Language Log

Avram Pitch, "Meet President Willian H. Brusen from the great state of Onegon", The Register 8/8/2025:

OpenAI's GPT-5, unveiled on Thursday, is supposed to be the company's flagship model, offering better reasoning and more accurate responses than previous-gen products. But when we asked it to draw maps and timelines, it responded with answers from an alternate dimension.

AI Is Helping Historians With Their Latin
A new tool fills in missing portions of ancient inscriptions from the Roman Empire

By Nidhi Subbaraman Aug. 6, 2025

In recent years, we have encountered many cases of AI assisting (or not) in the decipherment of ancient manuscripts in diverse languages.  See several cases listed in the "Selected readings".  Now it's Latin's turn to benefit from the ministrations of artificial intelligence.

People across the Roman Empire wrote poetry, kept business accounts and described their conquests and ambitions in inscriptions on pots, plaques and walls.

The surviving text gives historians a rare glimpse of life in those times—but most of the objects are broken or worn.

“It’s like trying to solve a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, only there is tens of thousands more pieces to that puzzle, and about 90% of them are missing,” said Thea Sommerschield, a historian at the University of Nottingham.

Now, artificial intelligence is filling in the blanks.

An AI tool designed by Sommerschield and other European scientists can predict the missing text of partially degraded Latin inscriptions made hundreds of years ago and help historians estimate their date and place of origin.

As is usually the case, the Wikipedia article on the Chinese calendar is comprehensive and built on consensus.  It states:

The Chinese calendar, as the name suggests, is a lunisolar calendar created by or commonly used by the Chinese people. While this description is generally accurate, it does not provide a definitive or complete answer. A total of 102 calendars have been officially recorded in classical historical texts. In addition, many more calendars were created privately, with others being built by people who adapted Chinese cultural practices, such as the Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, and many others, over the course of a long history.

A Chinese calendar consists of twelve months, each aligned with the phases of the moon, along with an intercalary month inserted as needed to keep the calendar in sync with the seasons. It also features twenty-four solar terms, which track the position of the sun and are closely related to climate patterns. Among these, the winter solstice is the most significant reference point and must occur in the eleventh month of the year. Each month contains either twenty-nine or thirty days. The sexagenary cycle for each day runs continuously over thousands of years and serves as a determining factor to pinpoint a specific day amidst the many variations in the calendar. In addition, there are many other cycles attached to the calendar that determine the appropriateness of particular days, guiding decisions on what is considered auspicious or inauspicious for different types of activities.

From here (at least that's where I saw it):

The chapter on "Calendar and Chronology" in Brill's Encyclopedia of China Online (2009) was authored by Ho Peng Yoke (1926-2014), who was the Director of the Needham Research Institute from 1990-2001.  The first two paragraphs of Ho's chapter begin as follows:

The traditional Chinese calendar is lunisolar, i. e. it is based on both the movement of the moon and on what seems to be the orbit of the sun around the earth. The incommensurability of the lunar synodical period of 29.530587… days and the equinoctial year's 365.2421… days has always been the cause for numerous difficulties with respect to the establishment of a calendar in China. In order to replace the former calendars which after a time had lost their validity, roughly 100 different types of calendars were devised over a period of about 2000 years, many of which were never officially adopted. According to Joseph Needham, the history of calendar making is the consequence of attempts to "make the incompatible compatible."

Below is a guest post by Bob Ladd:

A few days ago I received an editorial decision letter from a journal, which included a request to deal with a few typos. I had begun a sentence with the phrase “In the interests of brevity,” and the editor wanted me to remove the final -s from the word “interests”. Since I know that the editor is not a native speaker of English, my first reaction was to ignore the request, but I thought I should back up my insistence that this was not a typo with some sort of evidence, so I searched for the phrases “in the interests of” and “in the interest of” on Google n-grams. To my surprise, I discovered that both versions of the expression occur, with a roughly 60:40 preference for the version with “interest”, and that this proportion has been roughly stable since the early 20th century. Since Google’s book corpus permits the user to distinguish British and American English, I could also see that the version with “interests” is more common in BrEng and the version with “interest” in AmEng, but that both versions occur in both varieties.

The calendrical system used for defining the dates of traditional Chinese festivals such as ‘Chinese New Year’ (The first day of the first lunar month, now called 'Spring Festival’ Chun jie 春節 in the PRC), the mid-autumn festival 中秋 (full moon of the 8th lunar month) and so on is the last of the many versions of the Chinese luni-solar calendar that were adopted by successive imperial governments until the fall of the empire in 1911.  It is in fact the system adopted by the Qing dynasty in 1644.

Christopher Cullen’s book Heavenly Numbers: Astronomy and Authority in Early Imperial China (Oxford, 2017) gives a detailed account of the successive systems of mathematical astronomy that were used by Chinese astronomical officials in early imperial times to produce the annual luni-solar calendars that were promulgated by imperial authority. The following explanations are taken from Cullen’s book.

Ignorant prescriptivist peeving has recently been dying out in English-language mass media, or so it seems to me. But George Will is holding the line, as Viseguy points out in a comment on yesterday's "Vaccination" post. Will's July 30 piece, "Five words that today are gratingly misapplied or worn out", has the sub-head "The massive vibe shift is one of the only big developments in American English. In fact, it’s iconic".

The opening sentence emphasizes both the alleged recency and the U.S.A.'s alleged culpability:

“When we Americans are done with the English language,” wrote Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), “it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.” Let’s survey some recent damage.

It won't surprise our readers that Will's allegations are false, or at least problematic. The five "damages" that he complains about have all been around for several decades at least, if not several centuries, and several of them seem to have started in Britain. In all cases, the Brits need to share the blame (or credit) for spreading the denigrated usages.

From the August 11 New Yorker, a new theory about the etiology of prescriptivism. Also time-management and singing…

Beginning in 2006, "meh" studies were a staple of Intellectual inquiry at Language Log.  For a virtuoso variorum, see Ben Zimmer's "Three scenes in the life of 'meh'" (2/26/12).  Herewith, relying on "d'oh", another (in)famous Simpsonsism, I will partially resurrect meh studies.

Frases Famosas de Los Simpson en Diferentes Doblajes

Is it a "foo fighter" a fighter that fights foos? Or is it a fighter that IS foo? This should show up in the stress pattern, as in the difference between a "German teacher" as a teacher who teaches German (normally with stress on the first word), or a teacher who IS German (normally with stress on the second word).

Dave Grohl clears this up for us in a brief video clip:

A recent Jesse Welles song, inspired by the defunding of Public Broadcasting: