Language Log

Julesy tells it like it is: "The Impossible Chinese Typewriter"

At least sometimes…

Philip Taylor sent a link to this Guardian article "West Point cancels ceremony to honor Tom Hanks as ‘outstanding US citizen’", with the comment

It was only on reading the article that I realised that West Point was/were not cancelling the ceremony in order to honour Tom Hanks (as I had originally thought/believed) but were in fact cancelling a ceremony intended to honour Tom Hanks …

I've been meaning to test GPT-5's parsing ability, ever since I discovered its surprising ability to represent semantic scope ambiguities in correct predicate logic (see "No X is better than Y", 8/13/2025, and the details of its analyses).

No. At least, there've been plenty of dumb articles over past decades and centuries, and plenty of smart ones recently. But I have some complaints about one particular recent article in The Economist, "Is the decline of reading making politics dumber? As people read less they think less clearly, scholars fear", 9/4/2025.

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

“Mythologies, Religions, and Peoples Outside Ancient China in the Classic of Mountains and Seas,” by Xiaofeng He.

https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp364_Classic_of_Mountains_and_Seas.pdf

Or rather, messages from Penn's Office of the Vice Provost for Research, mysteriously tokenized and re-formatted by gmail.

The start of the Fall 2025 OVPR email newsletter, as displayed by MS Outlook, has 14 bullet points referencing hyperlinked subtopics:

But gmail (where I first read the newsletter) shows me the same information as 14 columns of (individually) hyperlinked textual tokens, with a bullet on the first token of each column:

Last week, Beijing hosted the first ever "Robot Olympics", and humanoid robot development is proceeding apace on many fronts.  One could fairly say that Chinese are obsessed with human-AI symbiosis.

China Advances Brain-Computer Interface Industry Development with New Policy Framework

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, along with six other government departments, has jointly issued an implementation plan to accelerate the innovative development of the brain-computer interface (BCI) industry. The comprehensive policy outlines ambitious targets for the emerging technology sector through 2030.

By 2027, China aims to achieve breakthrough progress in key BCI technologies while establishing advanced technical, industrial, and standardization systems. The plan specifically targets international-level performance in electrodes, chips, and integrated products. Applications are expected to expand rapidly across industrial manufacturing, healthcare, and consumer sectors, with the creation of 2-3 specialized industrial clusters and the development of new scenarios, models, and business formats.

Mixed metaphor of the week – via email from J.H.:

House Speaker Mike Johnson, apparently trying to lay the groundwork to blame Democrats for a government shutdown, is quoted by Politico as saying “The ball will be in their corner.”

And what are the consequences of the growing population of AI agents?

In "Agentic culture", I observed that today's "AI agents" have the same features that made "Agent Based Models", 50 years ago, a way to model the emergence and evolution of culture. And I expressed surprise that (almost) none of the concerns about AI impact have taken account of this obvious fact.

There was a little push-back in the comments, for example the claim that "There may come a time when AI is autonomous, reflective and has motives, but that is a long, long way off." Which misses the point, given the entirely unintelligent nature of old-fashioned ABM systems.

Antonio Gulli from Google has recently posted Agentic Design Systems, which offers some useful (and detailed) descriptions of the state of the agentic art, along with example code.

Or maybe "adverbial noun"? Or "adverbial verb"? Anyhow, "Long-closed Calif. mountain route surprise reopens after years", SFGate 9/2/2025:

A long-shuttered stretch of highway that cuts straight through Angeles National Forest above Los Angeles has finally reopened.

A roughly 10-mile stretch of Angeles Crest Highway, which runs roughly east-west through the national forest for over 60 miles from the wealthy suburb of La Cañada Flintridge to the small mountain town of Wrightwood, reopened with little notice on Friday after being closed for several years. Before the surprise return on Friday, the portion of the two-lane highway had been closed since the winter of 2022-2023, when “relentless storms” collapsed roadways, caused rockslides and damaged retaining walls, according to Caltrans.

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

“Xizi Qiji 西字奇跡The Miracle of Western Words: Matteo Ricci’s Innovations in Language and Faith,” by Zhaofei Chen.

https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp363_matteo_ricci_xizi_qiji.pdf

Classrooms Beneath the Himalayas: Why China’s “Migrant Learners” Are Turning to Nepal
Zheng Yiwen, The World of Chinese (8/13/25)

As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, I find this phenomenon of Chinese going to Nepal to learn English to be somewhat cognitively dissonant.

Here's what goes on in one such Kathmandu crammer:

Inside, around 10 young Chinese students sit in a classroom, hunched over as they complete English listening exercises. Leon Row, the school’s British founder and lead instructor, steps out of the classroom, and with a crisp London accent, gently asks the crowd outside to keep their voices down—the noise is disrupting them.

Several people have asked me about this paper — Maya Inbar, Eitan Grossman, and Ayelet Landau, "A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms", PNAS 8/19/2025:

Intonation units (IUs) are a hypothesized universal building block of human speech [W. Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing (1994); N. P. Himmelmann et al., Phonology 35, 207–245 (2018)). Linguistic research suggests they are found across languages and that they fulfill important communicative functions such as the pacing of ideas in discourse and swift turn-taking. We study the rate of IUs in 48 languages from every continent and from 27 distinct language families. Using an analytic method to annotate natural speech recordings, we identify a low-frequency rate of IUs across the sample, with a peak at 0.6 Hz, and little variation between sexes or across the life span. We find that IU rate is only weakly related to speech rate quantified at the syllable level, and crucially, that cross-linguistic variation in IU rate does not stem from cross-linguistic variation in syllable rate.

Note that 0.6 Hz is 1/0.6 ≈ 1.7 seconds in the time domain.

'Tis the season of sneezing, and I'm doing a lot of it these days.  At 5 AM this morning, I was awakened by my own sneezing.   It was completely unpremeditated and unexpected.  The sounds that came out were aaah-HOOOOO!!!!!  Low level / high rising.  

The conventional representation of this sound in writing is "achoo".  Other variations include "kerchoo" and "hachao", etc.  In German, I think that the sound of a sneeze is represented as "hatschee" and in Japanese it is "hakushon".

This morning, the sound that I explosively emitted was aaah-HOOOOO!!!!!  Twice.

Since I have a large, Alpine schnoz that acts as an echo chamber, causing the sound to reverberate in my nasal passages, it is extremely loud and ends shrilly.  It can be heard a block away, or all the way down the turn of the corridor from my office to the departmental office about 40 paces distant.