Language Log

Today's SMBC presents a new take on Moravec's Paradox:

The latest Questionable Content follows Yann LeCun:

Like others, I've often noted  analogies between prosody (as modulations of pitch, voice quality, timing, and so on) and text rendering, whether in calligraphy or typography — e.g. "Intonational focus", 4/29/2011; "Prosodic lettering", 5/8/2011; and many other posts about the communicative use of color, font choice, spatial placement, punctuation, and so on. Some aspects of textual prosody are perceptually natural, like size and spatial separation, while others are conventional, like the use of font choices in dictionary entries. And the conventions change over time and space, like capitalization in English.

Attempts by style guides to lock this variation down are roughly as effective as other efforts to limit individual and cultural creativity, and the growth of social media opens up new horizons for orthographic sociolinguistics.

Here's an odd error from a recent Washington Post article ("Pope Leo visits a polarized Spain where conservatives are turning on the church", 6/6/2026):

On Thursday, Leo will visit Spain’s Canary Islands, a hub for Latin American migrants and major landing point for those arriving by sea from the African coast. The waters around the islands have become a graveyard for those who lost their for a chances to resettle in Europe.

When I joined the Peace Corps in 1965-67 (Group Nepal VI), headquarters in Washington DC gave me two precious collections:  1. a box ("locker") of 250 books to read when I wasn't out trekking across the length and breadth of Bhojpur, the district in northeast Nepal where I was stationed by myself, 2. a medicine chest packed with over a hundred prescription drugs that kept me alive many a time.  The books were carefully chosen, and I churned through them omniverously.  I remember one in particular that had an enormous impact upon me, Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel), by Hermann Hesse (1877-1962).

Marc Andreessen's recent appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast presented a striking example of AI promotion (or AI hype, as you please). We can discuss his extraordinary claims and predictions another time. My topic this morning is something Andreessen does that AI still can't do, namely talk like a human being. I'm referring to the way that humans talk in spontaneous conversation, not in fluent reading or in well-rehearsed presentations, which AI text-to-speech can imitate increasingly well.

Elle Cordova's latest short:

Below is a guest post by Robert Shackleton: