Language Log

[This is a guest post by William Jinbo WANG (王金波), associate professor of English and translation studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University]

Over the past 22 years I have been researching the translation of classical Chinese novels, with concentration on The Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as The Story of the Stone; 18th-century) in the English- and German-speaking worlds. I have published more than a dozen research articles about the translation of the novel and received several research grants concerning the novel from various provincial and national grant-giving bodies. 

John Brewer writes:

Today's majority opinion by Justice Gorsuch in Bondi v. Vanderstok cites (on its page 10 of the opinion, which is the 13th page of the linked pdf) "S. Grimm & B. Levin, Artifact Nouns: Reference and Countability, in 2 Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47) 55 (2017)."  That's a pretty unusual sort of citation to see in a judicial opinion, in my experience.

He also drops a footnote mentioning the amicus brief filed by various "Professors and Scholars of Linguistics and Law," which in turn cites authorities ranging from the SCOTUS-friendly (Scalia & Garner) to the perhaps less-known-in-those-circles Huddleston & Pullum.

Today's SMBC:

The mouseover title: "If you mix beer and oatmeal, it's Frat Brose."

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

Exactly what had become ‘visualizable’ according to Heisenberg in 1927,
and whence the term ‘Blurriness Relation’ in lieu of Uncertainty Principle?

As backdrop for the physics concepts and associated German vocabulary to be explored in a moment, here is a story I call “Quadrille Dance & Shotgun Wedding”:

1925. Heeding the lesson of Niels Bohr’s ill‑fated orbital theory (1913‑1918), Heisenberg is wary of developing any visual model; he wants to “get rid of the waves in any form.” Accordingly, with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, he sets forth his matrix‑mechanics formulation of quantum theory.

Two years ago, I wrote a post about "kempt and sheveled" (3/26/23).

That elicited the following offline comment by a German friend:

In the first part of this inquiry, I stressed the connection between Mesopotamian and Indus Valley (IV) civilizations.  My aim was to provide support for a scriptal and lingual link between the undeciphered IV writing system and the well-known languages and writing systems of Mesopotamia (MP), which tellingly is translated as liǎng hé liúyù 兩河流域 ("valley / drainage basin of two rivers") in contemporary Sinitic.  The point is to detach IV from IE, which is a red herring and a detraction from productive efforts to decipher the IV script.  If we concentrate on the civilization, languages, and writing systems of MP, it should be easier to crack the IV code.

A recent achievement of helpful Google AI — Anna Brown, "How a glitch in an online survey replaed the word 'yes' with 'forks'", Decoded 3/21/2025:

At Pew Research Center, we routinely ask the people who take our surveys to give us feedback about their experience. Were the survey questions clear? Were they engaging? Were they politically neutral?

While we get a wide range of feedback on our surveys, we were surprised by a comment we received on an online survey in 2024: “You misspelled YES with FORKS numerous times.”

That comment was soon followed by several others along the same lines:

• • “Please review [the] answer choices. Every ‘yes’ answer for me was listed as ‘forks’ for some reason. I.e. instead of yes/no it was forks/no.”
  • “My computer had some difficulty with your answer choices. For example, instead of ‘yes’ for yes or no answers, my display showed ‘forks.’ Weird.”

We touched upon this question recently in "Chicken or egg; grammar or language" (1/15/25), where we examined Daniel Everett's thesis as propounded in How Language Began:  The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention.  In that volume, Everett argues that language is learned / acquired / developed, not hard-wired in the human brain.  He holds that our ancient ancestors, Homo erectus, had the biological and mental equipment for speech 1,500,000 years ago, 10 times earlier than the conventional wisdom that language originated with Homo sapiens 150,000 years ago, and that it was the result of a "language instinct". 

Now we come back to the lower date with this new research as presented in:

Shigeru Miyagawa, Rob DeSalle, Vitor Augusto Nóbrega, Remo Nitschke, Mercedes Okumura, Ian Tattersall. Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago. Frontiers in Psychology, 2025; 16 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1503900

Jackie M. sent a link to an instance of a new eggcorn — "laying duck" for "lame duck":

Schumer had just written his political epitaph. Now, he is a laying duck in the Senate. New York, you must force him to resign and start shopping for a new senator.

— writerarmando.bsky.social (@writerarmando.bsky.social) March 18, 2025 at 2:28 PM

The words that leap to mind are pustakālaya पुस्तकालय (pustak पुस्तक ["book"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]) and granthālaya ग्रन्थालय (granth ग्रंथ ["text"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]).  Those are simple and straightforward.

There were several other Sanskrit words for library I used to know, such as vidyākośasamāśraya विद्याकोशसमाश्रय* that included the component vidya ("knowledge"), but they were more subtle and complicated, so they were harder for me to recall.

*knowledge treasury coming together (for support or shelter)

Yann LeCun's evaluation of political versus linguistic errors:

 

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I've been saying "Erin go Bragh" my whole life and knew that it meant roughly "Ireland Forever!".