Language Log

Long ago (half a century), I had occasion to translate the word "masochism" into Chinese.  At that stage, I wasn't even sure what "masochism" itself meant.  Supposedly it was "the madness of deriving pleasure from pain", I guessed especially sexual pleasure — something like that.

Wanting to give the most accurate possible translation into Chinese, I thought I should begin by investigating the etymology of the word, as is my bent.  So I pulled out my trusty 1960 Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, my lexical vade mecum.  Here's what it had (has — I still keep it on my desk):

[After L. von Sacher-Masoch (1835-1895), Austrian novelist, who described it.]  Med. Abnormal sexual passion characterized by pleasure in being abused by one's associate; hence any pleasure in being abused or dominated.

My recollection is that, at the time, I couldn't readily find an English-Chinese dictionary that had the term "masochism" in it, so I may have made up this rendering for it myself, although I'm not absolutely certain that I did so:

zìnüèdài kuáng 自虐待狂 ("madness of self abuse") (129 ghits)

Be that as it may, there's no doubt that the most common translation of "masochism" in Chinese today is this:

shòunüèkuáng 受虐狂 ("madness of enduring / accepting / receiving abuse") (13,700.000 ghits)

It seems that nobody attempted to render "masochism" in such a way that it would reflect the fact that it derived from a person's surname.

Alexei S. Kassian and George Starostin, "Do 'language trees with sampled ancestors' really support a 'hybrid model' for the origin of Indo-European? Thoughts on the most recent attempt at yet another IE phylogeny".  Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, no. 682 (May 16, 2025).

Abstract

In this paper, we present a brief critical analysis of the data, methodology, and results of the most recent publication on the computational phylogeny of the Indo-European family (Heggarty et al. 2023), comparing them to previous efforts in this area carried out by (roughly) the same team of scholars (informally designated as the “New Zealand school”), as well as concurrent research by scholars belonging to the “Moscow school” of historical linguistics. We show that the general quality of the lexical data used as the basis for classification has significantly improved from earlier studies, reflecting a more careful curation process on the part of qualified historical linguists involved in the project; however, there remain serious issues when it comes to marking cognation between different characters, such as failure (in many cases) to distinguish between true cognacy and areal diffusion and the inability to take into account the influence of the so-called derivational drift (independent morphological formations from the same root in languages belonging to different branches). Considering that both the topological features of the resulting consensus tree and the established datings contradict historical evidence in several major aspects, these shortcomings may partially be responsible for the results. Our principal conclusion is that the correlation between the number of included languages and the size of the list may simply be insufficient for a guaranteed robust topology; either the list should be drastically expanded (not a realistic option for various practical reasons) or the number of compared taxa be reduced, possibly by means of using intermediate reconstructions for ancestral stages instead of multiple languages (the principle advocated by the Moscow school).

But can they still tell us something useful about language?  Here are two new papers that address that question:

I.

"What the Hidden Rhythms of Orangutan Calls Can Tell Us about Language – New Research." De Gregorio, Chiara. The Conversation, May 27, 2025.

In the dense forests of Indonesia, you can hear strange and haunting sounds. At first, these calls may seem like a random collection of noises – but my rhythmic analyses reveal a different story.

Those noises are the calls of Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), used to warn others about the presence of predators. Orangutans belong to our animal family – we’re both great apes. That means we share a common ancestor – a species that lived millions of years ago, from which we both evolved.

Even if you can't understand spoken Taiwanese, you can learn a lot from these two videos because of the excellent visuals, plus it is nice just to hear the clearly spoken Taigi and compare terms in Taigi with their parallels in Sino-Korean.

The first is a video from Taiwan's public TV (公視台語台) on the interesting distribution of the names of tea in the world:

Today's xkcd:

The mouseover title: "'This HAZMAT container contains radioactive material with activity of one becquerel.' 'So, like, a single banana slice?'"

Subtitle:  "A cautionary note on the application of limited linguistics studies to whole populations"

A prefatory note on "anthropology".  In the early 90s, I was deeply involved in the first ancient DNA studies on the Tarim mummies* with Paolo Francalacci, an anthropologist at the University of Sassari. Sardinia.  Paolo was deputed to work with me by the eminent population geneticist, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza of the Stanford medical school genetics department, who was unable to endure the rigors of the expedition to Eastern Central Asia. 

[*Wikipedia article now strangely distorted for political reasons.  Be skeptical of its claims, especially those based on recent DNA studies.] 

After we had collected the tissue samples in the field, Paolo took them back to Sassari to extract and analyze the attenuated DNA.  This involved amplification through PCR (polymerase chain reaction), a process that later gained great fame during the years of the coronavirus pandemic, inasmuch as it is an essential step in the detection and quantification of messenger RNA (mRNA).  Indeed, two Penn scientists, Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó, were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on mRNA technology, which was crucial in the development of COVID-19 injections.

[first draft written June 9-10, 2025 in Bemidji, Minnesota, where the famous giant statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox stand next to beautiful Lake Bemidji*]

During my peregrinations in upper midwest USA, I noticed a proliferation of place names beginning with "mi-".  Because there are 10,000 big and little glacial lakes up here, I suspected that "mi-" might be a prefix signifying "water").  I had come to Minneapolis to explore the headwaters of the Mississippi in northern Minnesota.  That alone was enough of an emphatic prompt to set me off on a linguistic "mi-" quest.

My main intention on this trip is to follow the Mississippi from Lake Itasca, whence it emerges as a small stream about ten feet wide you can walk across on a line of stones in northern Minnesota, to where it debouches into the Gulf in the south.  European-American settlers named the Mighty Mississippi after the Ojibwe word ᒥᓯ-ᓰᐱ misi-ziibi ("great river"). (source)  Misi zipi is the French rendering of the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or Algonquin) name for the river. (source) 

So I had one strike against me on the first "mi".

There are several different types of "fronting" or "preposing" in English, sometimes categorized in syntactic terms (e.g. wh-movement) and sometimes in pragmatic terms (e.g. topicalization). Here's recent example of a familiar type, for which I don't know a standard name:

The stage was set for Tesla to get its launch, and its launch it got.

That example seems a bit awkward to me, but definitely still possible. Examples where the preposed item is a simpler noun phrase seem to go down a bit easier — for example, substituting "a launch" for "its launch".

My wonderful 2nd grade teacher taught me how to spell Mississippi with a special sing-song rhythm, and I've never forgotten it thereafter.  Her jingle makes spelling "Mississippi" — whose shape is as contorted as its riverine course and scared me the first few times I tried to spell it myself, before she taught me the secret / knack — as easy as falling off a log.

Unfortunately, I never learned how to spell "Cincinnati" that way, so I always have to proceed carefully and cautiously when I spell the name of that awesome city in the southwest corner of my home state.

I use a similar technique for remembering my social security number, phone number, lock combinations, and so forth.  But I have not been able to apply it to recalling computer passwords, which are a terrible trial for me (ask the department staff and IT guys at Penn how awful I am with passwords and the like).  Maybe the reason rhythmic memorization don't work for passwords is that we have many of them for different purposes, plus they require weird combinations of upper and lower case letters, an arbitrary number of numbers, and a set amount of nonalphanumeric symbols.

"Unraveling the origins of the sogdians: Evidence of genetic admixture between ancient central and East Asians", Jiashuo Zhang, Yongdi Wang, Naifan Zhang, Jiawei Li, Youyang Qu, Cunshi Zhu, Fan Zhang, Dawei Cai, and Chao Ning, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (Volume 61, February 2025, 104957)

Highlights:

• Genome-wide data was generated for two individuals from a joint burial in the Guyuan cemetery dating to the Tang Dynasty.
• The female individual exhibits local ancestry, while the male individual carries both local ancestry and additional genetic components.
• The integration of genomic data with archaeological evidence suggests that the two individuals were likely husband and wife.
• The Sogdians, who travelled to China and intermarried with local populations, played a significant role in the Silk Road trade.

Back in March, the AAAI ("Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence") published an "AAAI Presidential Panel Report on the Future of AI Research":

The AAAI 2025 presidential panel on the future of AI research aims to help all AI stakeholders navigate the recent significant transformations in AI capabilities, as well as AI research methodologies, environments, and communities. It includes 17 chapters, each covering one topic related to AI research, and sketching its history, current trends and open challenges. The study has been conducted by 25 AI researchers and supported by 15 additional contributors and 475 respondents to a community survey.

You can read the whole thing here — and you should, if you're interested in the topic.

I thought this use of incredulous in a recent Forbes article was a malapropism for incredible:

If you thought that my May 23 report, confirming the leak of login data totaling an astonishing 184 million compromised credentials, was frightening, I hope you are sitting down now. Researchers have just confirmed what is also certainly the largest data breach ever, with an almost incredulous 16 billion login credentials, including passwords, exposed. As part of an ongoing investigation that started at the beginning of the year, the researchers have postulated that the massive password leak is the work of multiple infostealers. [emphasis added]

Chris Button saw this bubble tea place at 3:45 PM today in Hollywood:

From the cafe's website:

BOPOMOFO CAFE draws its name from the phonetic Traditional Chinese Alphabets. ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ, and ㄈ [bo, po, mo, and fo] are the “ABCs” of the Mandarin Chinese alphabet symbolizing nostalgia and strength as the building blocks of Mandarin language mastery. Co-founders Eric and Philip, both "American Born Chinese" (ABC), chose the name to reflect their heritage and shared pride in their culture.