Language Log

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. 

Paul Krugman, "Is There a Dignified Legal Way, Preferably in Latin, to say 'Holy Shit'?", 5/28/2025:

A court just threw out Trump's whole trade agenda.

It will take me a while to digest this […]

Some more coherent thoughts in the morning, after a gallon or so of coffee.

A recent cartoon by Tom Gauld:

Japan sets rules on name readings to curb flashy 'kirakira names'
The Mainichi Japan (May 25, 2025)

TOKYO (Kyodo) — Japan will impose rules on Monday on how children's names in Chinese characters are pronounced, amid growing concern over what are known as "kirakira names" — flashy or unusual readings that have stirred debate.

[This is a guest post by Rasmus Okasmets]

Analysis of Google search data for 2025 reveals the most misspelled words for each U.S. state and America.

National Spelling Bee begins at the end of May. The research is well timed.

America's most misspelled words:

1. Definitely – 33 500 searches.
2. Separate – 30 000 searches.
3. Necessary – 29 000 searches.
4. Believe – 28 500 searches.
5. Through – 28 000 searches.
6. Gorgeous –  27 000 searches.
7. Neighbor – 25 500 searches.
8. Business – 24 200 searches.
9. Favorite – 23 000 searches.
10. Restaurant – 22 500 searches.

In 1444, an associate professor (bujehag 부제학 副提學) in the Hall of Worthies, Ch'oe Manli (최만리 崔萬里; d. October 23, 1445), along with other Confucian scholars, spoke out against the creation of hangul (then called eonmun).  See here for the Classical Chinese text and English translation (less than felicitous, but easily available) of Ch'oe's 1444 protest against the reforms leading to Hangul.  As we all know, King Sejong (1397-1450; r. 1418-1450) nonetheless promulgated Hangul in 1446, so I wondered whether anything unfavorable happened to Ch'oe as a result (note that he died the year after delivering his protest and the year before the promulgation of Hangul).  Ross King kindly replied to my inquiry on this matter as follows:

Donald Trump's recent West Point commencement address has gotten plenty of media coverage. But what I noticed was something linguistic, which the commentariat unsurprisingly ignored, namely a violation of expected modifier order (in a passage around 45:46 in the cited recording):

I went through a very tough time with some very
radicalized sick people
and I say I was investigated more than the great
late Alphonse Capone. Alphonse Capone was a monster
he was a very hardened criminal
I went through more investigations than Alphonse Capone
and now I'm talking to you as president can you believe this
can you believe it

(Source: posted and removed on Reddit;
the same image has been previously posted)

A recent xkcd:

Mouseover title: "169 is a baker's gross."

I seldom dream, but last night a line got stuck in my brain:  "dub it up", repeated over and over, with a crisp reggae beat.  I couldn't figure it out, and was annoyed that I didn't know what it meant.

I don't think that I had ever heard it before in my waking life.

The first thing I did after washing up in the morning was google it.  Turns out there was a record called "Let's dub it up" by a male British artist named Dee Sharp (b. 1956 in London; to be distinguished from the more famous American female singer Dee Dee Sharp [b. Philadelphia 1945]).  I listened to the Dee Sharp song here (Fashion records 1980), and was astonished to find that it had the same melody and beat as the repeated line in my dream, so I must have heard it at some time in my life, whether I was aware of it or not.

A couple of relatively recent English compounding forms are getting more common in the media: X-pilled and X-maxxing.

Letter to the editor of Taipei Times (4/29/25) by Te Khai-su / Tè Khái-sū:

Abolish Chinese characters

A few months ago, under the overhang walkway (teng-a-kha, or Hokkien architecture) of a Tainan side street, I saw a child — perhaps 10 years old — hunched over one of the collapsible tables of her parents’ food stall, writing columns of “hanzi” (漢字, Chinese/Han characters), each in their dozens.

A familiar, if rather sad sight in Taiwan — although not nearly as spectacular as Hugo Tseng’s (曾泰元) evocative account in this newspaper (“Rejuvenating ‘Chinese character,’” April 20, page 8), where he recalled the legend of Cangjie’s (倉頡) creation of hanzi, describing how “millet grains rained from the sky and the ghosts and gods wept at night.”