Language Log

Below is a guest post by Bob Ladd:

A few days ago I received an editorial decision letter from a journal, which included a request to deal with a few typos. I had begun a sentence with the phrase “In the interests of brevity,” and the editor wanted me to remove the final -s from the word “interests”. Since I know that the editor is not a native speaker of English, my first reaction was to ignore the request, but I thought I should back up my insistence that this was not a typo with some sort of evidence, so I searched for the phrases “in the interests of” and “in the interest of” on Google n-grams. To my surprise, I discovered that both versions of the expression occur, with a roughly 60:40 preference for the version with “interest”, and that this proportion has been roughly stable since the early 20th century. Since Google’s book corpus permits the user to distinguish British and American English, I could also see that the version with “interests” is more common in BrEng and the version with “interest” in AmEng, but that both versions occur in both varieties.

The calendrical system used for defining the dates of traditional Chinese festivals such as ‘Chinese New Year’ (The first day of the first lunar month, now called 'Spring Festival’ Chun jie 春節 in the PRC), the mid-autumn festival 中秋 (full moon of the 8th lunar month) and so on is the last of the many versions of the Chinese luni-solar calendar that were adopted by successive imperial governments until the fall of the empire in 1911.  It is in fact the system adopted by the Qing dynasty in 1644.

Christopher Cullen’s book Heavenly Numbers: Astronomy and Authority in Early Imperial China (Oxford, 2017) gives a detailed account of the successive systems of mathematical astronomy that were used by Chinese astronomical officials in early imperial times to produce the annual luni-solar calendars that were promulgated by imperial authority. The following explanations are taken from Cullen’s book.

Ignorant prescriptivist peeving has recently been dying out in English-language mass media, or so it seems to me. But George Will is holding the line, as Viseguy points out in a comment on yesterday's "Vaccination" post. Will's July 30 piece, "Five words that today are gratingly misapplied or worn out", has the sub-head "The massive vibe shift is one of the only big developments in American English. In fact, it’s iconic".

The opening sentence emphasizes both the alleged recency and the U.S.A.'s alleged culpability:

“When we Americans are done with the English language,” wrote Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), “it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.” Let’s survey some recent damage.

It won't surprise our readers that Will's allegations are false, or at least problematic. The five "damages" that he complains about have all been around for several decades at least, if not several centuries, and several of them seem to have started in Britain. In all cases, the Brits need to share the blame (or credit) for spreading the denigrated usages.

From the August 11 New Yorker, a new theory about the etiology of prescriptivism. Also time-management and singing…

Beginning in 2006, "meh" studies were a staple of Intellectual inquiry at Language Log.  For a virtuoso variorum, see Ben Zimmer's "Three scenes in the life of 'meh'" (2/26/12).  Herewith, relying on "d'oh", another (in)famous Simpsonsism, I will partially resurrect meh studies.

Frases Famosas de Los Simpson en Diferentes Doblajes

Is it a "foo fighter" a fighter that fights foos? Or is it a fighter that IS foo? This should show up in the stress pattern, as in the difference between a "German teacher" as a teacher who teaches German (normally with stress on the first word), or a teacher who IS German (normally with stress on the second word).

Dave Grohl clears this up for us in a brief video clip:

A recent Jesse Welles song, inspired by the defunding of Public Broadcasting:

"The endangered Tanka language in Hong Kong: phonological variations and lexical convergence with Cantonese", Cong Wang, Daxingwang Peng, Yanmei Dai & Chong Qi, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 12, Article number: 1133 (July 19, 2025)

The first thing we need to take care of is to discuss their name:

According to official Liu Zongyuan (773–819) of the Tang dynasty, there were Boat Dweller people settled in the boats of today's Guangdong Province and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

The term "Tanka" (蜑家) may originate from tan (Cantonese: "egg") and ka (Cantonese: "family" or "people"), although another possible etymology is tank ("junk" or "large boat") rather than tan. "Tanka" is now considered derogatory and no longer in common usage. The Boat Dwellers are now referred to in China as "people on/above water" (Chinese: 水上人; pinyin: shuǐshàng rén; Cantonese Yale: Séuiseuhngyàn), or "people of the southern sea" (Chinese: 南海人; Cantonese Yale: Nàamhóiyàn). No standardised English translation of this term exists. "Boat People" is a commonly used translation, although it may be confused with the similar term for Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong. "Boat Dwellers" was proposed by Dr. Lee Ho Yin of The University of Hong Kong in 1999, and it has been adopted by the Hong Kong Museum of History for its exhibition.

Both the Boat Dwellers and the Cantonese speak Cantonese. However, Boat Dwellers living in Fujian speak Min Chinese.

(Wikipedia)

A recent Elle Cordova video:

It's not every day that you get a chance to experience Old Uyghur (language; script). Recently, when I was looking through albums of photographs of medieval Buddhist wall-paintings, I spotted an Old Uyghur inscription:

(click to embiggen)

That's from a Five Dynasties (907-979) transformation tableau (biànxiàng 變相) depicting the story of the Buddhist saint, Mahāmaudgalyāyana, rescuing his mother from hell.  It is located on the north side of the corridor to the antechamber to Cave 19 at Yulin Grottoes toward the western extremity of Gansu Province, part of the larger complex of medieval Buddhist caves at Dunhuang, which we have often mentioned on Language Log.  For the complete and heavily annotated translation of the transformation text on Mahāmaudgalyāyana (Mùlián 目連), see Victor H. Mair, Tun-huang Popular Narratives (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

[This is a guest post by Elizabeth J. W. Barber]

A linguist friend specializing in Iranian linguistic reconstruction has a word that means weft, but also has something to do with a boat and weaving.  To me, that immediately meant the "boat shuttle"–Gm. Schiffchen, Fr. navette, etc.  Once the horizontal treadle loom was invented, the (flat, horizontal) shed could be opened wide enough that you could flick the weft bobbin all the way across the loom, catch it, change the shed, and shoot (shoot > shuttle) it back.  HUGE time-saver!!!

The treadle loom seems to have been invented in China during the Han dynasties (206 BC-220 AD) — I can find no more than that.  Don't know when some genius added the boat-shaped shuttle that floats the weft bobbin across the loom, riding atop the lower half of the warp.

The last couple of months have seen some interesting publications about AI systems that are small by modern standards.