Language Log

Today's SMBC presents a new take on Moravec's Paradox:

The latest Questionable Content follows Yann LeCun:

Like others, I've often noted  analogies between prosody (as modulations of pitch, voice quality, timing, and so on) and text rendering, whether in calligraphy or typography — e.g. "Intonational focus", 4/29/2011; "Prosodic lettering", 5/8/2011; and many other posts about the communicative use of color, font choice, spatial placement, punctuation, and so on. Some aspects of textual prosody are perceptually natural, like size and spatial separation, while others are conventional, like the use of font choices in dictionary entries. And the conventions change over time and space, like capitalization in English.

Attempts by style guides to lock this variation down are roughly as effective as other efforts to limit individual and cultural creativity, and the growth of social media opens up new horizons for orthographic sociolinguistics.

Here's an odd error from a recent Washington Post article ("Pope Leo visits a polarized Spain where conservatives are turning on the church", 6/6/2026):

On Thursday, Leo will visit Spain’s Canary Islands, a hub for Latin American migrants and major landing point for those arriving by sea from the African coast. The waters around the islands have become a graveyard for those who lost their for a chances to resettle in Europe.

When I joined the Peace Corps in 1965-67 (Group Nepal VI), headquarters in Washington DC gave me two precious collections:  1. a box ("locker") of 250 books to read when I wasn't out trekking across the length and breadth of Bhojpur, the district in northeast Nepal where I was stationed by myself, 2. a medicine chest packed with over a hundred prescription drugs that kept me alive many a time.  The books were carefully chosen, and I churned through them omniverously.  I remember one in particular that had an enormous impact upon me, Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel), by Hermann Hesse (1877-1962).

Marc Andreessen's recent appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast presented a striking example of AI promotion (or AI hype, as you please). We can discuss his extraordinary claims and predictions another time. My topic this morning is something Andreessen does that AI still can't do, namely talk like a human being. I'm referring to the way that humans talk in spontaneous conversation, not in fluent reading or in well-rehearsed presentations, which AI text-to-speech can imitate increasingly well.

Elle Cordova's latest short:

Below is a guest post by Robert Shackleton:

Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom
Developmental Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

F. R. (Ruud) Van der Weel and Audrey L. H. Van der Meer
Developmental Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

Front. Psychol., 25 January 2024 | Sec. Educational Psychology (Volume 14 – 2023) 

There must be a strong physiological bond / affinity between these two aspects of the senses, such that it seems as though you can't have one without the other.

Because of my two months of illness, I no longer have any appetite, not even for the things I used to love to eat — for example the exquisite carrot cake made by Pastry Pants Bakery in Swarthmore; a scrumptious piece of it has been sitting on my kitchen counter for two weeks.  In the past, I would have devoured it upon sight.

Never mind that the Manchus ruled China for 268 years (1644-1912), the last dynasty in the whole of Chinese history.  Now another ethnic group, the Han, are complaining that the Manchus were not Chinese after all.

What’s Driving Anti-Qing Sentiment in Contemporary China?

A patriotic film backfired because a growing number of Han Chinese don’t see the Manchu-origin Qing dynasty as a part of their history.
By Zhenlin Cui, The Diplomat (May 27, 2026)

A recent SMBC:

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.