Language Log

"Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like" | Open Culture (10/14/25)

With two audio recordings.  If you want to hear them, click on the link embedded in the title.

…since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.

Julesy's knowledge of linguistics is not restricted to East Asia:

I could write an entire post about this euphemistic French oath (lit., "sacred blue"), but I leave it to LL readers to figure out how it fits in to what follows.  Nowadays it is used more in English than in French.  (Wiktionary; Wikipedia)

Italian blasphemy and German ingenuity: how swear words differ around the world
Once dismissed as a sign of low intelligence, researchers now argue the ‘power’ of taboo words has been overlooked 
Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian (10/19/25)

Do you remember Charlotte, who was selling authentic French style crepes in a Taichung night market five years ago?  Judging from this recent video she appears to have done quite well; from a night stand she has now opened a full-fledged crepe restaurant and established a flower-cum-tea bag business for export to France on the side.

Why Do Japanese Still Use Kanji? Complicated Writing System…

Over the years, I've posted several times about the problematic word (and concept) disfluency — there's a too-long list at the end of "Spontaneous (dis)fluency" (8/27/2025). Among other ideas, I've suggested using the term interpolations (see this 2019 post for example). But as far as I can tell, this suggestion has had no impact on other people's usage.

So here's another try: How about making a list of the ways in which fluent spontaneous speech is not like fluent reading, and calling them all spontaneities?

From Peter Daniels:

Do the 7 or 8 (or whatever) “dialects” of Sinitic constitute what Hockett called an “L-complex,” like Romance, such that you could traverse the entire domain and never encounter neighboring villages that didn’t understand each other, with cultural centers where the language described in the regional grammar book and dictionary is spoken, or are they distinct languages as far back as one can look?

We've been discussing simplified characters, both official and unofficial (believe you me, they're all out there).  They come and go as people find them useful or not.  This is one thing that makes characters very different from alphabets and syllabaries.  The latter two types of writing systems tend to settle down to a more or less fixed number of elements / letters / symbols (generally around 50-100 symbols for a syllabary and 20-40 or so for an alphabet, whereas morphosyllabographic / logographic writing systems tend to keep burgeoning out of control if they are a living, functioning script.

It has often been mentioned on Language Log that the simplification of Chinese characters by the PRC government did not come at one fell swoop in 1965, but was spread out over a long period of time, and had at least one additional formal stage, in 1977, that was retracted in 1986.

This has resulted in uneven acquisition of separate sets of simplified characters by students who went through primary and secondary education at different times.

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)