Language Log

The (ir)reality of the MingKwai typewriter

There's been a lot of hoopla about the famous Chinese author Lin Yutang's (1895-1976) purported MingKwai ("clear-quick") typewriter in the last few years.  Fortunately, linguist Julesy popped the hallucinatory bubble about the proclaimed wonders of the MingKwai by grappling with the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of the MingKwai:  "The many myths about the Chinese typewriter" (9/7/25).

Now, in a new video that I just learned about two days ago, we get inside a replica of the MingKwai and can see how incredibly complex its innards are:

Xi Jinping.

There are countless online suggestions for how to pronounce the name of the Great Helmsman.  Most of them are well intended, but I fear that so far they have failed.  People who are well informed about Chinese affairs still murder the Paramount Leader's name.  So as not to muddy the waters, I will give a completely non-technical transcription.  No phonology, no semantics, no frills.

What I'm going to suggest on the next page is intended for the English-speaking layperson who has no specialized knowledge of Chinese language.  It will not be exactly the same as Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) spoken by a native, but it will get you close — sans tones, which would take a long time to explain and practice

Remember, there are countless Sinitic topolects, dialects, and idiolects, and endless variations even among MSM speakers.  Be confident.  If you pronounce the Paramount Leader's name the way I advise on the next page, any well-disposed/intended speaker of MSM will understand whom you're referring to.

Oh, by the way, if you haven't formally studied Mandarin and try to pronounce the "X" in some linguistically sophisticated way, you will most likely miserably fail.

Don't try to make it fancy or exotic.

Pronounce the words the way you would in English.

Here goes:

Charles Belov saw this sign on Clement Street (aka New Chinatown) in San Francisco:

A year and a half ago, we learned of the initial AI-assisted decipherment of a charred scroll that had been buried for two millennia under the volcanic ashes of Mt. Vesuvius (eruption 79AD) in the city of Herculaneum:  "AI (and human ingenuity) to the rescue" (2/6/24).

Since then, researchers have continued to work on the scroll until now they have identified the precise text on it:

Lost Work of Greek Philosopher Philodemus Unearthed from Herculaneum Scroll
By Tasos Kokkinidis, Greek Reporter (May 6, 2025)

Steven R. Anderson has passed away. Sally Thomason wrote today on Facebook:

Linguist friends, I am very sorry indeed to report that Steve (Stephen R.) Anderson died last night, October 13, after a diagnosis last month of aggressive stage 4 esophageal cancer. He died at home, peacefully and free of pain, surrounded by his loved ones. Steve was a giant in our field, with highly significant publications in phonology and morphology, among other areas (including, for instance, animal communication systems). He was a fellow of the AAAS and other prestigious organizations, and the only person, as far as I know (and certainly in recent decades), to serve two years as president of the Linguistic Society of America: he graciously accepted the burden of the second year when his elected successor was unable to serve.

I first met Steve at a conference in Poland in the late 1970s; later, we served together on various LSA committees, and I always enjoyed working with him and, in off-work hours, gossiping with him over drinks. One of the most memorable meals I ever ate was when he and I were both at a conference in Amsterdam, and he chose an Indonesian restaurant and ordered the food: spectacular. Our paths haven't crossed since we both retired and went in different directions (and, in my case at least, stopped flying off to conferences often), but I am sad to know that there is no longer any chance that our paths will cross in the future.

The Wikipedia entry on Free Indirect Speech quotes Norman Page's 1972 analysis of a passage from Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility:

[1] Mrs John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters. [2] To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy, would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. [3] She begged him to think again on the subject. [4] How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum?

Page explains that "the first [1st] sentence is straight narrative, in the 'voice' of the [narrator]; the third [3rd] sentence is normal indirect speech; but the second [2nd] and fourth [4th] are what is usually described as free indirect speech." In these two sentences, Austen presents the interior thoughts of the character and creates the illusion that the reader is entering the character's mind.

Jane Austen's usage is so easy to follow that most readers probably don't even notice it. But in Thomas Pynchon's latest novel Shadow Ticket, there are some examples that are harder.

From Mok Ling:

The OED dates meh as an interjection back to 1992, in an internet newsgroup, and as an adjective back to 2007 in The Guardian:

The man could scarcely walk. Two hours later he was cheerfully high-kicking a suicide bomber out the back of a train. Nuts. But somehow it all seemed, to use a bit of internet parlance, a bit ‘meh’.

But this bit of "internet parlance" has started showing up in news headlines, without excuses or scare quotes, and not just in places like college papers.

[Update– For more on the origins and progress of meh, see "Meh-ness to society" (Ben Zimmer, 6/98/2006), "Awwa, meh, feh, heh" (Ben Zimmer, 2/16/2007),  "The 'meh' wars" (Ben Zimmer, 11/21/2008), "The 'meh' wars, part 2" (11/24/2008), "Meh again" (Arnold Zwicky, 12/1/2011), "Words for 'meh'" (Mark Liberman, 12/22/2011), "Three scenes in the life of 'meh'" (Ben Zimmer, 2/26/2012).]

In “Agentic Culture” (8/30/2025), I cited some work by economists about agentic collusion in fixing prices and dividing markets — to which I might add links here, here, and here. And in that post, I noted that the problematic effects of AI agents learning from their social interactions in other areas have been mostly ignored.

But here it comes: Batu El and James Zou, "Moloch's Bargain: Emergent Misalignment When LLMs Compete for Audiences", 10/7/2025.

Following on Mark's "Literacy: peasants and philosophers" (10/10/25) yesterday, also a number of posts on this subject that we have written in the past (see the bibliography), i herewith offer an account of myth and literacy:

Memories within myth
The stories of oral societies, passed from generation to generation, are more than they seem. They are scientific records
By Patrick Nunn, Aeon (4/6/23)

This is a long, richly documented article, from which I will take only a few representative selections.  It begins:

In the 1880s, the American journalist William Gladstone Steel made several visits to a freshwater lake that filled the caldera of an extinct volcano in Oregon. For Steel, these visits were the fulfilment of a dream that began while he was just a schoolboy in Kansas. It was one day in 1870, while reading the newspaper wrapped around his school lunch, that he noticed an article about the ‘discovery’ of a spectacular body of freshwater named Crater Lake. ‘In all of my life,’ Steel would later recall, ‘I never read an article that took the intense hold on me that that one did…’ When he finally made it to the lake in 1885, he was so captivated that he determined to have the area designated as a National Park. But designation was not easily gained and required extensive documentation of the region.

Today's SMBC starts with this panel:

Recently I came upon the following quotation from the Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1905-1945):

Photograph taken at the Ningbo airport: those items are not allowed to be taken into the city of Ningbo.

zìyuàn fàngqì wùpǐn tóuqì xiāng

自愿放弃物品投弃箱

"disposal bin for items voluntarily discarded"