"Does GPT-4 Surpass Human Performance in Linguistic Pragmatics?" Bojic, Ljubiša et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (June 10, 2025). Ljubiša Bojić, Predrag Kovačević, & Milan Čabarkapa. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 12, Article number: 794 (2025) Cite this article Abstract As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into everyday life as general-purpose […]
From Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, "U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem Braces for Possible Israeli Strike on Iran" NYT 6/12/2025: More recently, however, Mr. Trump has said he was less convinced that talks with Iran would yield a new nuclear deal. “I’m getting more and more less confident about it,” he told The New York Post […]
In a comment on yesterday's post "A 12th-century influencer", Laura Morland wrote: Thanks for sharing "to abelard," the new verb of the month! Note to AP: the grammarians will insist that it be spelled with a lower-case "a". (Verbs are never capitalized, not even in German, I don't believe.) This is one where The Errorist […]
From Ada Palmer, "Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age": The new scholastic method was so exciting! that when Peter Abelard got kicked out of his monastery (for proving its founding saint didn’t exist—that pissed off the abbot, who’d have guessed?) and went to live as a hermit in the wilderness of Champagne, […]
The latest xkcd: Mouseover title: "With a good battery, the device can easily last for 5 or 10 years, although the walls probably won't."
Randy Alexander is not a professional Sinologist, but when it comes to reading Chinese poetry, he's as serious as one can be. The following poem is by Du Fu (712-770), said by some to be "China's greatest poet". In the presentation below, I will first give the text with its transcription, and then Randy's translation. […]
Current LLMs can answer questions or follow instructions in a way that makes them useful as cheap and quick clerical assistants. Many students use them for doing homework, writing papers, and even taking exams — and many journalists, government functionaries, lawyers, scientists, etc., are using them in similar ways. The main drawback from users' point […]
Launch of the Journal of Sinographic Philologies and Legacies & Call for Papers The Institute for Sinographic Literatures and Philology at Korea University (Seoul, South Korea) is proud to announce the launch of the Journal of Sinographic Philologies and Legacies (JOSPL), a pioneering venue in the growing field of Sinographic studies. This quarterly, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal is dedicated to the study of the humanistic […]
Email from a reader: In the last several years, when receiving instructive information from gen Z in places of business, I have noticed a regular use of the FUTURE tense, when the present would perfectly suffice. Sometimes, but not always, this is combined with telling me what I WILL WANT to do. To wit, – […]
That's the title of a brand new (3/13/25) book by Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider, a noteworthy volume on the 1918 influenza pandemic. Here she is interviewed (6/7/25) by Colin Gorrie (the interview is too long [58:14] to post directly on Language Log): Proto-Indo-European Origins: A Conversation with Laura Spinney Follow along with the […]
Babbel's April 2025 Semicolon Survey looked at students' reactions to the obvious secular decline in semicolon frequency: The semicolon once stood as a symbol of thoughtful, elegant writing, a punctuation mark beloved by literary greats like Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. But today, the humble semicolon faces an uncertain future. New analysis from Babbel uncovers […]