Language Log

Above is the cover of John DeFrancis's magnum opus, Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1989).  It has a stunning illustration consisting of the phonetic representation of the first six words of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address transcribed as follows: acoustic wave graph of the voice of William S.-Y. Wang, IPA, roman letters, Cyrillic, devanagari, hangul, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Arabic, katakana, Yi (Lolo, Nuosu, etc.), cuneiform, and sinographs (a fuller version of the cover illustration may be found on the frontispiece [facing the title page] and there is a generous explanation on pp. 248-251).

I don't order things online, but sometimes others do so for me, and I'm always amused / bemused by wording such as this:  "Your package will ship on 1/23/25". Normally, I would expect "your package will be shipped on 1/23/25" or "we will ship your package on 1/23/25".  Now, however, "Your package will ship on 1/23/25" seems to have become almost standard.

Here's a real-life example, received this afternoon:

We have received and begun processing your gift selection. Your gift will ship via United Parcel Service, to the address you confirmed during the ordering process. We expect your gift to ship within 2 weeks.

Sign on the back of a pickup truck in Fujian Province:

With current LLM technology, users can create individualized chatbots, and interact with them over time as if they were real friends. This started almost a decade ago with Replika, and more recently, we've seen similar tools from Character.ai (from September 2022) and Meta's AI Studio (from July 2024).

There've been several recent problems with these apps. The most serious ones involve harmful advice, such as those described in this recent lawsuit. In a less serious but still troublesome issue, NBC News recently found "two dozen user-generated AI characters on Instagram named after and resembling Jesus Christ, God, Muhammad, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, MrBeast, Harry Potter, Adolf Hitler, Captain Jack Sparrow, Justin Bieber, Elon Musk and Elsa from Disney’s 'Frozen'".

But the weirdest recent problem seems to be the result of a Character.ai bug.

When I was in the British Museum bookshop several weeks ago, I was pleased by the numerous offerings of books on language.  Two types stood out:  those on the origins of speech and those on the origins of writing.  As we would say in Mandarin, they are iǎngmǎshì 兩碼事 ("two different things").  The best stocked / selling one on scripts was Andrew Robinson's The Story of Writing, and its counterpart for speech was Daniel Everett's How Language Began:  The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention.

In this post, I will focus on the latter volume and its author, with whom Language Log readers are well acquainted (see the bibliography below).  I will not discuss his lengthy fieldwork among the hunter-gatherer Pirahã of the Lowland Amazonia region (to be distinguished from the piranha or piraña fish which has such a fearsome reputation and also lives in the Amazon), but will emphasize his radical theories of the origins of language.

Yesterday on YouTube, "Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon sits down with Dasha Burns, POLITICO's White House bureau chief". At the end of the interview, there's a conventional exchange of thank-yous. From Dasha Burns:

All right Steve, I know you got a show to record,
thank you so much for- for beaming in here
and uh sorry for the technical difficulties everyone.
Steve thanks so much.

And Steve Bannon's response:

Dasha thank you,
and thank Politico for having me.

[This is a guest post by Christopher Paris (website).]

I just wanted to thank you for your 2009 essay on the misinterpretation of “wēijī” as meaning both opportunity and crisis.

This controversy takes on dramatic new importance as the misinterpretation has been used to justify the invention of a school of thought that “risk is positive.” When challenged with English language dictionaries dating back to the 1700s, showing risk as typically meaning a potential threat or harm, the proponents of “positive risk” run to the wēijī trope. They say, “the Chinese came up with this 3000 years ago, so English dictionaries don’t matter.”

Xu Wenkan is well known to readers of Language Log, both because he was memorialized in an obituary here — "Xu Wenkan (1943-2023)" (1/10/23) — and because he was cited in many posts on IE languages (especially Tocharian), Sinitic lexicography / lexicology, and the Sinographic writing system.  Today he was featured in a Chinese newspaper article, two years after his passing, and that reminded me of another important aspect of his language skills and activities.  Namely, without any doubt whatsoever, he was the most prolific letter writer I have ever met.

I sent the above photograph of a body lotion (bodirōshon ボディローション) bottle to Nathan Hopson and asked him why it has so many katakana words, also why they have to give a phonological gloss for yuzu, which should be a fairly common word in Japanese (even I know it!).

Marketoonist (3/26/23):

[This is a guest post by Penglin Wang]

            Identification of the Xiongnu word ninghu (寧胡) as meaning ‘six’ in the phrase ninghu yanshi ‘the sixth consort’ (Wang 2024) and its connection with Jurchen ninggu (寧谷) and Manchu ninggun ‘six’ has opened up the possibility for thinking about the Xiongnu official title danghu (當戶) in relation to Jurchen tanggu (倘古) and Manchu tanggū ‘hundred’. Xiongnu used gradient decimal numerals as the echelons for its military and administrative organization, in which a century stands between a decad tier and a chiliad tier and is commanded by a centurion. Presumably, the centurion was gradually generalized as an official in addition to their regular low-ranking position and hence promoted to a mid and mid-high rank bearing the prefix da (大) ‘grand’.

            Chinese records may serve to illustrate where the Xiongnu official titles grand danghu and danghu fit in the government system. According to Shiji (110.2890f), there are wise kings of the left and right, guli (谷蠡) kings of the left and right, grand generals of the left and right, grand commandants of the left and right, grand danghu of the left and right, and gudu (骨都) marquises of the left and right; From wise kings of the left and right down to danghu, the big one is ten thousand horsemen, the small ones are several chiliads; All the twenty-four chiefs have their own chiliad chiefs, century chiefs, decad chiefs, small kings, ministers, commandants, danghu, qiequ (且渠) and the like. Having paid attention to the title danghu used in Hanshu, the ancient commentators such as Yan Shigu (顏師古 581-645, Hanshu 8.266, 17.650) and Meng Kang (孟康 Hanshu 8.271) living in the third century were united in their opinion that danghu and danghu of the left and right were Xiongnu official titles.

I encouraged Nathan Hopson to see the last sentence of the second comment here, "Ramen Lo Mein lou1 min6" (1/9/25), which reads:  "We need Nathan Hopson / other Japanese lexicologists…".

Nathan replied with this guest post: