Language Log

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "Sure, you could just ask, but this also takes care of the host gift thing." Unless of course they have Google Home. In which case apparently the thing to do is to ask about the communist coup that Obama is planning…

This has apparently been around for awhile, but I'm seeing it now for the first time:

Here's what you get if you align 11 million words of English-language audiobooks with the associated texts, divide it all into phrases by breaking at silent pauses greater than 150 milliseconds, and average the word durations by position in phrases of lengths from one word to fifteen words: The audiobook sample in this case comes […]

People often ask me questions like these: What's the easiest / hardest language you ever learned? Isn't Chinese really difficult? Which is harder, Chinese or Japanese?  Sanskrit or German? Without a moment's hesitation, I always reply that Mandarin is the easiest spoken language I have learned and that Chinese is the most difficult written language […]

Today's SMBC: Mouseover title: "New rule: Anyone referring to X as the poetry of Y must have actually ever read a poem." Not strictly relevant to the Neil deGrasse Tyson discussion, since linguistics is a science and all. But still.

This is a guest post submitted by Nathan Sanders and colleagues. It's the text of an open letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson, who made a comment about linguists on Twitter not long ago. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, As fellow scientists, we linguists appreciate the work you do as a spokesperson for science. However, your recent […]

This is a guest post by Stephen Goranson. The source of “copasetic,” meaning “fine,” has been sought in Yiddish, Hebrew, Creole French, Italian, Chinook, and in a putative assurance from an accomplice of a thief in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago that the house “cop’s on the settee.” But, probably, a novelist coined the word. […]

Fred Vultee, "Pronouns: The Reunion Tour", HeadsUp The Blog, 3/1/2017: The Fabulous Pronouns are back on the road! Take it away, The Washington Examiner: President Trump referred to himself during his first speech to a joint session of Congress at a much lower rate than former President Barack Obama did in his first address in […]

I have a German friend who lives amid farmland out east of Edinburgh, and keeps chickens as a hobby. When I visited recently, there was much excitement because one of a clutch of fertile eggs in a small incubator in the living room was beginning to hatch. A tiny beak appeared, and eventually a bedraggled […]

Whether you are familiar with Chinese characters or not, try to guess the meaning of the calligraphy on the front of this forthcoming book (the answer is at the very end of this post):

An amusing slip in the Daily Mail (online here), in an opinion piece by Dan Hodges on the decline of the Labour Party and its singularly unsuccessful leader Jeremy Corbyn. Hodges says that "anyone who thinks Labour's problems began on September 12, 2015, when Corbyn was elected, are deluding themselves." It's unquestionably a grammatical mistake, […]

While we at Language Log bemoan how often the passive voice is misidentified, and how often passive constructions are wrongly scapegoated, last night's Oscars debacle has provided us with a clearcut case of how agentless passives can serve to obfuscate. The official apology from PricewaterhouseCoopers for the envelope mixup, which led Warren Beatty and Faye […]