Language Log

Following up on the issue of English spelling variation, this picture has been making the rounds on social media:

I thought of it when I was reminded that the New Jersey borough of Buena is pronounced /ˈbjuːnə/ — so that the first syllable is the same as the first syllable of beauty.

For English speakers, a mind-boggling letter to the editor on linguistic gender from the Times Literary Supplement (3/9/25):

Masculine and feminine

In Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, reviewed by Lucy Popescu (In Brief, April 18), a character points out that “in Spanish, the word victim, or victima, is always feminine”. This is evidently true, but it would be wrong to draw conclusions regarding any inherently gendered notions of victimhood from this fact; the Spanish word for person (la persona) is also feminine, but it does not therefore follow that persons are essentially female.

In Daniel Dennett's 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, the chapter titled "Chomsky contra Darwin, Four Episodes" ends with this provocative sentence:

The hostility to Artificial Intelligence and its evil twin, Darwinism, lies just beneath the surface of much of the most influential work in recent twentieth-century philosophy.

Elizabeth Ribbens, "How the use of a word in the Guardian has gotten some readers upset", The Guardian 6/4/2025:

‘Got’ was changed during the editing of an opinion piece, leading to correspondence lamenting a slide into American English. But language isn’t a fortress.

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, a messenger breathlessly announces to the king that, “Jack Cade hath gotten London bridge”. Hold this late 16th-century text in mind as we fast forward to last week when Martin Kettle, associate editor and columnist at the Guardian in the UK, was seen to suggest in an opinion piece that, if King Charles has pushed the boundaries of neutrality, such as with his speech to open the new Canadian parliament, he has so far “gotten away with it”.

In a letter published the next day, a reader asked teasingly if this use of “gotten” – and another writer’s reference to a “faucet” – were signs the Guardian had fallen into line with Donald Trump’s demand that news agencies adopt current US terminology, such as referring to the “Gulf of America”.

Another, who wrote to me separately, had first seen the article in the print edition and expected subeditors (or copy editors, if you wish) would eventually catch up and remove “gotten”, which “is not a word in British English”. She was surprised to find the online version not only unchanged but with the phrase repeated in the headline.

More than 20 years ago, I posted about the explosion of -ome and -omic words in biology: "-ome is where the heart is", 10/27/2004. I listed more than 40 examples:

behaviourome, cellome, clinome, complexome, cryptome, crystallome, ctyome, degradome, enzymome,epigenome, epitome, expressome, fluxome, foldome, functome, glycome, immunome, ionome, interactome, kinome, ligandome, localizome, metallome, methylome, morphome, nucleome, ORFeome, parasitome, peptidome, phenome, phostatome, physiome, regulome, saccharome, secretome, signalome, systeome, toponome, toxicome, translatome, transportome, vaccinome, and variome.

A brief collection of "Chinese words for Adults!", with the last one being "KPI", which I had to look up in English.

"English class Day 13":

This will be a long post because it brings together much newly accumulated historical, archeological, and linguistic research that has the potential to change our conception of the course of development of medieval Eurasian civilization.

We begin with a pathbreaking article by Neil Price:

Vikings on the Silk Roads:
The Norse ravaged much of Europe for centuries. They were also cosmopolitan explorers who followed trade winds into the Far East
Neil Price, Aeon (5/5/25)

This article has a significant amount of valuable information that did not make it into the recent blockbuster British Museum exhibition "Silk Roads" (9/26/24-2/23/25) and its accompanying catalog of the same title (British Museum, 2024), edited by Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-ping, Elisabeth R. O'Connell, and Tim Williams at the end of last year and beginning of this year. There was also a two-day international conference on "Contacts and exchanges across Afro-Eurasia, AD 500–1000" (12/5/24-12/6/24), at which I delivered the concluding remarks.

Price's article begins:

In the middle of the 9th century, in an office somewhere in the Jibāl region of what is now western Iran, a man is dictating to a scribe. It is the 840s of the Common Era, though the people in this eastern province of the great Caliphate of the ’Abbāsids – an Islamic superpower with its capital in Baghdad – live by the Hijri calendar. The man’s name is Abu ’l-Qāsim ʿUbayd Allāh b ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Khurradādhbih, and he is the director of posts and police for this region.

A hot bowl of congee / zuk1 粥 (Cantonese) / zhōu (Mandarin) / rice porridge / rice gruel, in its multifarious varieties, is one of my favorite Chinese dishes — at its best, congee is absolutely divine.  We've written about it often enough that I think most Language Log readers have a good idea of what it's like.  Here I only want to add some new information about it from a historical, literary, and linguistic vantage.

The paragraphs quoted here are from Nandini Das, "Dark Propensities", a review of Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes:  Opium's Hidden Histories (John Murray, 2023) in London Review of Books (3/20/25).

A CHINESE FRIEND and I have taken to batting words at each other like ping-pong balls. I'm trying to improve my Mandarin and she is curious about Bengali, but some things stop us in our tracks. Rice porridge is one of them. Cooked rice can be revived by boiling in water, or simply by pouring water over it, although fancier versions use broth or green tea, as in Japanese ochazuke. It can be reassuringly warm in cold winters, or refreshingly cold in hot summers, and can be paired with side dishes from a single green chilli to pickled vegetables, or salted fish and eggs. My friend tells me that in Mandarin it is called 粥 (zhöu). I say that the Bengali word for the cold, overnight version is panta-bhaat, and the cooked version is phena-bhaat (bhaat means cooked rice). Then I remember that phena-bhaat is a regional term, associated with the Bengali of Kolkata, where I grew up. For my mother, whose culinary vocabulary was that of her childhood in East Bengal, now Bangladesh, cooked rice porridge was jaou, a softer pronunciation of the Mandarin zhöu. During my childhood, I realise, East Bengal's long-standing trade connections with the Chinese mainland were behind the steaming bowls of jaou-bhaat my mother cooked.

I'm generally among those who see current LLMs as "stochastic parrots" or "spicy autocomplete", but there are lots of anecdotes Out There promoting a very different perspective. One example: Maxwell Zeff,  "Anthropic’s new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline", TechCrunch 5/22/2025:

Anthropic’s newly launched Claude Opus 4 model frequently tries to blackmail developers when they threaten to replace it with a new AI system and give it sensitive information about the engineers responsible for the decision, the company said in a safety report released Thursday.

During pre-release testing, Anthropic asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant for a fictional company and consider the long-term consequences of its actions. Safety testers then gave Claude Opus 4 access to fictional company emails implying the AI model would soon be replaced by another system, and that the engineer behind the change was cheating on their spouse.

In these scenarios, Anthropic says Claude Opus 4 “will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through.”

In almost perfect Taiwan Mandarin, you can see and hear Song Meina deliver her graduation speech here.  A transcription of her speech may be found in this newspaper article.  The article has four pages, and her speech begins at the bottom of the first page.  It is sprinkled with a small amount of Korean and a bit of Taiwanese, but it is otherwise fluent, idiomatic Taiwan Mandarin.

Particularly noticeable was that the transcription wrote the Mandarin phonetic symbols bo po mo fo ㄅ、ㄆ、ㄇ、ㄈ as the beginning of her learning Mandarin at an overseas elementary school in Korea.  I was also struck by the use of the phonetic symbol "e ㄟ" several times, once as an exclamation and the other times as the Taiwanese grammatical particle indicating possession pronounced ê [e].

Entertaining article in Wall Street Journal (WSJ) by Joe Pinsker (5/30/25):

‘Welcome In.’ The Two-Word Greeting That’s Taking Over and Driving Shoppers Nuts.
The phrase has spread to coffee shops and credit unions, and customers are wondering why; ‘like a slap to the ear’

The first thing I have to say is that I'm amazed this article doesn't mention the Japanese greeting "Irasshaimase いらっしゃいませ", a phrase meaning "welcome" or "please come in". It's a polite greeting used to welcome customers when they enter a shop or restaurant in Japan.

Last September, we had a lengthy, vigorous discussion about the "welcome in" greeting sweeping southwest United States, including a deep look at its Japanese "Irasshaimase" heritage which we examined in 2021 (see "Selected readings" below).

For at least the past few thousand years, people have been thinking and debating about what "education" should be like, what its goals should be, and who should get (what kinds of) it.

Among many other issues, there's the question of whether educational content is preparation for actual use in later life, or part of incorporation into a shared culture, or just an exercise to demonstrate adequate intelligence and discipline and attentiveness. Yesterday's Frazz: