Language Log

Some folks seem to think so, but not Benjamin James who wrote this letter to the London Review of Books, 47.6 (April 3, 2025), p. 4:

Simple Script

In his fascinating article on the recent decipherment of Linear Elamite, Tom Stevenson finds it difficult to accept that 'the Latin or Greek writing systems are simpler or "more precise" than mostly logographic writing systems like written Chinese' (LRB, 6 March). Does he really believe Chinese script is just as suited as Latin to the rendering of foreign words? 'Tom Stevenson' is far simpler and more phonetically precise than 汤姆•史帝⽂森，'Tangmu Shidiwénsen', which adds two syllables, six tones and six individual character meanings. The Committee for Language Reform in China acknowledged the relative simplicity of the Latin script as one of the factors behind its abandonment in 1956 of the attempt to develop a phonetic script based on Chinese characters.

"Constructed Languages Are Processed by the Same Brain Mechanisms as Natural Languages." Malik-Moraleda, Saima, et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 12 (March 17, 2025): e2313473122.

Last weekend, a number of crosswalk buttons in Silicon Valley were hacked so as to play (faked) messages from Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. This got lots of (social and mass) media coverage — for one useful summary, see Zoe Morgan, "Silicon Valley crosswalk buttons apparently hacked to imitate Musk, Zuckerberg voices", Palo Alto Online 4/12/2025, or check out various other sources…

Some audio samples:

For the record:

"Do Inuit languages really have many words for snow? The most interesting finds from our study of 616 languages", The Conversation (4/10/25); rpt. in phys.org/news (4/13/25)

Authors:

Charles Kemp
Professor, School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne (PhD MIT)
Ekaterina Vylomova
Lecturer, Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne (The University of Melbourne, PhD/Computational Linguistics)
Temuulen Khishigsuren
PhD Candidate, The University of Melbourne (National University of Mongolia, M.A. in linguistics)
Terry Regier
Professor, Language and Cognition Lab, University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., Computer science, UC Berkeley, 1992; frequent co-author with Paul Kay; among his most-cited work is:

"Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left",
Aubrey L. Gilbert; Terry Regier; Paul Kay; Richard B. Ivry.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2006)\

These two articles (The Conversation and phys.org/news) are journalistic accounts of the scientific study by Kemp, Vylomova, Khishigsuren, and Regier.

Thirty-five or so years ago, Allyn Rickett (1921-2020), my old colleague at Penn, referred to a certain person as "pópomāmā 婆婆媽媽" ("mawkishly maudlin" [my translation of Rickett's Mandarin]; "old-lady-like").  This is such an unusual expression, and it so perfectly characterized the individual in question, that it's worth writing a post on it.

In the years around the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Rickett ("Rick") was in China doing research for his doctoral dissertation on the Guǎn Zǐ 管子 (Master Guan), a large and important politicophilosophical text reflecting the thought and practice of the Spring and Autumn period (c. 770-c. 481 BC), though the received version was not edited until circa 26 BC.  Rickett was accused of spying for the US Office of Naval Intelligence and imprisoned by the PRC government.  There he underwent four years of "struggle sessions".  Call them what you will, he had ample opportunity to become familiar with such colloquial terms as "pópomāmā 婆婆媽媽".

I should also note that Rickett, who was a student of the distinguished Sinologist, Derk Bodde (1909-2003), was an outstanding scholar in his own right, and his densely annotated translation of the Guan Zi is a monumental achievement, one that he worked on for most of his professional life.

Jeffrey Weng, "What Is Mandarin? The Social Project of Language Standardization in Early Republican China", Journal of Asian Studies, 77.3 (August 2018), 611-633.

Abstract

Scholars who study language often see standard or official languages as oppressive, helping the socially advantaged to entrench themselves as elites. This article questions this view by examining the Chinese case, in which early twentieth-century language reformers attempted to remake their society's language situation to further national integration. Classical Chinese, accessible only to a privileged few, was sidelined in favor of Mandarin, a national standard newly created for the many. This article argues that Mandarin's creation reflected an entirely new vision of society. It draws on archival sources on the design and promulgation of Mandarin from the 1910s to the 1930s to discuss how the way the language was standardized reflected the nature of the imagined future society it was meant to serve. Language reform thus represented a radical rethinking of how society should be organized: linguistic modernity was to be a national modernity, in which all the nation's people would have access to the new official language, and thus increased opportunities for advancement.

Stumbled upon an earliest surviving partial bible translation into Japanese made by Manuel Barreto in 1591 (known as バレト写本 or Reg. lat. 459), here's the first paragraph.

Scans can be found here:https://t.co/pW2nH8Udtj pic.twitter.com/HMehP0F6qd

— Maxim Persikov (Panates) (@gyankotsu) December 5, 2024

In Chinese they are called yùntú 韻圖 / 韵图.  These tools are vitally important in the development of Sinitic phonology, but barely known outside of sinological specialists, so — for the history of world phonology — it is worthwhile to introduce them to linguists in general.

A rime table or rhyme table (simplified Chinese: 韵图; traditional Chinese: 韻圖; pinyin: yùntú; Wade–Giles: yün-t'u) is a Chinese phonological model, tabulating the syllables of the series of rime dictionaries beginning with the Qieyun (601) by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones and other properties. The method gave a significantly more precise and systematic account of the sounds of those dictionaries than the previously used fǎnqiè analysis, but many of its details remain obscure. The phonological system that is implicit in the rime dictionaries and analysed in the rime tables is known as Middle Chinese, and is the traditional starting point for efforts to recover the sounds of early forms of Chinese. Some authors distinguish the two layers as Early and Late Middle Chinese respectively.

[This is a guest post by Robert S. Bauer in response to the video and paper featured in this recent Language Log post:  "Cantonese is both very cool and very old" (4/1/25)]

After I read the paper the first word that came to mind was “Cringeworthy” in regard to the author’s phrase “purer descent”; and the second word was “Superficial” in regard to the author’s knowledge of Cantonese and Chinese linguistics. For instance, the author who has narrowly focused on just those items that support his claims doesn’t seem to know that the Ancient Chinese tone category of Rusheng/Entering Tone which has disappeared from Mandarin was not a particular tone contour; the distinctive feature of Rusheng was that the monomorphosyllables belonging to it had as their finals or endings the three stop consonants -p, -t , -k, all of which have been retained in Cantonese, as well as in various other Chinese topolects of South China.

"Shakespearean focus" featured a 2016 skit in which different actors promoted different focus choices in Hamlet's famous line:

PAAPA ESSIEDU: «To be or not to be that is the question»…
TIM MINCHIN: Right sorry, sorry. I mean – y-yes… I’m – yes – but if you don’t mind a note: O-OR: «To be OR not to be.»
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH: Try this: «To be or NOT to be, that is the question.»
DAVID TENNANT: Calm down, right. It’s simple. Don’t lose focus: «To be or not to be, THAT is the question.»
RORY KINNEAR: No, no, no, no, no. Idiots! «To be or not to be, that IS the question.»
SIR IAN MCKELLEN: Lend me your ears: «To be or not to be, that is THE question.»
DAME JUDI DENCH: «To be or not TO be.»
PRINCE CHARLES: «To be or not to be, that is the QUESTION.»

David Z. commented:

This reminds one (i.e., me) of the scene in WC Fields's film The Old Fashioned Way, about a troupe of actors, where benefactor Cleopatra Pepperday is promised a role, reciting the line "Here comes the prince." She practices the line many times, emphasizing different words, although she never actually gets to deliver it on stage.