Language Log

In "Beautiful music and logical warts", I quoted (part of) the trollish conclusion of Rousseau's Lettre sur la Musique Française:

Je crois avoir fait voir qu’il n’y a ni mesure ni mélodie dans la musique française, parce que la langue n’en est pas susceptible ; que le chant français n’est qu’un aboiement continuel, insupportable à toute oreille non prévenue; que l’harmonie en est brute, sans expression, et sentant uniquement son remplissage d'écolier ; que les airs français ne sont point des airs ; que le récitatif français n’est point du récitatif. D’où je conclus que les Français n’ont point de musique et n’en peuvent avoir, ou que, si jamais ils en ont une, ce sera tant pis pour eux.

I believe I have shown that there is neither rhythm nor melody in French music, because the language is not capable of them; that French song is only a continual barking, unbearable to any unbiased ear; that the harmony is crude, without expression, and full of childish padding; that French airs are not airs; that French recitative is not recitative. From which I conclude that the French have no music and never will have any, or that, if ever they have some, it will be a disappointment for them.

In "Rococo" (7/6/2025), I quoted from Charles Carr's 1965 paper "TWO WORDS IN ART HISTORY II. ROCOCO" his evidence that the word rococo began as way of denigrating certain kinds of out-of-fashion ugliness. Jonathan Smith noted in the comments that "baroque itself was first a(n) (disparaging) epithet", and I quoted the OED's endorsement of that idea, though without going into the whole "an irregular pearl is like a wart" background.

But in a parallel 1965 article, "TWO WORDS IN ART HISTORY I. BAROQUE", Charles Carr lays out three etymological theories about baroque, after sparing us "fantastic etymologies to be found in certain eighteenth-century dictionaries".

[This is a guest post from Christopher Atwood]

Building on observations of Andras Rona-Tas (Tibeto-Mongolica, pp. 213-14), one can observe a basic division in Mongolian words for cultivated plants. They divide into two types: 1) words for grains and grain cultivation; and 2) words for fruits and vegetables.

Words in the first category (tariya "grain" buudai "wheat," arbai "barley," shish "sorghum," am "millet," budaa "grain," anjisu "plow" mill "teerem" etc) are consistent throughout the Mongolic family, and have great time depth — most of them are not obviously loan words from any other language (some have Turkic cognates, but at a considerable time depth).

[This is a guest post by Bill Benzon]

I thought you’d be interested in a study showing the distribution of “Xanadu” across the web. I first looked into this back in 2010. I’ve now updated that work using ChatGPT o3 (one of the so-called “reasoning” models). It designed the study and executed it.

This report ran all night. And it’s the kind of thing that would have been impossible prior to the internet. Here’s the abstract:

In the Fox News recording of Donald Trump's 7/8/2025 cabinet meeting, at around 17:33, there's a Walt Whitman-esque description of various historical U.S. raids on Iran, culminating in an interesting example of how to define a word by repeating it with emphatic voice quality.

[This is a guest post by Gábor Parti]

This morning at the Greek stand of the farmers market, I bought spanakopita ("spinach pie") and one other item with the "spanako-" root, which also had spinach as a main ingredient.  The resemblance to English "spinach", plus the fact that it was obviously not one of those ubiquitous wrinkled leafy green vegetables related to cabbage, kale, collard, etc., got me interested in what its etymology was.

Just quickly checking a few easily accessible sources, some seemingly contradictory aspects of the common understanding of the etymology of "spinach" started to bother me:

From Middle English spinach, from Anglo-Norman spinache, from Old French espinoche, from Old Occitan espinarc, from Arabic إِسْفَانَاخ (ʔisfānāḵ), from Classical Persian اسپناخ (ispanāx, ispināx).

Wiktionary

Mok Ling sent me an article from China Times with the following percipient observations:

Today I'm bringing you this short article for LL. A Korean pop idol, Solar — that's her stage name, Mandarinized as 頌樂; her real name is 김용선 (Hanja: 金容仙), romanized Kim Yongsun) — has made headlines for speaking very fluent Mandarin after just 7 months of learning it. She has also released a full song in Mandarin with Taiwanese artist 9m88 and taken countless interviews with Taiwanese media in Mandarin as well (see this "What's in My Bag" interview with Vogue Taiwan.)

"Indonesia Volcano Eruption Sends Ash Soaring 11 Miles High", NYT 7/7/2025:

A volcanic eruption in Indonesia on Monday sent an ash cloud soaring about 11 miles high, far higher than a plume produced by the same volcano when it erupted last month.

Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, on the southeastern Indonesian island of Flores, spewed the ash when it erupted for about six minutes on Monday morning, the national volcanic agency reported. It erupted several more times later in the day.

That’s a lot of ash: The cloud was nearly four times taller than the three-mile-high one that Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki produced when it erupted last month.

The 11 tracks of TREC2025 are underway, collectively constituting the 2025 edition of the "Text Retrieval Conference" organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. See the call for details and links, and this site for a few words about its history going back to 1992.

Wikipedia has more historical information, although the article's section on "Current tracks" is from 2018, which is not exactly "current".

And the Wikipedia article also doesn't give a clear picture of what TREC accomplished in its early years. Here's what it says about TREC-1:

In 1992 TREC-1 was held at NIST. The first conference attracted 28 groups of researchers from academia and industry. It demonstrated a wide range of different approaches to the retrieval of text from large document collections. Finally TREC1 revealed the facts that automatic construction of queries from natural language query statements seems to work. Techniques based on natural language processing were no better no worse than those based on vector or probabilistic approach.

The title of this song attracted my attention:  "Fāngyán de ànshāng 方言的黯伤" ("The sadness of topolect"). 

I listened to it here, but couldn't catch everything that the singer was saying.  I asked Zhaofei Chen what she heard, and here's what she gleaned from listening to the recording:

Commenters noted the ambiguity of this sentence quoted earlier today in "Rococo":

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, he wasted little time redecorating.

From Bob Ladd: "I was genuinely uncertain when I read the sentence about 'wasting little time' whether Trump had in fact gone right to work redecorating or rather had decided not to bother.