Language Log

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Latin, French, and vernacular English in late medieval England

Making hanzi with Japanese kana

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

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

Pariah dogs and pariah people

Are local accents doomed?

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

The Japanese language and the Japanese people: intricately intertwined helpmates

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

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

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)

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

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

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

A garden-path headline from the Washington Post

More on algorithmic culture

A German neologism coined in English

Happy World Linguistics Day

AI in education

Canting Crew words

Isidore of Seville and his Etymologiae (7th c. AD)

The Canting Crew

Weirdly specific words

Gendered word counts again

Comparative Common Shē and Common Neo-Hakka

Ask LLOG: Alternative standard pronunciations?

Uyghurish Mandarin and shrike-tongued barbarians

LSA Virtual Attendance Option

Why telephonic transmission requires the creation of a spelling alphabet

Errorist returns

Analogy of the week

The syllabicity of spoken "Canton" and "Akron"

Phrase-final Prepositions rise from the grave again

Australian WOTY vote

Girlsemanticsatiation

Yet another sinographic stumbling block for Chinese modernization

Northeastern topolect expressions

Passing strangers

Abstand und ausbau, part 2

Sumerian double negative (and fart joke)

Fake Indian accents (by an Indian)

Hangul as a global alphabet manque

Strange prescriptions

Dungans at Penn

Politeness levels for saying "Ohayō gozaimasu"

How to transcribe the name of the ruler of the PRC

Hybrid language (Japanese)

Top Tier Taobao Trick or Treat T-shirt

Punjabi word salad

The formative stage of Sinitic romanization

Language variation writ large

Abstand und ausbau

Scribes as Scheiße

Pitch accent in Japanese

Keelung ("chicken coop")

The Oldest (Known) Song Ever

Ancient Greek doȗle (voc.) 'slave' through time and space

Schleicher's PIE "The Sheep and the Horses" (reprise)

The gender of a key

French girl sells crêpes in a Taiwan market, part 2

What good are kanji?

Characters at hand

Unofficial simplified characters

The (ir)reality of the MingKwai typewriter

How to pronounce the name of the ruler of the PRC

Semiliterate restaurant Chinese

AI to the rescue of a Greek philosopher's work buried by Vesuvius

Steve Anderson, RIP

Free-er indirect speech

"Think" in Japanese

"Moloch's bargain"?

The tyranny of literacy

America-vectorized units

The niceties of German grammar

Literacy: peasants and philosophers

Correspondences between Ancient Greek doȗle (voc.) 'slave' and 奴隷 Jpn dorei / Tw lô·-lē

More conjoined pronoun case counts

The invention of English

Barriers between you and I?

"The insane effort to preserve this ancient script"

"Prepositions are tricky"

Different from/than/to?

Study Reveals America's Most Searched Slang Words 2025 / OHIO; mayonnaise

Death from overwork

"Between you and I"

Intentional for good

Top Gun photoshop fail

The singularity of stupid

"Long-held assumptions"?

The difficulty of borrowing in Chinese

Vernacular and classical fiction in late imperial China

Discourse on the AI Method of Rightly Reasoning

AI: Not taking jobs yet?

Freudian slip of the century: "Let's stop attacking pedophiles"

Sino-Japanese n- / d- initial interchange

"It can only good happen"?

Charlie Hustle in the AI industry

"Slav-ishly devoted"