Language Log (original) (raw)
The burgeoning of Indo-European and the withering of many other languages
April 29, 2025 @ 8:32 pm · Filed by under Language extinction, Language preservation
"How the World's Largest Language Family Spread – and Why Others Go Extinct." Robinson, Andrew. Nature 641, no. 8061 (April 28, 2025): 31-33.
This is a review of the following three books:
Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
Laura Spinney (William Collins 2025)
The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting their Story
J. P. Mallory (Thames & Hudson 2025)
Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of HiddenLanguages Lorna Gibb (Atlantic 2025)
The mathematics of kana vs. kanji usage over time (1879-1968)
April 28, 2025 @ 4:28 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and mathematics, Writing systems
In the fourth comment to "Striving to revive the flagging sinographic cosmopolis" (4/26/25), I stated my observation of morphosyllabic kanji usage is that it has been declining over time at the expense of kana and other phonetic elements of the writing system, and I expressed the wish that a quantitative study of the actual usage be carried out. It turns out that we already do have this information, and it is visually evident in these graphs which were called to my attention by Jim Unger.
They are from:
Zusetsu nihongo: Gurafu de miru kotoba no sugata kotoba o hakaru keiryō kokugogaku (Kadokawa ko jiten 9), Hayashi Ōki.
図説日本語: グラフで見ることばの姿 ことばを計る計量国語学 (角川小辞典 9), 林大.
Illustrated Japanese: The appearance of words in graphs, Quantitative Japanese linguistics to measure words (Kadokawa Small Dictionaries), Hayashi Ōki, ed. and comp. (1982), pp. 276-277.
The graphs are derived from a 1969 book by Morioka Kenji on Meiji period language. Both graphs cover the years 1879-1968.
Best not to buy cheap audio gear
April 28, 2025 @ 12:45 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Acoustics, Language and music, Language and society
"Superficial auditory (dis)fluency biases higher-level social judgment." Walter-Terrill, Robert, et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 13 (March 24, 2025): e2415254122
Significance
In recent years, tools such as videoconferencing have shifted many conversations online, with stark auditory ramifications—such that some voices sound clear and resonant while others sound hollow or tinny, based on microphone quality and characteristics. A series of experiments shows that such differences, while clearly not reflective of the speakers themselves, nevertheless have broad and powerful consequences for social evaluation, leading listeners to make lower judgments of speakers’ intelligence, hireability, credibility, and even romantic desirability. Such effects may be potential sources of unintentional bias and discrimination, given the likelihood that microphone quality is correlated with socioeconomic status. So, before joining your next videoconference, you may want to consider how much a cheap microphone may really be costing you.
Mangajin
April 27, 2025 @ 8:12 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and literature, Language teaching and learning, Linguistics in the comics, Pedagogy
I am the proud possessor of the complete run of Mangajin (pun for "magazine") from #1-#70 (1988-1997).
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Mangajin was the brainchild of Vaughan P. Simmons, whom I had conversations with at several meetings of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and corresponded with for a dozen years. I have utmost respect for him as someone who had the vision and fortitude to make a truly effective pedagogical tool for learning Japanese a reality.
I dare say that I learned more Japanese language from Mangajin than from any other single source — just as I learned more Mandarin from Guóyǔ rìbào 國語日報 (Mandarin Daily), the Republic of China newspaper that had furigana-like bopomofo rubi phonetic annotations for all hanzi, than from any other single source.
Striving to revive the flagging sinographic cosmopolis
April 26, 2025 @ 5:32 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Historical linguistics, Language and archeology, Language and history, Writing systems
If we take stock of the sinographic cosmopolis at the end of first quarter of the 21st century, it is evident that it is increasingly moribund. Vietnam has jettisoned chữ Hán for the Latin alphabet; North Korea has switched exclusively to hangul; South Korea now uses very few hanja; the Japanese script currently consists of draconically limited kanji, many of which are simplified, often in ways that are different from the simplified characters adopted by the PRC, plus two types of syllabaries and roman letters; the PRC itself now uses radically simplified and limited characters and the Latin alphabet, not to mention that all of the hundreds of millions of students in China learn English, which is a primary index of success for rising in the world of education, and entering sinographs into computers and other digital devices is overwhelmingly accomplished through the alphabet (with resultant amnesia eroding the characters they do learn); while the ephemeral Sinoform scripts of Inner Asia (Tangut, Jurchen, Khitan) disappeared around a millennium ago; Sinitic Dungan speakers write their language in Cyrillic…. For those who are advocates of the sinographic script, naturally all of this would be cause for alarm.
Topolect literature
April 25, 2025 @ 8:40 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Colloquial, Jargon, Slang, Vernacular
If you do a search across the internet for this term, you will find it used here and there. You will even find the extended expression Topolect Literature Movement (TLM), which is traced back to at least the mid-twentieth century.
For the lexical legitimacy and morphological construction of "topolect literature", see this comment to a previous post:
"Topolect literature" may seem to be a contradiction in terms — fāngyán wénxué 方言 文學 ("topolect literature"). On the other hand, "oral literature" is a well-established concept / term in global scholarship, the idea being that this is written literature transcribed / derived from oral sources.
The beautiful virtue of the United States and Germany
April 23, 2025 @ 7:48 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and the media, Lost in translation
This photograph of a card in a series on "míngrén míngyán 名人名言" ("famous quotes by famous people") is floating around on Facebook:
The magnitude of traditional Chinese literature
April 23, 2025 @ 6:52 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Books, Language and literature, Translation
Two days ago, I received a big package with three heavy books inside. They were three copies of the following tome:
Routledge Handbook of Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Victor H. Mair and Zhenjun Zhang (London: Routledge, 2025), 742 pages.
It came as a surprise for, even though we had been working on the handbook for years, I had lost track of when it would actually be published.
Holding the printed and bound work in my hands, the sheer magnitude of what its pages contained began to sink in.
Latinized Persian
April 22, 2025 @ 5:48 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Language reform, Romanization
One of my favorite photographs shows Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) teaching the alphabet to citizens:
Mustafa Kemal introducing the new Turkish alphabet to the people of Kayseri, 20 September 1928
Battle for Taiwanese, part 2
April 21, 2025 @ 5:43 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Topolects, Vernacular, Writing systems
IA sent me this article (in Chinese) about a new translation of George Orwell's 1984. It begins:
Yīngguó zuòjiā Qiáozhì Ōuwēiěr de míngzhù `1984' chūbǎn yuē 75 nián, jìnrì yíng lái shǒubù Táiwén bǎn. Yìzhě Zhōu Yíngchéng shuō, zhè shì tuīdòng `Táiyǔ zhèngchánghuà'de chángshì, ràng Táiyǔ mǔyǔzhě bùbì tòuguò Zhōngwén yìběn, yě néng jiēchù shìjiè jīngdiǎn wénxué
英國作家喬治‧歐威爾的名著「1984」出版約75年，近日迎來首部台文版。譯者周盈成說，這是推動「台語正常化」的嘗試，讓台語母語者不必透過中文譯本，也能接觸世界經典文學。
1984, a famous novel by British writer George Orwell, was published about 75 years ago and recently had its first Taiwanese version. Translator Zhou Yingcheng said that this is an attempt to promote the "normalization of Taiwanese" so that native Taiwanese speakers can access world classic literature without having to rely on Chinese translations.
IA points out that, as in the following quotation from the translator, "Zhōngwén 中文" (lit. "Chinese writing"), refers not only to written language but spoken as well:
Tā shuō:`Dāngshí zài guó wài jiǎng zhōngwén, chángcháng bèi dàng zuò zhōngguó rén, yúshì wǒ kāishǐ sīkǎo zìjǐ gēn táiwān de liánjié shì shénme, dé chū de jiélùn shì tái yǔ. Dàn wǒ tái yǔ bùgòu hǎo, yǒu shí wǒmen xiǎng jiǎng qiāoqiāohuà,(jiǎng zhōngwén) pà biérén tīng dǒng, jiù huì qiēhuàn chéng tái yǔ, dàn yòu méi bànfǎ wánzhěngde shuō
他說：「當時在國外講中文，常常被當作中國人，於是我開始思考自己跟台灣的連結是什麼，得出的結論是台語。但我台語不夠好，有時我們想講悄悄話，（講中文）怕別人聽懂，就會切換成台語，但又沒辦法完整地說」。
He said: "When I was speaking Chinese abroad, I was often mistaken for Chinese, so I began to think about what my connection with Taiwan was, and I concluded it was Taiwanese. But my Taiwanese is not good enough. Sometimes when we want to whisper, we are afraid that others will understand (what we are saying in Chinese), so we switch to Taiwanese, but we can't speak it completely."
Study Reveals Most Popular American Texting Habits
April 21, 2025 @ 8:37 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Abbreviation, Acronyms, Slang, Tests
[This is a guest post by Randoh Sallihall]
Analysis of Google search data for 2025 reveals the most searched for texting abbreviations in America.
Study reveals most searched for text abbreviations in America:
- FAFO (254 000 searches) – F–k around and find out.
- SMH (166 000 searches) – Shake my head.
- PMO (101 000 searches) – Put me on.
- OTP (95 000 searches) – One true pairing.
- TBH (93 000 searches) – To be honest.
- ATP (85 000 searches) – At this point.
- TS (79 000 searches) – Talk soon.
- WYF (76 000 searches) – Where are you from.
- NFS (75 000 searches) – New friends. Read the rest of this entry »
Easter: eggs and rabbits
April 20, 2025 @ 4:04 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Errors, Language and culture, Language and religion, Speech-acts
This morning, as is my wont, I stepped out on my stoop to test the weather. Across the street, I saw children running around picking up eggs that had been hidden in the grass here and there and delightedly putting them in the baskets they held with one hand. These eggs were colored, all right, but made of plastic, not the kind of natural eggs we used to spend a lot of time on boiling and dyeing and, if we were fancy and clever, making designs and even using multiple colors through a combination of melted wax and various tools and techniques. I fondly recall the olfactory and tactile sensations of vinegar, melted wax used during the process, and smooth egg shells.
Really elaborately decorated Easter eggs are called pysanky (plural form of pysanka from the Ukrainian word pysaty meaning "to write" (source), cf. Russian письменность ("writing"). You don't have to be a pro and make pysanky like the ones shown here, but you can derive a lot of fun and satisfaction making your own colored Easter eggs that are dyed and decorated in a fashion that is commensurate with your time and talents.
The multivalence of interjections
April 19, 2025 @ 7:31 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Fillers and pause words, Interjections and exclamations
Feast your eyes on a small segment of the total number of interjections in English: Aha, Hurray, Oh, Ah, Aw, Ouch, Wow, Alas, Boo, Hey, Oh my God, Ahem, Bah, Cheers, Hmm, Huh, Huzzah, Oops, Yay, Agreement, Amen, Argh, Awesome, Boy….
Interjections may be exclamatory, quizzical, condemnatory, laudatory, and so forth and so on. They may convey pain, delight, dismay; approbation, disapproval.
Some interjections are neutral: uh, um.
Some are positive: woo-hoo, bravo.
Some are negative: duh, which is disdainful, demeaning, and even insulting.