Language Log

Posts

Super Fakehuman grammar everything advice

Evidence from oracle bone inscriptions for research on typhoon-related disasters in the Central Plains and Chengdu Plain of China

Language policy at the Chinese National People’s Congress (NPC)

Which way hangs the apostrophe's tail?

German English

Chinese Text Project augmented by AI translation

Problems a Chinese girl has with writing one of the characters for her name

Are you in the loop?

Irish in Jamaica?

Electric shadows

"Horse" in Nubian and other African languages

Touché

The Chinese Computer: Competition or Cooperation?

Planes, patches, pilots, and propaganda

Hanging a trans flag from El Capitan

Crazy characters

Unifying Arabic topolects through AI

What's (still) wrong with AI text-to-speech?

Tariffs

Washington State Spanish

Spacing in Korean

Rampant plagiarism in the Chinese literary world

Saving Sámi

The full name of Bangkok

"Written Cantonese must have word segmentation"

The ancient Near Eastern origin of Chinese birthday celebrations

Global literary diffusion and its impact on Chinese language, literature, and culture

Trilingual Frequent Human-Monkey Conflicts, and Umbrellas in Taiwan

Another UH?

AI brings the Tarim mummies back to life, part 2

English teaching for the People’s Liberation Army

A love story; mediated through translation

Evolution of the sinograph and the word for horse

The Greeks in Ancient Central Asia: The Written Sources

AI brings the Tarim mummies back to life

Tamil Brahmi, Prakrit, and Sanskrit inscriptions found in ancient Egyptian tombs

Laisee

Student names in language classes

AI teaches spoken English in Taiwan

Japanese inscription in medieval India

Nepali man slurred in Northeast India

Mandarin vs. Dongbei accent

"La Cosa" ("the thing"), bigger and more intimidating than "Cosa Nostra" ("our thing" ["Mafia"])

A Personal Encounter with the Submissive Woman/Bound Slave Rorschach Test

Strange Chinese on South African album cover

English proficiency tests

Snowcrete

The "unchanging gene" of the "fine Chinese language"

The officialization of romaji

Roboton

Schneewind

What green olives do to black olives

Multilingual Snail Alley in Tainan

Storytelling with pictures

Dallas Dodecahedron Daze Days

Latin, French, and vernacular English in late medieval England

Making hanzi with Japanese kana

Fun guy?

Submissive woman or bound slave: interpreting oracle bone forms as a Rorschach test, part 2

Historical onomastics of the Uyghurs

Islamo-Confucianism during the early Manchu / Qing dynasty

AI assistance

Old, older, oldest

Authenticity of pronunciation

Submissive woman or bound slave: interpreting oracle bone forms as a Rorschach test

A better pronunciation of "Davos"

Women's script wins in the end

In Memoriam: MATSUMOTO Akirō (松本耿郎), 1944-2026

Another sinograph for Unicode — the third-person gender-neutral pronoun

Hangul and Buddhism

Seal Script in Unicode

The virtues of sluggishness

Amber in the east

"Stopping the palace evolve"

A comprehensive overview of 漢 in East Asian languages

Where North Korea is headed: Kim Ju Ae

Online lookup tool for Vietnamese character usages

A new socio-political promo

Eagles' postseason drill

Battery-Powered Prayers

Chomsky and the origins of AI research

Oreoreoreoreo

Pariah dogs and pariah people

Dry January

Are local accents doomed?

Weltarsch

A Dunhuang transformation text minutely examined and revised

The ineffability of the Dao in the Zhuangzi

Oppenheimer, Einstein, the Atom bomb, Hiroshima, time, death, and the Bhagavad Gita

Volts before Volta

Dunhuang mania nominum

Buc-ee's bigness

The difficulty of Russian cursive

Origins of Japanese

Hyperhomophonous hanzi

Quiet quit and its potential perils

"Welcome in!" again

Reward for learning Hakka

Dialect fieldwork on the Penghu archipelago

Mixing languages, religions, and cultures in Central Asia

Word division and computer lockouts

Celto-Sinica

The Japanese language and the Japanese people: intricately intertwined helpmates

Talking horse

Nontrivial script fail, part 2

nice == ignorant?

merry == brief?

More Chinese menu shorthand, part 2: the future of the Chinese writing system

Name-transcription slop

Annenberg

Unknown language #21

Test for dialect relatedness: especially for Northeast topolect groupies

Northeastern topolect expressions, part 2

"Manic"? "Monotone"?

More Chinese menu shorthand

Language reform and script reform

Iron Age vehicle burials of tattooed Saka (Eastern Iranian) Pazyryk culture in the Altai Mountains

Grueling South Korean English exam

"Slop"

"Maplewashing"

Differential retention of sinographs across East Asia

ChatG(epetto)P(inocchio)T

Battle of the typefaces: Times New Roman vs. Calibri

"Devil" with an initial "dr-" consonant cluster

Granddaddy of empty lies (with tons of puns)

Anti-we

Voices as instruments, instruments as voices

The conceptual origins of "brainwashing"

Why are Japanese still using kanji?

"Blue Velvet" vocal

"Dognitive Science" again

TGTM: Hong Kong on fire

Poor walruses

Human Washing Machine

The many purposes and functions of ancient manuscripts from early 2nd-century BC China

A new kind of lost in translation

Vietnam in the Sinographic Cosmopolis

Pets with buttons

Dying minority languages in Europe

Polysemous Han

Scope of "more than"

Parsing of a fated kin tattoo

In search of lost/spare/wasted time

The strongest Indian accent

The cruelty of (some) thesis supervisors

Canting in Sinitic (and other) languages

Friendsgiving

A garden-path headline from the Washington Post