Language Log

Or maybe I should say, "AI prosody"? In a series of posts over the past year, I've suggested that evaluation of reading performance ought to go beyond the question of whether individual words are correctly decoded and pronounced.

From a Medieval Latrine in Germany, Archaeologists Extracted a Pristine Leather Notebook That Preserved Latin Cursive for CenturiesThe writing in the booklet suggests it belonged to an upper-class merchant, who may have had a mishap while using the toilet 800 years ago Michele Debczak, Smithsonian magazine (May 20, 2026)   Includes exquisite photographs of the wood […]

Speech Prosody 2026 starts tomorrow, and I've been asked to present 5 minutes of welcoming remarks at the opening session. My plan is to start with a quick reading of the abstract from my 2011 Henry Sweet lecture, "Towards the Golden Age of Speech and Language Science": For the sciences of speech and language, the […]

‘It’s broken English’: MP’s attempt to speak Jamaican in parliament sparks language rowParliamentary rule that only English is allowed has reignited debate about language, legitimacy and postcolonial identityNatricia Duncan and Anthony Lugg in Kingston, The Guardian (5/21/26) In this explosive exchange, you can hear the dramatic shift from "Patwa" (patois) to standard English in a […]

5 Mysterious Writing Systems That No One Has Deciphered:  These ancient scripts offer tantalizing clues about civilizations we still don’t fully understand.Crystal Ponti, History (5/15/26) The five undeciphered writing systems covered in this post are:  Linear A, Indus Script, Rongorongo, Proto-Elamite, and The Phaistos Disk.  We have discussed each of these scripts on Language Log, some of […]

It's a word I've barely heard of, though I did write a post about it two years ago ("A fancy way to say 'fancy'" [9/22/24] — with lengthy, learned discussion in the comments).  Yet this morning it turns up at the top of "America's most misspelled words in 2026" (5/22/26)!

"Words as Data: How Data Journalists Tell Stories about Documents and Text." Bradshaw, Paul. Online Journalism Blog, May 14, 2026.  "Discovering Regularity and Mechanisms of Word Sense Acquisition in Childhood." Li, Jiangtian et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123, no. 20 (May 11, 2026): e2525788123. 

Below is a guest post by Randoh Sallihall: Analysis of Google search data for 2026 reveals the most misspelled words for each U.S. state and America. National Spelling Bee will be held from May 26 to May 28. The research is well timed. America's most misspelled words: Bougie – 134 400 searches. Favorite – 128 400 searches. Through – 127 […]

In "Analysis of prosodic timing in reading" (4/5/2026), I suggested that inter-word timings in fluent reading can give a surprisingly clear picture of prosodic phrasing, despite the many other effects on word durations in speech. That post looked at data from the Speech Accent Archive, which involves reading a short and somewhat weird passage. Since […]

Today's xkcd:

"Humans 40,000 y Ago Developed a System of Conventional Signs." Bentz, Christian et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123, no. 9 (February 23, 2026): e2520385123. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520385123. Painstaking research by Christian Benz, Ewa Dutkewicz, et al. Significance Humans have carved visual signs into the surfaces of mobile artifacts and cave walls since several hundred […]

Below is a guest post by Matt Rips (and Google Gemini). In a discussion of linguistic matters, an LLM began using a word, an adjective, repeatedly, to describe a concept. The word does not exist. There were multiple instances, such as: One possible explanation for the tendency of quantified plural event nominals to resist direct […]