Language Log

It's been a while since I've written about Chinese tattoos, although years ago they used to be a staple subcategory of our Chinglish-themed posts.

This intriguing one is too good to pass up:

As the English Wikipedia article tells us, the first English translation of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu bore the title Remembrance of Things Past, echoing Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, while later translations used the more literal In search of lost time. But Proust's original title also echoes two idiomatic phases in French, one of which is entirely missing in English, while the other one is weaker– and I've wondered for a while how intentional those echoes were.

"War of Words: How Chinese College Students and Professors Survive the Thesis Season", by Aria Zhang, The World of Chinese (11/26/25)

Under the looming pressure of graduation and thesis defense, students and their mentors have resorted to academic sarcasm to cope with stress

I will make extensive excerpts from this article for a variety of reasons.  First of all, it speaks the truth about the unwarranted browbeating behavior of many professors who make caustic comments about their students' drafts, not to encourage them and help them to write a better thesis, but to make sure that the student knows who is on top and because it is easier to make negative criticisms than constructive remarks.

This is not about what you think it may be. 

Whenever I see the word "canting", as it has been appearing in recent Language Log posts, I can't help but pronounce it as pinyin (MSM) cāntīng 餐廳 ("canteen; cafeteria; dining hall; dining room; restaurant").  The two morphosyllables respectively mean "dining" and "hall".

• Mandarin

(Standard)

(Pinyin): cāntīng

(Zhuyin): ㄘㄢ ㄊㄧㄥ

(Dungan, Cyrillic and Wiktionary): цантин (cantin, I-I)

• Cantonese (Jyutping): caan¹ teng¹
• Hakka

  (Sixian, PFS): chhôn-thâng

  (Hailu, HRS): con^ˋ tang^ˋ

• Southern Min

  (Hokkien, POJ): chhan-thiaⁿ

  (Teochew, Peng'im): cang¹ tian¹

• Wu (Shanghai, Wugniu): ¹tshoe-thin; ¹tshe-thin

(Wiktionary; see Appendix for more detailed notes in various Sinitic topolects)

In case you've encountered this portmanteau, and wonder about its history, Merriam-Webster has you covered And NPR's Word of the Week featured it last week — Rachel Treisman, "Friendsgiving 101: A history of the made-up holiday and how to celebrate it", 11/19/2025:

Thanksgiving is always the fourth Thursday of November. But many Americans don't wait that long to share a fall feast with their loved ones — that is, if they celebrate Friendsgiving.

Friendsgiving is exactly what it sounds like: A gathering close to the date of Thanksgiving, starring many of its starchy staples, usually served potluck-style, with friends instead of relatives.

Think fewer dinner-table political debates, less travel time, turkey optional (more on that later).

From François Lang:

I had to read the first paragraph of this article before being able to parse the headline!

In "Agentic culture" (8/30/2025) and "'Moloch's bargain'?" (10/12/2025) I cited some work on how interactions among algorithmic "agents" can create (socially) bad results that were not directly programmed by their inventors. I continue to be surprised at how little attention has been paid to this issue in the media, given the excitement over agentic AI. I've found a fair amount of other research with similar content, as  searches like this illustrate, which makes me wonder even more about the relative lack of uptake.

Today is (not very officially) World Linguistics Day, celebrated on the birthday of Ferdinand de Saussure. It started with "National Linguistics Day" in the UK, noted by LLOG in 2024.

Sunday's Doonesbury addresses possible restrictions on the use of AI in higher education. Here are the middle four panels:

As promised, here are a few fun words that I learned by skimming a 17th century slang dictionary.

Tomorrow I will be delivering the keynote address to the international conference on "China and Greece. Ancient Ecumenisms in the Mirror", to be held at the Dipartimento Asia, Africa e Mediterraneo (DAAM) of Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale" in late November (actually tomorrow, Tuesday the 25th; here's the zoom link for my talk at 9:30 AM EST).

In preparing for my lecture on "Isidore of Seville and the medieval concept of the ecumene", I was delighted to learn more about this remarkable man.  Isidorus Hispalensis, who lived from ca. 560-636. was a Hispano-Roman scholar, theologian, and the archbishop of Seville.  During his lifetime, he was active in the politico-religious affairs of Iberia, including most prominently the conversion of the Visigothic kings to Chalcedonian Christianity.  After his death, Isidore's legacy was based largely on his celebrated Etymologiae, an encyclopedia that brought together extracts of works from classical antiquity that would otherwise have  been lost.