Language Log

In "Linguistic relativity: snow and horses" (4/15/25), I summarized and assessed the following paper:

Temuulen Khishigsuren et al, "A computational analysis of lexical elaboration across languages", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2417304122

My post was picked up by Cody Cottier, who was doing a critique of the Khishigsuren et al. article for Scientific American.  Cottier interviewed me and incorporated some of what I said to him in this review:

Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a ‘Hoax’
Inuit languages really do have many words for snow, linguists found—and other languages have conceptual specialties, too, potentially revealing what a culture values
Scientific American (5/9/25)

"The complex environmental toll of Artificial Intelligence:
AI is very much mostly not green technology"
Devika Rao, The Week US (21 March 2024)

I do not mean to be an alarmist or a negativist, but this is something that people are talking / concerned about, so we should take a look at it too.

New article in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), "The rise and fall of rationality in language", Marten Scheffer, Ingrid van de Leemput, Els Weinans, and Johan Bollen (12/21/21)

118 (51) e2107848118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107848118