Language Log

Poster on a Tokyo subway, courtesy of Sanping Chen:

Someone complained in an inappropriate and non sequiturish place that AIO (Artificial Intelligence Overview) did not definitively solve the difficult problem of the seeming non-Sinitic etymology of Japanese waka 若 ("young; youth") that he posed to it. Cf. Wiktionary: Japanese Noun 若(わか) • (waka)  "my lord" (towards a young master or a young heir)

According to Roy Dayan et al., "Age against the machine—susceptibility of large language models to cognitive impairment: cross sectional analysis", BMJ Christmas 2024: To evaluate the cognitive abilities of the leading large language models and identify their susceptibility to cognitive impairment, using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and additional tests. […] With the exception of […]

Spending some time in Ireland, I hear people saying "It's a soft day" or "It's a soft day, thank God!".  Not knowing what that expression implies, I do a search and find that "A soft day is what the Irish call a very very damp fog or a mizzle, which is a cross between a […]

Yesterday's Frazz: Caulfield's joke illustrates several interesting linguistic points.

Back in the day, we used to talk about strange typos and tried to figure out how they happened. Here's a good one. I typed the following sentence: Once that one foodstuff you said everybody likes to consume but is hard to resist and is not good for us?

Well, approximately as much as lexicography does… The current Dinosaur Comics:

In a comment on "Yair" (2/14/2025), Philip Taylor asserted that he routinely pronounces the orthographic "r" in the typical British filled-pause spelling "er": « some Americans adopt a mistaken spelling pronunciation, rendering "er" with a final [r] » — well, speaking as a Briton, my "er" pauses, if prolonged, also end with an phoneme, although […]

I forget who it was and for what reason, but a week or two ago, someone said "Thank you" in Hakka to me. That got me thinking about all the different ways to say "thanks" in Sinitic languages. Here's a map of Sinitic topolectal equivalents for MSM (Modern Standard Mandarin) "xièxie 謝謝 / 谢谢" (“thank you”).  […]

Having just a couple of months ago burrowed my way into the center of one of the world's most famous Neolithic barrows, more specifically a passage tomb at Newgrange (ca. 3200 BC, older than Stonehenge, which I had visited the previous week, and the Egyptian pyramids, which I have yet to behold in person) in […]

In an Australian novel, I recently encountered hundreds of cases where an informal assent is spelled in an unexpected way, e.g. "Yair, that’s true enough."

In response to the initiative for the U,S.  to buy (or otherwise acquire) Greenland from Denmark, some Danes have started a petition to buy California from the U.S. Have you ever looked at a map and thought, "You know what Denmark needs? More sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates." Well, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make […]