Language Log

In an interview yesterday, Ty Cobb (the lawyer, not the baseball player) answered a question from Geoff Bennett:

GEOFF BENNETT: How do you assess the way President Trump in his second term has asserted control over the Justice Department and many of the prosecutors who work for it, as compared to the first term?

TY COBB: Well, he appointed people who were clearly slavishly devoted to him and willing to break any ethical barriers or legal barriers to do his bidding.

In "Reading Instruction in the mid 19th century" (8/15/2025), I noted a suggestion, due to Ran Liu of Amira Learning, that a computational analysis of prosodic features could be an effective way to evaluate how well grade-school students understand what they're reading. Beyond that, Maryellen MacDonald has suggested that phrasal prosody can be seen as the phase-level analog of phonemic blending (i.e. putting the sounds of 'c' 'a' 't' together into "cat") — which might help to explain the benefits of McGuffey-style elocution lessons.

Both ideas raise the question of how to evaluate the prosody of a given student's reading. And there's a simple and obvious way to do this, described and exemplified below.

People who don't know any Chinese characters will think the four glyphs pictured above are just typical Chinese characters, but won't be able to make any sense of them at all.

People who are minimally / partially literate in Chinese characters will recognize components of the four glyphs, but not one of the glyphs as a whole.

People who are moderately literate in Chinese characters will "sort of" recognize parts of the four glyphs, but will not be able to extract meaning from the sentence as a whole.

Kim Jong-Un has a mission to eliminate bourgeois, foreign, and southern terminology. This story in the Daily Mail by Sabrina Penty, citing the Daily NK, is hardly scholarly, but it gives some examples, and there are other stories online. The Metro in the UK reported that "I love you" (discovered in a love letter during a routine Big-Brother check by the Socialist Patriotic Youth League) was subject to severe state criticism. "Hamburger" has to be called something else (dajin-gogi gyeopppang [double bread with ground beef]) in Korean. "Karaoke" is too Japanese (try "on-screen accompaniment machines" instead). But the most interesting ban was on the phrase "ice cream" ("aiseukeurim 아이스크림). Kim wants it replaced by eseukimo. But doesn't this show that the dear leader is weak on etymology?  Isn't it transparently a Koreanized borrowing of English eskimo?  

Breffni O'Rourke sent a link to a current news story with the headline "'Ludicrous' professors cannot be appointed – ATU President". It starts:

The inability of Technological Universities to appoint professors is causing significant regional imbalance that needs to be urgently addressed, according to the President of Atlantic Technological University (ATU), the largest university outside of Dublin.

Following up on our previous post, "Sakas, Kushans, and Hephthalites: the sources in Greek, Latin, Persian, and Chinese" (9/24/25) by Taishan Yu, we turn now to Étienne de La Vaissière's "A Military Origin for New Persian?", which was published lightning fast by Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae.

Received: 26 April 2025 • Accepted: 3 July 2025
Published Online: 5 August 2025

From Astral Codex Ten:

Something is off about this Bay Area House Party. There are . . . women.

“I’ve never seen a gender balance like this in the Bay Area,” you tell your host Chris. “Is this one of those fabled ratio parties?”

“No – have you heard of curtfishing? It’s the new male dating trend. You say in your Bumble profile that you’re a member of the Dissident Right who often attends parties with Curtis Yarvin. Then female journos ask you out in the hopes that you’ll bring them along and they can turn it into an article.”

“What happens when they realize Curtis Yarvin isn’t at the party?”

“Oh, everyone pools their money and hires someone to pretend to be Curtis. You can just do things. Today it’s Ramchandra.”

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-sixth issue:

“Relations between Persia and Central Asia in Antiquity: An Examination of the Written Sources,” by Yu Taishan. (pdf)

A couple of decades ago, I reviewed the argument between Paul Ekman and Margaret Mead about whether facial expressions are universal or socially constructed:

"Political correctness, biology and culture", 10/31/2006
"The Cabinet of Dr. Birdwhistell", 11/2/2006

Ekman won that argument, at least as judged by most of subsequent intellectual history — though not everyone is convinced, and his own methods have been criticized.

The Japanese word for "spinach", "hōrensō", has many different graphic forms and meanings:

(Wiktionary)

Are nonlinear vocal phenomena as distracting as people think?
Andrey Anikin, ORCID Icon Bioacoustics The International Journal of Animal Sound and its Recording (18 Sep 2025)

Keywords

Roughness    vocal communication    attention    infant cries    auditory salience    nonlinear vocal phenomena

Today's For Better or For Worse:

April's "comftrable" is not dictionary-sanctioned — but maybe it should be?

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-eighth issue:

“Demetrios of Bactria as Deva Gobujo and Other Indo-Greek Myths of Japan,” by Lucas Christopoulos.