Language Log

From Rebecca Turner in Seattle:

We've met Julesy before:  "The conundrum of singing with tones" (5/30/25).  She has a Ph.D. in linguistics and knows how to communicate her scientific knowledge of Mandarin to intelligent laypersons.  Here she is again, this time telling us some very important things about the differences between words and characters:

Over the years, we've taken many self-appointed usage authorities to task for ignorant pronouncements presenting their personal reactions as facts of the standard language, or even as logical necessities. But everybody has similar reactions, and the point is not to deny the existence of usage conventions, or to pretend that you don't ever perceive something […]

When I was a wee lad and went to bible school each week, I had a hard time comprehending just whom were all of those epistles in the New Testament addressed to.  Of course, there are many other books in the New Testament, a total of 27, but the ones that intrigued me most were […]

[This is a guest post by Barbara Phillips Long] There is an interesting sidelight in commentary about an article in the New York Review of Books, which posits that the U.S. is two nations under one government, where the two entities exchange political power. The link to the NYRB (paywalled) article is here. The Language […]

I haven't visited Engrish.com for several years, but it is always a source of great joy, so I thought I'd take a look today and see what turns up.  Here are six items of interest: Photo courtesy of Brian Linek. Spotted in China.

Is being bilingual good for your brain?Perhaps. Learning languages offers other, more concrete benefitsEconomist (6/27/25) Yes!  I won't mince words.  At least in my case, multilingualism has been very good for my brain. In my rural Ohio high school, I took Latin and French, which is what were on offer.  I enjoyed both of them […]

Long ago (half a century), I had occasion to translate the word "masochism" into Chinese.  At that stage, I wasn't even sure what "masochism" itself meant.  Supposedly it was "the madness of deriving pleasure from pain", I guessed especially sexual pleasure — something like that. Wanting to give the most accurate possible translation into Chinese, […]

Alexei S. Kassian and George Starostin, "Do 'language trees with sampled ancestors' really support a 'hybrid model' for the origin of Indo-European? Thoughts on the most recent attempt at yet another IE phylogeny".  Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, no. 682 (May 16, 2025). Abstract In this paper, we present a brief critical analysis of […]

But can they still tell us something useful about language?  Here are two new papers that address that question: I. "What the Hidden Rhythms of Orangutan Calls Can Tell Us about Language – New Research." De Gregorio, Chiara. The Conversation, May 27, 2025. In the dense forests of Indonesia, you can hear strange and haunting […]

Even if you can't understand spoken Taiwanese, you can learn a lot from these two videos because of the excellent visuals, plus it is nice just to hear the clearly spoken Taigi and compare terms in Taigi with their parallels in Sino-Korean. The first is a video from Taiwan's public TV (公視台語台) on the interesting distribution […]

Today's xkcd: The mouseover title: "'This HAZMAT container contains radioactive material with activity of one becquerel.' 'So, like, a single banana slice?'"

Subtitle:  "A cautionary note on the application of limited linguistics studies to whole populations" A prefatory note on "anthropology".  In the early 90s, I was deeply involved in the first ancient DNA studies on the Tarim mummies* with Paolo Francalacci, an anthropologist at the University of Sassari. Sardinia.  Paolo was deputed to work with me […]