Language Log

The genius logic of the NATO phonetic alphabet (title of the YouTube video)

In the comments on "Final prepositions again", AntC alerts us to Elle Cordova's latest, part III in the Grammarian Saga: "Grammarian vs Errorist showdown at the secret L'error".

"Dictionary.com’s 2025 Word of the Year Is…"

Each year, Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year and short-listed nominees capture pivotal moments in language and culture. These words serve as a linguistic time capsule, reflecting social trends and global events that defined the year. The Word of the Year isn’t just about popular usage; it reveals the stories we tell about ourselves and how we’ve changed over the year. And for these reasons, Dictionary.com’s 2025 Word of the Year is 67.

Macquarie Dictionary's WOTY shortlist also included six-seven; Sam Altman is apparently planning to name his next AI model GPT-6-7; and a news search will give you plenty of other relevant stories, from basketball scores  to "6-7 in the Bible".

Since Victor recently spent 1100 words on various people's "best approximations of how they think they are saying 'Canton'", "expressed in common spelling (not a phonetic alphabet)", and has resisted requests to provide audio, I thought I'd provide some examples of how a Canton resident pronounces the city's name. As I've explained many times, I don't think that IPA transcriptions are an effective way of representing how people actually talk, and this case will continue to support that view. Instead, a good place to start is a sample of audio clips along with graphical representations of waveforms, spectrograms and other kinds of acoustic analysis — and there are several possible directions to go from there.

From Dan Fagin, "We Can Now Track Individual Monarch Butterflies. It’s a Revelation.", NYT :

For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America […]

The breakthrough is the result of a tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200. […]

Most monarchs weigh 500 to 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrator making the transcontinental journey is, by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice.

[Preface:  The nitty-gritty questions about pronunciation discussed below are expressed in common spelling (not a phonetic alphabet) because the people who have written them down here are non-phoneticians.  What they have recorded are their best approximations of how they think they are saying "Canton".]

After reading "'Cant-idates'" (11/12/25) and "Can't even" (11/13/25), I submitted this comment:

As for "can't", there are quite a few "Cantons" in America. I'm from the one in Stark County Ohio, and some of the people there pronounce the name not as "Can-ton", but as "Cant-un".

This prompted Mark Liberman to ask:

Is that your way to representing [ˈkænʔn̻], i.e. the second syllable as a glottal-onset syllabic nasal?

In "Prepositionssss…" (9/2/2011), we quoted from the 1995 Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage,

Members of the never-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition school are still with us and are not reluctant to make themselves known…

This follows M-W's note that

…recent commentators — at least since Fowler 1926 — are unanimous in their rejection of the notion that ending a sentence with a preposition is an error or an offense against propriety. Fowler terms the idea a "cherished superstition."

And that same 2011 post ends with a list of links discussing the superstition's origin and progress, going back to John Dryden's 1672 attempt to demonstrate that "he is a better poet and playwright than Jonson, Fletcher and Shakespeare were".

Today I observed this superstition rising again from the grave.

Macquarie Dictionary is soliciting votes for its 2025 Word of the Year choice — the shortlist is here.

Yesterday's Dinosaur Comics:

After coming face to face with the unavoidable debacles inherent in mechanical Chinese typewriters (not to mention many other pitfalls of the writing system), Language Log readers will not be surprised to learn that sinographs were not well suited for telegraphy:

In the comments on "Cant-idates" (11/12/2025), there was some back-and-forth about how much phonetic residue Americans generally leave of the word-final /t/ in sequences where can't is immediately followed by a vowel-initial word.

In defense of the answer "not much", I pulled three examples of "can't even" (literally) at random from the NPR podcast corpus I've used in previous posts (and in teaching corpus phonetics).

This video begins with two Dutch sayings:

There's a saying in Dutch: "God schiep de Aarde, maar de Nederlanders schiepen Nederland".

Another saying in Dutch is: "Wij smachten naar achtentachtig prachtige nachten bij achtentachtig prachtige grachten".

Today's program is about how the Netherlands picked a fight with the sea, and won.

All places in China have topolect terms, some more than others, and some are more influential outside of their own region than others.  One regional variety whose speakers create numerous memorable expressions they are proud of is Dōngběihuà 東北話 ("Northeastern topolect").  I was inspired to make this post after reading a collection of twenty Northeasternisms.

I showed the collection to Diana Shuheng Zhang, who is an authentic Northeasterner.  Diana not only translated and explained the entire collection, she added twenty more, for a total of forty, commenting, "Can't stop laughing. Hope everybody enjoys our native expressions. :)" 

Please note that I (VHM) have added all the pinyin romanizations and a few literal translations).  Because some of the characters are unusual and I'm not a Northeastern speaker, I cannot guarantee the accuracy, especially down to the tones (and their sandhi), of all the transcriptions I have supplied.  Pay attention to Diana's valuable phonological notes.