Language Log

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "Numbers can be tricky. On the day of my 110th birthday, I'll be one day younger than John Tukey was on his."

When I was going through the TSA checkpoint in Philadelphia at the beginning of this run down the Mississippi, something very unfortunate happened.  The TSA agent who was going through my carry-on belongings approached me and said, "Is this your stick?" "Yes, sir," I replied. "I have a problem with your stick," he said. "What's […]

YouTube's speech-to-text system is way behind the state of the art, or maybe has a good sense of humor. From its transcription of Donald Trump's 5/15/2025 speech in Qatar (the whitehouse.gov version): Your browser does not support the audio element.

I have always been deeply intrigued by George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950), but Mark's recent "Dynamic Philology" (5/24/25) rekindled my interest. Put simply, He is the eponym of Zipf's law, which states that while only a few words are used very often, many or most are used rarely, where Pn is the frequency of a word […]

[This is a guest post by Mok Ling] I happen to know a few students (of varying ages and learning experiences) who want to learn (or re-learn, for some of them) Mandarin the "right" way (that is, focusing on speaking and listening before reading and writing, unlike what is prescribed by most HSK courses). Right […]

Submitted by Charles Belov: I've been browsing through the proposed Unicode 17 changes, currently undergoing a comment period, with interest. While I don't have the knowledge to intelligently comment on the proposals, it's good to see that they are actively improving language access. I'm puzzled that some new characters have been added to the existing […]

We've talked about Dungan a lot on Language Log.  That's the northwest Sinitic topolect written in Cyrillic that has been transplanted to Central Asia.  See "Selected readings" below. For those of you who are interested and would like to hear what it sounds like in real life — spoken and sung by male and female […]

Running down the road in Clarksdale, Mississippi, I screeched to a halt (felt like Rroad Runner) when I passed by a Chinese restaurant with the odd name Rice Bowl (in Chinese it was Fànwǎn lóu 饭碗楼 — the only characters I saw on the premises).  It was a tiny, nondescript establishment, with six or so […]

That's the title of a valuable Wikipedia article.  I have no idea who wrote it, but I'm very glad to have access to this comprehensive article, since it touches on so many topics that concern my ongoing research. Here are some highlights: Before British colonisation, the Persian language was the lingua franca of the Indian […]

The first two panels from SMBC a few days ago:

"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 […]