Language Log

(Since we have previously had lively discussions on subjects related to today's topic, I will publish this essay as is, but with the admonition that it is for advanced Siniticists, though naturally all Language Log readers are welcome to partake.)

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]

I was (routinely) digging into the etymology of Taioanese U-LÓNG, which, like UDON, comes from Japanese うどん, and it turns out that うどん is cognate to WONTON, Cantonese 雲吞 (of c.), & Mandarin 馄饨.

The 廣韻 has 餛飩; so does Cikoski, with the gloss K[IND OF] DUMPLING. So the word is pretty ancient. 集韻 has it written 䐊肫, apparently. Using that as a search term, I found an article on your blog, but the commenters were generally unaware that 餛飩 had this alternate form in the medieval book language. (Of c., the person that wrote 䐊肫湯 may not have known either.)

A Sino-Indo-Iranian literary-religious-mythic nexus, with a focus on J. C. Coyajee

Für Professor Patrick Dewes Hanan, meinen Doktorvater

People often ask me what the meaning of the morpheme biàn 變 in the disyllabic term biànwén 變文 is.  The reason they come to me is because I spent the first two decades of my Sinological career focusing on this genre of medieval popular Buddhist prosimetric (shuōchàng 說唱) narrative.  

Wén 文, of course, means "writing; text".  No sweat there.  But biàn 變 is a thorny problem.  It has the following basic meanings:    

1. 1. (intransitive) to change (by itself); to transform
   2. (transitive) to change (something in some way); to alter; to transform
   3. (intransitive) to become; to turn into; to change into
   4. (transitive) to sell off (one's property)
   5. (intransitive) to be flexible (when dealing with matters); to accommodate to circumstances
   6. to perform a magic trick
   7. sudden major change; unexpected change of events
   8. changeable; changing
   9. grotesque thing
   10. (Buddhism) bianwen (form of narrative literature from the Tang dynasty)
   11. (Hokkien) to do (bad things)

       Lí tī pìⁿ sím-mi̍h khang-khùi? [Pe̍h-ōe-jī]

       What [bad thing] are you doing?

(Wiktionary)

A common meaning for hen 變 in Japanese is "strange"

Yesterday's SMBC:

From AntC:

Kid's T-shirt in a Carrefour, downtown Taichung. (I think an English-speaking kid wouldn't be seen dead in it.)    [VHM:  American English:  "wouldn't be caught dead" — usually, in my experience]

In a comment on "Reading Instruction in the mid 19th century", Rachel Churchill asked

Does contrastive emphasis (as in "George or his brother") exist in all languages? If not, which ones don't have it?

I've sometimes noticed non-native English speakers – even those whose pronunciation and accent are pretty good – failing to use it. For example, they might say "This one is fifty GRAMS, but the other one is twenty GRAMS", where a native speaker would emphasise the "fifty" and "twenty" rather than the "grams". I'm guessing it's because their native language doesn't use contrastive emphasis and maybe they've never been taught the concept, but I don't know this for sure.

I responded:

See Yong-cheol Lee, Bei Wang, Sisi Chen, Martine Adda-Decker, Angélique Amelot, Satoshi Nambu, and Mark Liberman, "A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus", IEEE ICASSP, 2015. The abstract:

We examined the production and perception of (contrastive) prosodic focus, using a paradigm based on digit strings, in which the same material and discourse contexts can be used in different languages. We found a striking difference between languages like English and Mandarin Chinese, where prosodic focus is clearly marked in production and accurately recognized in perception, and languages like Korean, where prosodic focus is neither clearly marked in production nor accurately recognized in perception. We also present comparable production data for Suzhou Wu, Japanese, and French.

See also "Victor Hugo, hélas", 4/13/2024, "LÀ encore…", 4/14/2024, and "Intonational focus", 4/21/2011.

Roger C. continued the discussion:

In Spanish, focus contrast is generally achieved by changes in word order; syntax is more flexible than in English.

And I responded:

I'm guessing that (as in French) the word-order changes are combined with tonal and durational changes, and that in some cases (as in corrective focus on number or letter strings), the prosodic changes are the only cues.

I Used to Know How to Write in Japanese:
Somehow, though, I can still read it
Marco Giancotti, Aether Mug (August 14, 2025)

During the last thirty to forty years, two of the most popular dictionaries for mastering sinographs were those of James Heisig and Rick Harbaugh.  I was dubious about the efficacy of both and wished that my students wouldn't use them, but language learners flocked to these extremely popular dictionaries, thinking that they offered a magic trick for remembering the characters.

The latter relied on fallacious etymological "trees" and was written by an economist, and the former was based on brute memorization enhanced by magician's tricks and was written by a philosopher of religion.  Both placed characters on a pedestal of visuality / iconicity without integrating them with spoken language.

I have already done a mini-review of Harbaugh's Chinese Characters and Culture: A Genealogy and Dictionary (New Haven: Yale Far Eastern Publications, 1998) on pp. 25-26 here:  Reviews XI, Sino-Platonic Papers, 145 (August, 2004).  The remainder of this post will consist of extracts of Giancotti's essay and the view of a distinguished Japanologist-linguist on Heisig's lexicographical methods.

The phrase "AI Bubble" has become common in the media recently — in particular, Sam Altman has apparently endorsed the idea:

As economists speculate whether the stock market is in an AI bubble that could soon burst, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has just admitted to believing we’re in one. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI?” Altman said during a lengthy interview with The Verge and other reporters last night. “My opinion is yes.”

In the far-ranging interview, Altman compared the market’s reaction to AI to the dot-com bubble in the ’90s, when the value of internet startups soared before crashing down in 2000. “When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” Altman said. “If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing. Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited.”

But this is Language Log, not Speculative Economics Log, so our topic this morning is the relevant history of the word bubble.

The McGuffey Readers are a series of elementary-school texts first published in 1836, and widely used in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I'm not quite old enough to have to have experienced McGuffey in school, but I've been interested for a long time in the problems of early reading instruction, and so I did skim some dog-eared copies of McGuffey many years ago.

My involvement with the "Using Generative Artificial Intelligence for Reading R&D Center" (U-GAIN) has now involved me directly in relevant research, in collaboration with others at Penn, at Digital Promise, at mdrc, and at Amira Learning.  Wikipedia tells us that "The Science of Reading (SOR) is the discipline that studies the objective investigation and accumulation of reliable evidence about how humans learn to read and how reading should be taught". And the methods that have emerged from that process are similar in many ways to McGuffey's intuitively-derived methods — minus one interesting feature, namely McGuffey's emphasis on training students to produce a rhetorically effective performance of the passages that are given to them to read.

I was recently invited to be interviewed on the topic of "visualizing linguistic data". As I understand it, the point was not to describe the standard stuff, like trees, dependency graphs, logical formulae, or waveforms, spectrograms, spectral slices, formant tracks, F0 tracks, and so on. Rather, the idea was to describe less common kinds of visualizations, or at least somewhat novel ways of using the standard visualizations.

I've done a lot of "visualizing linguistic data" over the years. And talking about these explorations strikes me as problematic, partly because the whole point of visualization is to go beyond talk, and partly because I've used lots of kinds of graphs and tables to explore lots of different questions at different levels of analysis, and it's hard to know where to start and where to stop.

So I've started by makiing a linked list of relevant LLOG posts, mostly on the phonetic side of things. There are a lot of them, and I'm sure I've left some out. I doubt that any readers will want to do more than click on a few at random — my goal was mainly to give myself (and maybe the interviewer) some background for a possible discussion.

I've listed the posts in chronological order, rather than by topic. FWIW, here they are:

Forty-five or so years ago, my Chinese and émigré friends who knew Chinese language and were familiar with Chinese society and culture used to josh each other about these terms:

fūrén 夫人 ("madam; Mrs.")

wàifū 外夫 ("outside husband", but sounds like "wife")

nèirén 內人 (lit., "inside person", i.e. my "[house]wife")

The first term is an established lexical item, and the second two are jocular or ad hoc, plus there are other regional and local expressions formed in a similar fashion, as well as some japonismes.

All of these terms were formed from the following four morphosyllables:

fū 夫 ("man; male adult; husband")

rén 人 ("man; person; people")

wài 外 ("outside")

nèi 內 ("inside")

Alexandra Petri, "A Dispatch from the MAHA Future", The Atlantic 8/5/2025:

“Did you see the game last night?” I ask Greg.

The year is 2029 and we are taking the New, Improved Presidential Fitness Test. The Secretary put some special touches on it himself. My wearable (we all have to wear wearables now, since the Secretary’s mandate) says that I still have 5,000 more steps to go. If we don’t pass our Presidential Fitness Test, we’ll have to visit the Wellness Farm to pick turnips and be “reparented.”

“No,” Greg says. I can sense that Greg is flagging. “Ever since the Leeches First mandate, I’ve had to spend most of my time, you know.” He bends down to pluck a leech off his calf. It lolls about, engorged with blood. He deposits it carefully into his leech pack.

We both sigh. The leeches are the worst. Before taking what used to be called medicine (it is now, according to the CDC’s revised guidance, Just One More Supplement, No Better Or Worse Than Any Other Supplement), the Secretary insists that everyone “try leeches.” The papers at the time described this new mandate as a Huge Triumph for Big Leech. We walk past a billboard with a reminder from the CDC: Don’t Forget to Leech and Bleach! We feel pretty bad most of the time.

The reason for this part 2 about VPNs in China is that so many good responses to my inquiries about VPNdom in China came pouring in just after the first post went out.  Also, there is such a wide variety of different viewpoints and experiences that you cannot expect there to be a single standard out there.  One thing has become very clear to me, and that is that the Chinese government wants to keep people on their toes and resort to a lot of self-policing.  This is common government policy in China, not just with regard to the internet, but to many aspects of social and political life.

For an up-to-date comprehensive primer about VPN usage in the PRC, I recommend that you read carefully this article:  "Are VPN's Legal in China?"  Not really.  It's a tricky business. You can be heavily fined and get in real trouble if the internet police catch you with one, especially if you use it to read / write something the CCP disapproves of.

The following sentence in this Bloomberg story

I’m of the mindset that no car payment is better than a new car payment – hence why my 2017 Volvo will likely stick around for a few more years – but I’ve been enticed more about the electric vehicles on the market.

…could lead the reader down a garden path of wondering why a new car payment is the best car payment.