Linguistics

Back in March, the AAAI ("Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence") published an "AAAI Presidential Panel Report on the Future of AI Research": The AAAI 2025 presidential panel on the future of AI research aims to help all AI stakeholders navigate the recent significant transformations in AI capabilities, as well as AI research methodologies, […]

I thought this use of incredulous in a recent Forbes article was a malapropism for incredible: If you thought that my May 23 report, confirming the leak of login data totaling an astonishing 184 million compromised credentials, was frightening, I hope you are sitting down now. Researchers have just confirmed what is also certainly the […]

Chris Button saw this bubble tea place at 3:45 PM today in Hollywood: Fromthe cafe's website: BOPOMOFO CAFE draws its name from the phonetic Traditional Chinese Alphabets. ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ, and ㄈ [bo, po, mo, and fo] are the “ABCs” of the Mandarin Chinese alphabet symbolizing nostalgia and strength as the building blocks of Mandarin […]

Tuesday's Non Sequitur: Modern security measures are definitely siege-like. But in my recent experience, gmail classifies returned security codes as spam about half the time — I'm not sure how to work that into the joke. Wednesday's Pearls Before Swine offers a different analogy:

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." The difference in day counts is explained by explain xkcd: The title text states that Randall would be one day younger than Tukey would be on his 110th birthday. […]

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. A few other (meta-usage) examples of "Pulit suprise" are Out There, but even an old-fashioned […]

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: The rest of the strip: The aftercomic: The mouseover title: "Would you rather sit with friends watching shadows on the bigscreen or spending your time arguing with Plato about whether poetry should be legal?" This expands on the 9/9/2015 SMBC: Wikipedia explains the Allegory of […]

"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 volume12, Articlenumber:794 (2025) Cite this article Abstract As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into everyday life as general-purpose […]

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 […]

The first two panels of today's xkcd: The rest of it: The mouseover title: "If you think curiosity without rigor is bad, you should see rigor without curiosity." It's not just science — today's Tank McNamara: Some extra reading: Gavin Francis, "What Do You Expect?", The New York Review 6/26/2025. A couple of relevant past […]

From Ting Fen Yik on Facebook: It's been a while since we've posted on ambigrams. David Moser is the master in Chinese and in English. See the references below.   Selected readings "Weird characters" (7/7/13) "Orientation-dependent ambiguity" (12/27/18) "Sinographic memory in Vietnamese writing" (4/16/14) — see esp. the last comment "Freemocracy" (6/13/19) "Happy LÓNG year!" […]

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 […]

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." The joke worked for me, although I was pretty sure that a (current) MacBook makes no sound when a usb device connects. I checked, and that's true. A current Windows 11 […]

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 theJournal 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 theJournal of Sinographic Philologies and Legacies(JOSPL), a pioneering venue in the growing field of Sinographic studies.Thisquarterly, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journalisdedicated 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, – […]

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 […]

A letter to the editor on the essential nature of LLMs from the Times Literary Supplement (5/30/25): Large language models As someone who has spent the past few years working out what AI means to academic journals, I found Melanie Mitchell’s excellent review of These Strange New Minds by Christopher Summerfield (May 16) full of […]

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 […]

Stephanie Farr, "The nonbinary Revolutionary leader who preached in Philly during the Revolution", The Philadelphia Inquirer 6/5/2025: Sometimes when I walk the streets of Old City, I imagine the people of colonial times who walked those roads before me, before Philadelphia was Philly and before this nation secured its liberty and identity. I mostly think […]

Faizan Zaki overcomes a shocking, self-inflicted flub and wins the Scripps National Spelling Bee Ben Nuckols, AP (5/30/25) Not what you would expect when the stakes are so high: The favorite entering the bee after his runner-up finish last year — during which he never misspelled a word in a conventional spelling round, only to […]