Language Log

Note to Sinologist colleagues:

For the last few years, I've been noticing that Chinese archeologists
and scientists publishing in English consistently refer to jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文 as
"oracle bone scripts" (note the plural), when I think they mean "oracle
bone inscriptions" or "oracle bone texts".

I'm wondering if I should make an attempt to correct this usage, or
whether it is so well entrenched in Sino-English that nothing can be
done to change it.

For those who don't know what "Chinese Text Project" (CTP) is, here's a:

Brief introduction:

The Chinese Text Project is an online open-access digital library that makes pre-modern Chinese texts available to readers and researchers all around the world. The site attempts to make use of the digital medium to explore new ways of interacting with these texts that are not possible in print. With over thirty thousand titles and more than five billion characters, the Chinese Text Project is also the largest database of pre-modern Chinese texts in existence.

You may wish to read more about the project, view the pre-Qin and Han, post-Han or Wiki tables of contents, or consult the instructions, FAQ, or list of tools. If you're looking for a particular Chinese text, you can search for texts by title across the main textual sections of the site.

(from the CTP homepage)

My graduate seminar on Middle Vernacular Sinitic has six M.A. students from the PRC in it.  They are all advanced in Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese  (LS/CC) .  In this seminar, which I have been offering for more than a decade, each time I focus on a different medieval text.  Because the texts I assign to the students are largely or wholly unannotated, the students are mostly sailing through uncharted waters.  For them to be able to read and understand these texts, their Sinitic philological skills have to be high, higher than for most students in Advanced LS/CC courses.

I think jargon is getting thicker with each passing day, but where are people learning it?  Perhaps they are actually being taught it in business schools.  It's so pervasive, nauseating, and suffocating that it must be somebody's job to produce it.

To put the new wave / avant garde jargon in perspective, I turned to this consummate collection compiled by WSJ from the complaints of actual endurers:

‘Leverage.’ ‘Reach Out.’ ‘Circle Back.’ The Corporate Jargon We Hate the Most.
We pinged our readers for the terms that really annoy them. The list is long.

By Demetria Gallegos, WSJ (Feb. 26, 2026) 

Nadine White, "What a viral speech in Ireland reveals about colonial history and Caribbean English", The Guardian 3/4/2026:

Linguists say reaction to Irish TD’s remarks reflects shared regional English roots and enduring impact of empire

When the politician Thomas Gould rose to speak in the Irish parliament recently, few expected a lesson in colonial linguistics.

Yet clips of his speech began circulating online last week, with some viewers saying he sounded unmistakably Jamaican. The reaction was animated, particularly among Jamaican heritage communities.

Responding to the Cork politician’s viral moment, one person wrote online: “The influence the Irish have on the Jamaican accent is uncanny.”

Today in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations departmental colloquium, our colleague Ayako Kano gave a talk on the celebrated Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) film, "Rashomon" (1950).  During the Q & A, we went rather deeply into the author's creative use of shadows in his cinematography.

I commented that all Japanese filmmakers, and indeed probably all Japanese filmviewers, must be at least subliminally aware of the key role that shadows play in film production, since the Japanese word for "cinema" is  den'ei でんえい 電影  ("electric shadows").  Or perhaps I should say "was", since I think that the Japanese word for "film" may now have migrated to "shinema シネマ" and / or eiga 映画 ("image picture").

One does not usually associate horses with premodern Africa, yet we have words for "horse" in many African languages:

Here's a currently hot term in China:  pòfáng 破防.

Economist (2/27/26) describes it this way:

The phrase literally means “breaking the defence”. Originally a military term, it has become popular online to describe someone’s emotional defences being “breached”—for example, when a comment, joke or criticism hits a sensitive spot. Young Chinese people often use it in a jokey way when responding to posts about gloomy or harsh realities in the country.

Text-To-Speech technology has improved enormously over the decades — but there's still some headroom, as a friend has recently underlined for me. He observes that when The Economist magazine first publishes a piece online, it appears with a AI-read audio, and then later with a human-read version:

The rhythm/prosody/pitch (I'm not exactly sure which – all three?) is the same in nearly every sentence and even clause. This high-then-falling pattern is fine in one sentence, but repeated 50 times in a row is awful.

Later, those pieces that make it into the print edition get their own, human-read version. So voilà, you have a perfect before-and-after.

The Chinese Computer: Competition or Cooperation?
book review by
David Moser
Beijing Capital Normal University

Thomas Mullaney’s The Chinese Computer is a fascinating account of the decades-long effort by linguists, computer scientists and engineers to incorporate Chinese characters into the digital age. Drawing on a vast body of historical and scientific sources, the book offers the reader an lively account of the formidable technical challenges involved in creating practical and intuitive input methods for one of the world’s most complex writing systems. The reader will come away with an increased awareness of the contributions that Chinese computing brought to modern computer science.

Chinese scholars and sinologists working in the 1980s and 90s will recall the early generations of Chinese word processors—slow, unreliable, and crash-prone—when every incremental gain in speed or compatibility felt like a small miracle. Thanks to the ingenuity and innovation of computer input developers, today anyone on the planet can create Chinese texts using an impressive ecosystem of powerful and user-friendly tools.

Air Force billboard in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China:

Courtesy of The Great Translation Movement (TGTM) — here.

François Lang says:

This WSJ headline garden-pathed me; I got the correct parse only on the third try!

Federal Worker Fired After Hanging Trans Flag at Yosemite Sues Government

Former Park Service employee claims free speech violations after organizing climbers for display at ‘El Cap’

By Allison Pohle, WSJ (2/23/26)

Taken outside a hotel in Shenzhen: