Language Log

"China changed village names 'to erase Uyghur culture'", Anna Lamche, BBC (6/20/24)

I thought about this phenomenon again today, a year after that BBC article was published, because this morning Robert Thurman, the Columbia Tibetologist, told me about his concept of "ethnicide".  This, forced name changes, is one way to do it.

China has changed the names of hundreds of villages in Xinjiang region in a move aimed at erasing Uyghur Muslim culture, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says.

According to a report by the group, hundreds of villages in Xinjiang with names related to the religion, history or culture of Uyghurs were replaced between 2009 and 2023.

Words such as "sultan" and "shrine" are disappearing from place names – to be replaced with terms such as "harmony" and "happiness", according to the research, which is based on China's own published data.

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Achilles was a mighty warrior, but his Achilles' heel was his heel."

I don't know why, but the first time I came upon this marvelous site, in Mark's March 5, 2021 post, it didn't make much of an impression on me.  Maybe I was too busy to explore it at that time or was just not in the right mood.  Four days ago, however, when my old Peace Corps buddy, Bob Kambic, called it to my attention, Radio Garden just blew my mind away.  I kept exclaiming, "This is the most exciting, happiest day of my life!"

From Yann LeCun's presentation at the AI, Science and Society event in Paris last February:

Since I wrote The True History of Tea (2009; now available in a number of foreign languages and coming out in pb on 1/27/26), I've been a tea aficianado and connoisseur, so I was stunned when five days ago I learned of the existence of two types that are completely new to me.

The first is called Adeni tea, and I was privileged to taste it at Haraz Coffee House that recently opened next to Penn.  It is run by Yemenis, who really know their coffee and serve mouth-watering pastries, many of which I had never encountered before.

I already had a good impression of Yemeni food purveyors when I stopped at a Country Market by the side of Old Route 30 in Svensen WA run by a mother and her son, though I didn't have any hot, freshly brewed tea that time.

A sign just outside the driver's cab of a TRA (Taiwan Rail) aging diesel on the Pingxi Line that climbs along the edge of the Keelung River ravine, just outside Taipei.

[This is a guest post by Diana Shuheng Zhang]

(click to embiggen)

During my visit to the Luoyang Museum 洛阳博物馆, I found something amazing in its museum store. It is a set of 24 postcards, corresponding to the 24 solar terms 节气 (jieqi) in the traditional Chinese lunar calendar for agricultural purposes. What’s special about this set of cards is the design: every disyllabic lexeme for a solar term is coined into one single Sinitic “character”. I intended to attached multiple photos as examples but the last email was not successfully sent — the “size” was too big as an email. Therefore, here I’m only attaching one photo, that depicts the whole scene of the set of 24 cards.  By clicking on the photograph, you will be able to enlarge it sufficiently to enable you to see the details of the artwork and the writing.

On first blush, I thought perhaps the person pictured had a double chin, and by cropping the photo this way they were trying to hide it.  On second blush, it was clear that they had misinterpreted the name of the famous 2nd c. statesman, general, and poet, Cao Cao 曹操 (ca. 155-220 AD).

Most of the population of China cannot afford or obtain a VPN (Virtual Private Network).  For the privileged portion who do manage to purchase and install a VPN, does that solve their global internet access problem?

Some people claim that, with a good VPN, you can see anything on the global internet in China.  But I don't think that's quite true.  Sometimes I direct my students (all of whom have VPNs) to various Wikipedia and Wiktionary articles, and they say, "Sorry, Prof. Mair, I can't access that in China" (blocked without warning or explanation twenty-some years ago*).  The problem is even more acute with YouTube.

YouTube has all sorts of stuff:  richly informative, inflammatory, educational, political, DIY, linguistic, etc., etc.  Practically anything one can imagine, except probably outright pornography.  The Chinese government is deathly afraid that its citizens might see YouTube content that is critical of Xi Jinping, the CCP, and so forth.  So YouTube is a no-no, and that means nature films, music, poetry, art, archeology, chemistry, physics, recipes, Chinese / Japanese / Indian / Iranian / etc. culture.  How impoverished the Chinese people are because of the benighted policies of their government!  The nearly 15 BILLION videos on YouTube are off limits to Chinese citizens.  And that's just YouTube.  Think of all the internet riches that are unavailable to the people of China.  No wonder so many of them are desperate to go abroad to study where they have free access to the internet.

Hannah Al-Othman, "‘Mad fer it’: Greater Manchester Aldi to keep Aldeh name in tribute to Oasis", The Guardian 7/24/2025:

An Aldi store in Greater Manchester rebranded Aldeh in honour of Oasis is to keep the new name, the supermarket chain has said.

The new sign was erected at the Prestwich store before the Oasis homecoming gigs earlier this month. The band played five sold-out shows at Heaton Park, which is near the store.

It was meant to be a temporary name change, but the sign has been a massive hit with tourists and local people, with Oasis fans queueing outside for selfies.

The sign has even been listed on Google Maps as a cultural landmark, with a string of glowing five-star reviews calling it “the Stonehenge of a generation” and “the greatest rebrand of all time”.

"Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97", NYT 7/27/2025.
Nancy Friedman's skeet underlines who and what he outlived:

He outlived Henry Kissinger and New Math. RIP Tom Lehrer.
(Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/a…

[image or embed]

— Nancy Friedman (@fritinancy.bsky.social) July 27, 2025 at 1:14 PM

Today's Tank McNamara:

The most interesting LLM research that I've seen recently is from Alex Cloud and others at Anthropic and Truthful AI, "Subliminal Learning: Language models transmit behavioral traits via hidden signals in data", 7/20/2025:

ABSTRACT: We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models transmit behavioral traits via semantically unrelated data. In our main experiments, a "teacher" model with some trait T (such as liking owls or being misaligned) generates a dataset consisting solely of number sequences. Remarkably, a "student" model trained on this dataset learns T. This occurs even when the data is filtered to remove references to T. We observe the same effect when training on code or reasoning traces generated by the same teacher model. However, we do not observe the effect when the teacher and student have different base models. To help explain our findings, we prove a theoretical result showing that subliminal learning occurs in all neural networks under certain conditions, and demonstrate subliminal learning in a simple MLP classifier. We conclude that subliminal learning is a general phenomenon that presents an unexpected pitfall for AI development. Distillation could propagate unintended traits, even when developers try to prevent this via data filtering.