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)

In the last few years I've noticed a number of apps that can be used to figure out the proper terms to refer to your relations in Chinese.  Of course, this is a problem in all languages.  For example, who is your "second cousin twice removed"?  Some people care about these things and are good at figuring them out.  For Chinese, these are particularly important matters, but younger generations are becoming increasingly ill adept at using the correct, precise terms of address.  Hence the felt need for (digital) tools to assist one in determining the proper address for your relatives.

For example, what do I call "wǒ de māmā de dìdì de nǚ'ér 我的媽媽的弟弟的女兒" (my mother's younger brother's daughter")?  Answer:  she is my "jiù biǎojiě/jiù biǎomèi 舅表姐／舅表妹", depending on whether she is older or younger than me.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-ninth issue: “Lawrence Scott Davis (1951–2024),” by Lothar von Falkenhausen.

Next year  E. J. Brill will publish a book by the little-known but highly accomplished Sino-anthropologist L. Scott Davis, in which he pioneers a novel, anthropological interpretation of the Chinese classics. The book demonstrates how certain motifs and images in the Yijing (Classic of Changes), the Lunyu (Confucian Analects), and the Zuo zhuan (Zuo Tradition) are strategically deployed as structuring elements so as to meld these texts into a semantic continuum. Unfortunately, the author passed away this fall without being able to see his book in print; this obituary aims to make him and his life’s work better known to the scholarly community.