Language Log

From Frederick Newmeyer: "A sign in the breakfast room of a not very classy hotel in Amsterdam:"

"The middle language is Esperanto! Who could have decided on Esperanto as the third language and who can read it? The hotel receptionists have no idea."

Taken outside a hotel in Shenzhen:

Talk in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania:

"The Calendarized Onomasticon and the Arrival of Birthday Celebration from the Ancient Near East to China", by Sanping Chen, author of Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages

Dr. Chen's talk will be Wednesday, February 25th from 12:00 – 2:00pm in the Wolf Humanities Conference Room (WILL 623).

This article in the South China Morning Post twice mentions "laisee" without explanation:

China delivery firm offers kneeling service to send Lunar New Year greetings for customers
Paid for holiday festival package includes door cleaning, couplet hanging; critics say offer cheapens sanctity of filial piety, is disrespectful
Zoey Zhang, SCMP (2/12/26)

New guideline issued to promote Chinese language:
7 main tasks set to highlight ‘never-changing gene’
By Li Yuche, Global Times (1/19/2026)

If you're wondering what brought this on, I think it's AI and LLMs, which are featured in the rest of the article, especially as they relate to oracle bones and traditional Chinese writing.

It will also help to understand the aim of the article if you know something about the nature of the journal in which it appears, for which see below.

I recently spent a week at my son's campground in the countryside outside Dallas.  While there, I was elated to espy a sizable dodecahedron made of twelve substantial wooden panels tightly wrapped in brown, buff leather.  It had been constructed by a local artist about a dozen years ago.  

Contemplating that cosmic shape, it brought back all those vibrant discussions of geometry, linguistics, and metaphysics from a year and a half ago.  Esthetically and intellectually satisfying to commune with my old friend the dodecahedron, I fell into a reverie beneath those shaggy-scraggly-barked eastern red cedars that seemed to draw me up into their spreading branches that connected to the universe emanating from the dodecahedron that I held at my waist.

Throughout my research and teaching career,  I have always emphasized that, when it comes to genuine etymology of Sinitic, what matters are the sounds and meanings of the constituent etyma, going all the way back to the fundamental roots.  The shapes of the glyphs used to write the eyma in question are far less important than the sounds and meanings.  In fact, discussion of the shapes of the glyphs is often more of a distraction than a benefit to understanding what the true etymologies of given etyma are.  We demonstrated that by the sharp disagreements we had over the meanings of the shapes of the ancient glyphs / forms / shapes of such a simple / definite / concise lexeme / morpheme as "woman; female".  That is why the sound nǚ and its attendant meaning "woman; female" are more important for Sinitic etymology than is the the three-stroke character 女, albeit the latter derived from more complicated and difficult to explain / interpret forms.

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

“Buddhism among the Sogdians: A Re-Evaluation,” by Todd Gibson.

Random storefront in Taiwan:

"Dictionary.com’s 2025 Word of the Year Is…"

Each year, Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year and short-listed nominees capture pivotal moments in language and culture. These words serve as a linguistic time capsule, reflecting social trends and global events that defined the year. The Word of the Year isn’t just about popular usage; it reveals the stories we tell about ourselves and how we’ve changed over the year. And for these reasons, Dictionary.com’s 2025 Word of the Year is 67.

Macquarie Dictionary's WOTY shortlist also included six-seven; Sam Altman is apparently planning to name his next AI model GPT-6-7; and a news search will give you plenty of other relevant stories, from basketball scores  to "6-7 in the Bible".

There's a restaurant in the western suburbs of Philadelphia called "Rosa Mexicano", one of one of a chain by that name. Since the first time I saw it, I've known enough Spanish to wonder why Mexicano is a masculine adjective, given that the noun rosa "rose" is feminine. But thanks to a Spanish friend, I've recently learned that the noun rosa has another sense, referring to the color "pink" — and in that sense the noun is masculine.