Language Log

No sooner had I posted about a block of 11,328 proposed Small Seal characters dating back roughly two millennia being incorporated in UNICODE than a single spanking new sinograph surfaced and was urgently put forward for inclusion, and it is causing a bit of a ruckus.  That is the third-person gender-neutral pronoun [X也], which is pronounced the same as all the other characters for supposedly gendered Sinitic third-person pronouns, viz., tā (see below for their graphic forms).

N.B.:  The proposed neograph under dicussion is provisionally being written as [X也], but bear in mind that, as I have pointed out countless times, all sinographs, by the exigencies / inherent nature of the script, whether they have 1 stroke or 64 / n strokes, must be squeezed inside the same size box as all other sinographs.  In other words, [X也] perforce — once the typographers get it worked out — will eventually have to fit inside exactly the same space as 也 and biáng  (you can get an authentic plate of these belt-like Shaanxi noodles at Xi'an Sizzling Woks, 40th & Chestnut in University City next to Penn [opens at 11:30 AM, closed on Tuesdays]).  There are many Language Log posts about diverse aspects of this jabberwockyish character.  Just look it up under "biang" 

We've seen numerous blockbuster videos from Julesy, but this one is the most explosive ever:

"This might be the most hated film in Korea" (11:55)

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

“Correspondences between Old Chinese and Proto-Celtic Words,” by Julie Lee Wei

Just listened to the classic rendition of that song by Bobby Vinton. I was struck by the way he executed the long drawn-out glissando from the close back rounded vowel to the voiced labiodental fricative.

[Preface:  The nitty-gritty questions about pronunciation discussed below are expressed in common spelling (not a phonetic alphabet) because the people who have written them down here are non-phoneticians.  What they have recorded are their best approximations of how they think they are saying "Canton".]

After reading "'Cant-idates'" (11/12/25) and "Can't even" (11/13/25), I submitted this comment:

As for "can't", there are quite a few "Cantons" in America. I'm from the one in Stark County Ohio, and some of the people there pronounce the name not as "Can-ton", but as "Cant-un".

This prompted Mark Liberman to ask:

Is that your way to representing [ˈkænʔn̻], i.e. the second syllable as a glottal-onset syllabic nasal?

In the comments on "Cant-idates" (11/12/2025), there was some back-and-forth about how much phonetic residue Americans generally leave of the word-final /t/ in sequences where can't is immediately followed by a vowel-initial word.

In defense of the answer "not much", I pulled three examples of "can't even" (literally) at random from the NPR podcast corpus I've used in previous posts (and in teaching corpus phonetics).

All places in China have topolect terms, some more than others, and some are more influential outside of their own region than others.  One regional variety whose speakers create numerous memorable expressions they are proud of is Dōngběihuà 東北話 ("Northeastern topolect").  I was inspired to make this post after reading a collection of twenty Northeasternisms.

I showed the collection to Diana Shuheng Zhang, who is an authentic Northeasterner.  Diana not only translated and explained the entire collection, she added twenty more, for a total of forty, commenting, "Can't stop laughing. Hope everybody enjoys our native expressions. :)" 

Please note that I (VHM) have added all the pinyin romanizations and a few literal translations).  Because some of the characters are unusual and I'm not a Northeastern speaker, I cannot guarantee the accuracy, especially down to the tones (and their sandhi), of all the transcriptions I have supplied.  Pay attention to Diana's valuable phonological notes.

The "what we do" page for the  CANTWINVICTORYFUND starts by explaining that they "Run Cant-idates to lose spectacularly in gerrymandered districts".

"Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like" | Open Culture (10/14/25)

With two audio recordings.  If you want to hear them, click on the link embedded in the title.

…since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.

Why Do Japanese Still Use Kanji? Complicated Writing System…

It has often been mentioned on Language Log that the simplification of Chinese characters by the PRC government did not come at one fell swoop in 1965, but was spread out over a long period of time, and had at least one additional formal stage, in 1977, that was retracted in 1986.

This has resulted in uneven acquisition of separate sets of simplified characters by students who went through primary and secondary education at different times.

Following on Mark's "Literacy: peasants and philosophers" (10/10/25) yesterday, also a number of posts on this subject that we have written in the past (see the bibliography), i herewith offer an account of myth and literacy:

Memories within myth
The stories of oral societies, passed from generation to generation, are more than they seem. They are scientific records
By Patrick Nunn, Aeon (4/6/23)

This is a long, richly documented article, from which I will take only a few representative selections.  It begins:

In the 1880s, the American journalist William Gladstone Steel made several visits to a freshwater lake that filled the caldera of an extinct volcano in Oregon. For Steel, these visits were the fulfilment of a dream that began while he was just a schoolboy in Kansas. It was one day in 1870, while reading the newspaper wrapped around his school lunch, that he noticed an article about the ‘discovery’ of a spectacular body of freshwater named Crater Lake. ‘In all of my life,’ Steel would later recall, ‘I never read an article that took the intense hold on me that that one did…’ When he finally made it to the lake in 1885, he was so captivated that he determined to have the area designated as a National Park. But designation was not easily gained and required extensive documentation of the region.