Language Log

The QWERTY Keyboard Will Never Die. Where Did the 150-Year-Old Design Come From?
The invention’s true origin story has long been the subject of debate. Some argue it was created to prevent typewriter jams, while others insist it’s linked to the telegraph

Jimmy Stamp; Updated by Ellen Wexler (Updated: February 25, 2025 | Originally Published: May 3, 2013)    includes embedded 3:35 video and several interesting historical photographs

Those who have learned to touch type most likely have wondered about the illogical, unalphabetical arrangement of the letters on the keyboard.  But we have learned to live with it, and some of us have become highly proficient at it, while others spend their whole lives hunting and pecking for the desired letters.

A few years after the iPhone’s debut, an innovative new keyboard system started making headlines. Known as KALQ, the split-screen design was created specifically for thumb-typing on smartphones and tablets. It was billed as a more efficient alternative to the ubiquitous QWERTY keyboard, named for the first six letters in the top row of keys.

From time to time, people of all nationalities mistype my given name as "Vicotr".  The weird thing is that I myself fairly often mistype my name that way.

Surely I and the people who write to me know how to spell and pronounce my name.  So why does this mistyping happen so often?   

It garners nearly 50,000 hits on Google.  You can find "Vicotr Hugo" and "RCA Vicotr" online.

There's a website called Names.org that has a long page for "Vicotr", you will find a great deal of information about "Vicotr", including how to pronounce it.  If you push the "play" buttons on this site, the automated male and female voices will dutifully pronounce "Vicotr" for you.

Not only that, this site obligingly provides the following "Fun Facts about the name Vicotr":

• When was the first name Vicotr first recorded in the United States? The oldest recorded birth by the Social Security Administration for the name Vicotr is Tuesday, October 29th, 1878.*
• How unique is the name Vicotr? From 1880 to 2023 less than 5 people per year have been born with the first name Vicotr. Hoorah! You are a unique individual.
• Weird things about the name Vicotr: The name spelled backwards is Rtociv. A random rearrangement of the letters in the name (anagram) will give Ircovt. How do you pronounce that?

*QWERTY was invented in 1874.  One of my forthcoming posts will be about QWERTY, and will include some facts that you almost certainly didn't know about it.

Ottilie Mitchell and Tiffanie Turnbull, "'Nowhere's safe': How an island of penguins ended up on Trump tariff list", BBC 4/4/2025:

Two tiny, remote Antarctic outposts populated by penguins and seals are among the obscure places targeted by the Trump administration's new tariffs.

Heard and McDonald Islands – a territory which sits 4,000km (2,485 miles) south-west of Australia – are only accessible via a seven-day boat trip from Perth, and haven't been visited by humans in almost a decade.

Australian trade minister Don Farrell told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that the tariffs were "clearly a mistake".

"Poor old penguins, I don't know what they did to Trump, but, look, I think it's an indication, to be honest with you, that this was a rushed process."

The Japanese writing system consists of three major components — kanji (sinographs), hiragana (cursive syllabary), and katakana (block syllabary).  I would argue that rōmaji (roman letters) are a fourth component.  We have rehearsed and rehashed their different lexical, morphological, and grammatical functions so often that I don't want to waste time going over them again now.  Since we are focusing on katakana in this post, I will merely mention that their main roles are the following:

• transcription of foreign-language words into Japanese
• the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo)
• emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia
• for technical and scientific terms
• for names of plants, animals, minerals
• often for the names of Japanese companies

(Wikipedia)

"What Does 'that' Mean in 'Did You See That?'" ScienceDaily, March 25, 2025.  Discussing "Recency and Rarity Effects in Disambiguating the Focus of Utterance: A Developmental Study." Kishimoto, Reiki et al. PLOS ONE 20, no. 2 (February 12, 2025): e0317433.

Summary (of the Science Daily article)

What goes through your mind when someone asks 'Did you see that?' A study shows that children and adults process ambiguous information like 'that' differently. While children focus more on the literal meaning, adults use multiple cues to grasp the speaker's intent. Researchers hope their findings could aid dialogue robot development and improve support systems for individuals with communication difficulties.

Second paragraph of the Science Daily article

Imagine watching a quiet night sky. When a shooting star streaks across the sky and someone asks, "Did you see that?," we naturally understand they are referring to the shooting star, not the twinkling stars in the background.

A striking instance of the importance of context for communication.  Adults are better than children at sorting it out.

It wasn't until the 1870s that there was conclusive evidence that all four hooves of a horse are off the ground in the course of its gallop.  That feat was accomplished by the subject of this post.

Running (Galloping)
negative 1878–1879; print 1881
Eadweard J. Muybridge (American, born England, 1830 – 1904)

Getty Museum Collection 85.XO.362.44

As the story goes, in 1872 railroad magnate and ex-governor of California Leland Stanford made a bet with a fellow horseman regarding a horse's gallop. Contending that all four of a horse's feet are off the ground simultaneously at some point while galloping, Stanford hired Muybridge to prove it photographically.

Cuneiforms: New digital tool for translating ancient texts, University of Würzburg, ScienceDaily (March 26, 2025)
   
Summary:    Major milestone reached in digital Cuneiform studies: Researchers present an innovative tool that offers many new possibilities

We usually associate cuneiform (Classical Latin cuneus [“wedge”] + fōrma) with Sumerian and Akkadian, but this logo-syllabic script was actually used for many languages in the ancient world:  Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Urartian, Palaic, Aramaic, Old Persian.  In this post, we focus on its use for writing Hittite, the first Indo-European language, as described in the article cited above.

[This is a guest post by AntC]

Martin Schwartz called my attention to the Jiroft culture:

The Jiroft culture, also known as the Intercultural style or the Halilrud style, is an early Bronze Age (3rd millennium BC) archaeological culture, located in the territory of present-day Sistan and Baluchestan and Kermān provinces of Iran.

The proposed type site is Konar Sandal, near Jiroft in the Halil River area. Other significant sites associated with the culture include Shahr-e Sukhteh (Burnt City), Tepe Bampur, Espiedej, Shahdad, Tal-i-Iblis and Tepe Yahya.

The grouping of these sites as an "independent Bronze Age civilization with its own architecture and language", intermediate between Elam to the west and the Indus Valley civilization to the east, was first proposed by Yusef Majidzadeh, head of the archaeological excavation team in Jiroft (south central Iran). The hypothesis is based on a collection of artifacts that have been formally excavated and recovered from looters by Iranian authorities; accepted by many to have derived from the Jiroft area (as reported by online Iranian news services, beginning in 2001).

(Wikipedia)

The late Irene Good (PhD University of Pennsylvania, 1999; Harvard University Peabody Museum, 2001; later Oxford University Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art) worked at a number of Jiroft sites in the years just after they were discovered, especially on the important textiles that were preserved there.  Her investigations of the "palaeo-environmental perspective" on ancient textiles were instrumental in helping us understand the networks of trade, technology, and cultural transmission among Europe, MP, Iran, and IV.  See "Selected readings" for a biographical note on Irene.

When I first encountered the Chinese expression "pua" several years ago, I had no idea what it meant nor how to pronounce it, so I asked my students.  I wrote it on the board and pronounced it according to English phonology.  They laughed and told me they thought I was saying "pǔwa 普哇", whereas they pronounce it as an English letter acronym:  P-U-A.

You can hear it for yourself here.

@phuongviviyam

might start using PUA in English too #greenscreen #chinese #chineselanguage #chineselanguagelearning #gaslight #gaslighting

♬ original sound – viviyam

This afternoon I'm scheduled to give a talk at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Avenue, Room 9205), with the title "Signals and Symbols in Linguistic Variation and Change". The abstract:

Words are digital symbols transmitted as acoustic signals. The word sequence in an utterance is encoded by a phonological system whose symbol-facing side connects to morpho-syntax, while its signal-facing side controls articulation and perception. This "duality of patterning" (Hockett) or "double articulation" (Martinet) has crucial and little-recognized benefits for accurate transmission, lexical learning, and community convergence. It also raises serious and rarely recognized questions for phonological theory, including the nature of phonetic interpretation and the role of extra-phonological communication. This talk will explore these aspects of phonology, while also discussing the end-to-end nature of many contemporary AI systems.