Language Log

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.

"Interest(s)" (8/6/2025) engaged the often-unnoticed usage difference between "in the interest of" and "in the interests of". In a comment on that post, Yves Rehbein wrote

I would gamble that t is mistakenly inserted in in'eres[s], which is ambiguous to plural.

And I responded

Indeed. See "On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet", 4/19/2018, for an explanation of why /sts/ and /st/ and /s/ can be phonetically ambiguous. I've verified that this applies to interests / interest and will provide details in another post before long.

Julesy just keeps getting better and better:

China to restrict Tibetan language in region’s college entrance exam
Exclusion of core subject exam stokes fears Beijing is furthering campaign to ‘Sinicise’ region
John Reed, Financial Times (8/6/25)

Cantonese, Uyghur, Mongolian — they're all threatened.  And you can be sure that if China invades and occupies Taiwan, Taiwanese (and all of the aboriginal languages of the island) will be under duress.  What is being done to Cantonese, Uyghur, and Mongolian is the way the CCP deals with the majority languages of its various cultural regions, which together constitute approximately half of China's total land area.  Tibet alone occupies roughly 13% of the total land area of the PRC (Xinjiang is 1/6th [16.6% of the whole of China].  Since seven of Asia's major rivers (the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, and Indus) originate in Bod, and "The Roof of the World" possesses many other valuable natural and strategic resources, what happens to the native tongue of its inhabitants is no mean matter.

In an update to "Morpho-phonologically AI", I wrote

Ironically, since this puzzle was vocalically inspired by the term "AI" , I'm guessing that current AI systems are not very good at solving (or creating) puzzles like this. I'll give it a try later today.

But it seems that I was wrong.

Will Shortz, "Sunday Puzzle: Artificially Confused", NPR Weekend Edition 8/9/2025:

The theme of today's puzzle is A.I. every answer is a familiar two-word phrase or name in which the first word has a long -A vowel sound and the second word has a long-I vowel sound.

Do you speak Yukon English? These researchers want to hear it
'Linguists know very, very little about what's going on with Englishes in the Canadian North,' researcher says
CBC News · Posted: Aug 10, 2025

If you're not quite sure where Yukon is, it's way up there in northwest Canada, between British Columbia to the south, Alaska to the west, and Northwest Territories to the east.  It's cold, bitterly cold in winter, the coldest place in North America, with the abandoned town of Snag dropping down to −63.0 °C (−81.4 °F) in February, 1947.  Believe it or not, it gets extreme high heat in May and June, with the Mayo Road weather station, located just northwest of Whitehorse, recording a temperature of 36.5 °C (97.7 °F) in June, 2004.

As you might expect, the population of Yukon is sparse, with an estimated total of 47,126 as of 2025.  But now it gets interesting, at least to me.