition in Paris, the first fifty of these paper cards were produced by Jean-Marc Côté, designed to be enclosed in cigarette boxes and, later, sent as postcards. All in all, at least seventy-eight cards were made by Côté and other artists, although the exact number is not known, and some may still remain undiscovered. Each tries to imagine what it would be like to live in the then-distant year of 2000.

Language Is Not Enough for Brains in Conversation

Zoom Webinar: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/69177119780

4 October, 2:15 p.m. SEMINAR – WEB EVENT

Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS), Uppsala

Julia Uddén, Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS, and the Departments of Linguistics and Psychology, Stockholm University.
Affiliated Researcher, Department of Neurobiology of Language, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen

Riding the trolley from West Philadelphia going to University City,

https://twitter.com/slurve/status/563688361316339713

A key term in Chinese historical geography is guān 關 ("pass").  You can see from the shape of the character that it is framed by the two panels of a door, left and right, and that it has two upright, elaborated bars that could impede progress through the gate (I am thinking of the early forms of the character).  The flanking door panels constitute the semantophore (radical, classifier) of the character, and the bars inside are the secondary semantophore, but may also simultaneously function as a phonophore.

A pass serves both to facilitate and block movement along key routes leading into and out of a country or regions within a country.

Just as I was thinking about writing this post on passes, I synchronously and serendipitously received from Alan Kennedy a reference to this highly technical article on Silk Road travel:

Irina Tupikova, Matthias Schemmel, Klaus Geus, "Travelling along the Silk Road: A new interpretation of Ptolemy’s coordinates", Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte / Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Preprint 465 (2014), 73 pages.

A month ago ("Real people in virtual worlds: a viral update?", 3/5/2020), I noted that

[T]he popular virtual-meeting applications don't yet have a way for a group to hold their discussion in a shared virtual space, as in current video games or applications like vrchat.

And when participants' avatars (realistic or otherwise) can sit or move in a shared space, with appropriate directional audio and so on, we'll be able to have virtual seminars, virtual workshops, virtual corridor conversations — and most important, virtual dinner parties!

One positive outcome of the growing panic over COVID-19 will be to hasten the deployment of these technologies.

So today I learned that some University off Pennsylvania students are creating a virtual Penn campus, with the idea of holding (a version of) events there like Hey Day and the Penn Relays — "UPenn students recreated their campus on 'Minecraft' in painstaking detail while stuck at home — take a look", Business Insider 4/5/2020.