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https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69172&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sogdians-on-the-silk-road

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69172

For the past week, I have been preparing a major post on Middle Iranian and associated peoples who transited and traded across Eurasia during the Middle Ages, so it was fortuitous that I received the following photograph from Hiroshi Kumamoto:

Xinhua News Agency//Getty Images

From:
Archaeologists Found Someone They Never Expected in an Ancient Chinese Tomb: a Blonde Man
The discovery reveals an unexpected connection to the ancient Silk Road.
By Tim Newcomb Popular Mechanics (May 10, 2025)

Place:
Jinyuan District, Taiyuan City, Shanxi Province

It shows a Sogdian camelteer and horse groom, typical types of expertise of the Sogdians, who were merchants par excellence on the medieval Eurasian trade routes. The man's blond hair doesn't surprise me in the slightest, because I have seen it in Central Asian mummies and their descendants in Eastern Central Asia (ECA, aka Xinjiang), Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan,Tajikistan, etc., not to mention countless historical visual materials from the medieval period.

For a small foretaste of what's in store for the Sogdians in medieval Korea that will be part of the forthcoming post on Sogdians and associated peoples on the Silk Road, see "The Eastern end of the Silk Road in Silla", also here.

Selected readings

"Turco-Sogdian horses and languages" (10/28/24)
"Tocharo-Sinica and Sogdo-Sinica" (7/3/24)
"Tocharo-Sinica" (5/13/24)
"Catalogue of Sogdian Writings in Central Asia" (1/5/23)
"Sogdians and Xiongnu / Huns" (2/21/22)
"The sound of ancient Iranian languages" (10/26/23)
Victor H. Mair, ed., The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man Inc. in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, 1998). 2 vols.
J. P. Mallory and Victor H.Mair,The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West(London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).
Elizabeth Wayland Barber, The Mummies of Ürümchi (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999)

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https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69183&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=superstition-industry-in-the-prc-buzzwords-as-belief

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69183

Another superlative article from our Czech colleagues:

China’s Superstition Boom in a Godless State
In post-pandemic China, superstition has surged into a booming industry, as youth turn to crystals, fortune-telling, and AI oracles in search of hope and meaning.
By Ansel Li, Sinopsis (5/13/25)

Introduction

It is one of history’s more striking ironies: the People’s Republic of China, an officially atheist, Marxist-Leninist regime that has long sought to suppress all forms of organized religion, now finds itself caught in a tidal wave of superstition. Post-pandemic, what began as a trickle has become a torrent—an uncontrolled spread of fortune-telling, lucky crystals, and spiritual nonsense, growing in the vacuum left by institutional faith and spread further by a hyper-connected internet society.

This phenomenon is not merely a return to old habits or rural mysticism. It has become a nationwide consumer frenzy, driven by the very demographic the Communist Party hoped would be its most rational constituency: the young and educated. In chasing these modern symbols of hope, they are losing more than just money.

The article is divided into five sections, from each of which I will select passages that may be of particular interest to Language Log readers.

I. The Lottery Fever

Why the appeal? It’s the cheapest daydream on the market. For 10–50 yuan, one gets a momentary shot of dopamine and the fantasy of a sudden windfall. Compared to a bubble tea or a streaming subscription, the lottery feels like a better deal—an illusion of hope, or at worst, a donation to the welfare fund. Some call it “the budget daydream.” Others, “a comfort for the modern mind.” Even when they lose, players reassure themselves with a strange kind of generosity: “I’m supporting public welfare.”

II. From “Manifesting Success” to Managed Despair

At the center of this scam was a belief system built on fantasy: a belief that if one just believed hard enough—if one pictured oneself as rich, and spent like it—wealth would magically arrive. This idea was almost a copy of The Secret, Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 best-selling nonsense that claimed thoughts could change reality. But in the Chinese version, the language of God and angels was replaced with buzzwords like “quantum,” “energy,” and “cleansing”—terms made for local social media, where fake science is often treated as deep thinking. [VHM: emphasis added, here and below]

…

In today’s China, the most popular “spiritual” items aren’t books or teachings but small objects—especially crystals. These are sold not only as fashion items but as tools for cosmic power. Supposedly, they bring wealth, block bad energy, and balance inner forces. Livestreams offer quick lessons in “crystal basics,” and influencers promote them with the excitement once shown for new tech.

There are now over 40,000 registered crystal-related businesses in China. This isn’t a small trend—it’s a whole industry.

Along with the crystal craze, astrology, tarot, and fortune-telling have become small but growing businesses. Highly educated youth—graduates, civil servants, tech workers—are quitting their jobs to become full-time “mystics.” On platforms like Taobao and WeChat, paid readings are everywhere. In many cities, you’ll find stylish little shops doing tarot readings, often run by baristas turned fortune-tellers.

This is happening despite—or maybe because of—government crackdowns. In 2021, China banned religious content on e-commerce sites and tightened rules on spiritual services. But the demand only adapted. Tarot readers now call themselves “emotional consultants.” Horoscope sellers move to foreign platforms like Discord. The state fights superstition with censorship, and loses every time.

One product shows this perfectly: the CeCe Astrology app—a phone app combining Chinese and Western fortune-telling tools: tarot, birth charts, Zi Wei Dou Shu, and more. It even has AI-powered fortune-telling bots and 24-hour livestream astrologers. Users tune in at 2 a.m. for live readings, sending virtual “gifts” or paying for one-on-one talks. Top streamers can make over 100,000 yuan a month. One person in the business said the app had “basically replaced therapy” for many: “As long as you tell them what they want to hear, it works.”

Gone is the dream of becoming rich. In its place is a hunger for meaning—some system, no matter how strange, to explain the chaos of everyday life. But even this comfort isn’t cheap. Yearly spending on these services can easily go over 1,000 yuan per person.

III. Superstition as a Business—But a Poor One at That

…Online tarot certificate “bootcamps” cost between 3,999 and 6,999 yuan for a few weeks of lessons. Courses to become a “crystal healer,” held in boutique studios, can cost over 10,000 yuan. These programs promise not just knowledge but business contacts: suppliers, livestream tips, and MCN (multi-channel network) deals to build your online image.

…

The so-called “natural crystal” market is full of fake stones made in chemical factories. The space is starting to look like multi-level marketing (MLM). Participants are pushed not just to sell, but to recruit others, stock up on products, and take on losses—so the dream of spiritual business quickly becomes the nightmare of a pyramid scheme.

IV. DeepSeek’s Occult Tech Boom [VHM: This one takes the cake]

At the peak of this absurd trend is a combination so strange it could make a philosopher laugh: AI fortune-telling. By late 2024 and into early 2025, China’s homegrown large language model, DeepSeek, burst into the spotlight, briefly worrying American tech companies. While its hype slowed down later, before Lunar New Year it became a national craze.

And its most popular feature? Not education, not work tools. It was AI-powered fortune-telling.

The AI-Spiritual-Commerce loop went viral. “DeepSeek Occult Commands” became an online hit. On WeChat, a flood of mini-programs appeared—“AI Face Reading,” “AI Bazi Calculator”—reaching the daily user numbers of medium e-commerce apps. A 9.9-yuan facial reading could be resold again and again through referral links, with some users earning over 30,000 yuan a month. DeepSeek hit 20 million daily active users in just 20 days. At one point, its servers crashed from too many people requesting horoscopes.

On social media, commands like “Full Bazi Chart Breakdown” and “Zi Wei Dou Shu Love Match” turned into memes. One user running a fortune-telling template got over 1,000 private messages in ten days. The AI could write entire reports on personality, karma, and even create fake palm readings about “past life experiences.” People lined up online at 1:00 a.m. to “get their fate explained.”

Meanwhile, a competing AI company, Kimi, released a tarot bot—immediately the platform’s most used tool. Others followed: Quin, Vedic, Lumi, Tarotmaster, SigniFi—each more strange than the last. The result? A tech-driven blow to the market for real human tarot readers.

In this strange mix, AI—the symbol of modern thinking—has been used to automate some of the least logical parts of human behavior. Users don’t care how the systems work. They just want a clean, digital prophecy. The same technology that should help us face reality is now mass-producing fantasy—on a huge scale.

V. Metaphysical China

It would be wrong to see this wave of superstition as a uniquely Chinese flaw. But since 2024, China’s superstition boom has become a pressure cooker where many deep problems have gathered: economic slowdown, job stress, burnout, pushy online systems, and a desperate need for meaning.

Young Chinese are not naturally more superstitious. But they are trapped in an unstable system, and with no clear future, they are buying ready-made ones. These crystals and tarot cards aren’t ancient traditions—they’re quick-fix stories built from what’s left in the marketplace. Meanwhile, sellers and platforms continue testing how much people are willing to pay to ease their fears.

This “spiritual capitalism” may fade, whether from tighter rules or better economic conditions. But as long as deep anxiety exists, these emotional-money combinations will return—just with new symbols, using words like “wellness,” “self-knowledge,” or “destiny.”

In that way, the 2024 superstition wave wasn’t a mistake—it was a preview. It shows us that any empty space in meaning will be quickly filled by the smartest algorithms, and that the price of these illusions will always fall hardest on the most worried, the most uncertain, and the most eager to believe.

Superstition is the true "opium of the people".

Selected readings

"The perils of punning" (1/5/17) — featuring Julie Sedivy: "Is the Chinese Language a Superstition Machine?"
"8/8/8" (8/8/08)

[h.t. Leslie Katz]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69183&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=superstition-industry-in-the-prc-buzzwords-as-belief

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https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69179&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=untranslatability-and-human-rights

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69179

Blake Shedd called my attention to

…an article on philosophy / human rights and how a Chinese translation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (available online from Philosophy Now, 118 [February-March, 2017], 9-11, and also available here from the website of one of the authors) raises some questions of hermeneutics.

Here's the article:

Hens, Ducks, & Human Rights in China: Vittorio Bufacchi & Xiao Ouyang discuss some philosophical & linguistic difficulties

Blake continues:

There were several conclusions and statements in the article that I found interesting, e.g., “Chinese culture may not have the conceptual apparatus, or need, to distinguish the ‘community’ from the ‘individual.’” As a non-specialist, I find this statement surprising because I assume(d) all languages can make this distinction in some fashion. I’d very much be interested in reading what you think.

First of all, I think that Italian co-author Vittorio Bufacchi was misled by his Chinese co-author about the grammar and other aspects of Chinese language, starting with the choice and explanation of this Chinese proverb: jī tóng yā jiǎng 鸡同鸭讲 (lit., "a chicken speaking with a duck" i.e., "mutually unintelligible; unable to understand one another; talking about two different things; getting one's wires crossed; talking at cross purposes; people not understanding each other; talking without communicating; talking in circles; talking past each other"). This saying forms the basis for the title of the article and for the elaborate drawing that accompanies it. For an article that is dealing with the translation of terms relating to human rights from one human language to another, the theme / thrust of this proverb is highly unsuitable. As the authors say, "It is as if the Western language of human rights is untranslatable or unintelligible to the Chinese."

Because the authors of the article have mistakenly come to believe this, they arrive at the false conclusion that the only way out of this presumed misunderstanding

…lies in a linguistic turn: the way forward is to abandon the Western terminology of human rights and appeal instead to aspects of Chinese philosophy that can perform a similar role, although the term 'human rights' is never used.

If we abandon "human" and "rights" in a serious discussion of "human rights", what is there left to talk about?

In my estimation, the authors need to gain a better understanding of the Chinese language and its grammar.

The authors declare:

The majority of the thirty articles in the English version of the [UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights] refer to 'everyone' and 'no one', while the Chinese translation conveys all such expressions with the phrase 'ren-ren', 人人 — literally 'man and man'. This linguistic nuance is significant, since it means that the two languages convey the meaning of 'universality' in metaphysically distinct ways.

What this tells me is that the authors of the article do not understand how the inclusive plural is formed in Chinese. The reduplication of a noun in Sinitic languages is one of the most common means to form the plural: rénrén 人人 means "all people" or "everyone". To assert that it means "man and man" is to proclaim that this Chinese expression is gibberish. It is not. Insisting that rénrén 人人 means "man and man" is tantamount to insisting that English terms must be translated at the morphemic level. When morphemes join in lexical and grammatical constructions, they acquire new meanings depending on their context. The same is as true of Sinitic languages as it is of English.

Here are some additional examples of the reduplication of a noun to form the inclusive plural:

tiāntiān

天天

"every day; daily; day by day"

If we follow the Bufacchi & Ouyang style of grammatical explication, that would erroneously mean "day and day". Wrong!

For grammar sticklers:

This is about 量词 (measure words) repetition. Yes, it’s a way to form the plural. Other examples are:

个个都很聪明。("Each of them is smart".)

天天都很开心。("[I am] happy every day".)

栋栋（measure word for house) 都很漂亮. ("All the houses are beautiful") (but you can’t say 房房都很漂亮，because 房 is a noun, not a measure word)

人人都要面对 ("Everyone has to face [it]"). Here 人 is a measure word, not a noun)

Two famous lines of a poem by the Tang poet Li Shen 李绅 (772-846):

谁知盘中餐，

粒粒皆辛苦?

"Who knows that, in their rice bowl,

Each grain bespeaks bitter labor?"

[thanks to Jing Hu]

VHM: Note the use of emphatic 都 and 皆 ("all, every") in each of these lines.

Which all goes to show there's a difference between philosophy and linguistics, between philosophers and linguists. N'est-ce pas?

Selected readings

"No word for fair?" (1/28/09)
"Freedom of speech vs. speaking rights" (7/14/16)

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69179&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=untranslatability-and-human-rights

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69179

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dinosaur comics returns monday! i blame: THE WOODS

PHEW

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May 21st, 2025

May 21st, 2025: I am in the woods of Juneau Alaska for COMICS CAMP! And there's no internet or cell signals in the woods of Juneau Alaska, so please excuse me if I take a bit longer to write back to emails than normal! I blame THE WOODS

– Ryan

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69176&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bionic-brains

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69176

China Develops Robots to Implant Chips into Human Brain

A Chinese technology news website reported that the CyberSense flexible microelectrode implantation robot, developed by the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has passed the preliminary acceptance stage for Shenzhen’s major scientific infrastructure project on “Brain Mapping and Brain Simulation.” The robot is designed to implant flexible microelectrodes – thinner and softer than a strand of hair – into the cerebral cortex of experimental animals, providing crucial support for brain-computer interface (BCI) and neuroscience research.

Guided by an intelligent sensing system, CyberSense robot can achieve micron-level three-dimensional precision, implanting multiple micro-thread electrodes (≤10 microns thick, ≤100 microns wide) while avoiding brain blood vessels. Because the implantation process uses a hard needle that repeatedly moves up and down to handle the soft threads – much like a sewing machine – researchers refer to it as a “sewing machine”-style implant.

Once implanted, the flexible microelectrodes can transmit the brain’s neural electrical signals to a microchip. The chip processes and communicates these signals to interpret the brain’s information processing activities and control external devices. It can also stimulate nearby neurons via microcurrents to regulate brain activity.

Implantable BCI offers powerful benefits such as thought-controlled devices, speech synthesis, and vision restoration for people with disabilities. It also allows scientists to study brain function using high-throughput neural data. However, they also raise ethical concerns for humanity.

On July 3, 2024, Tianjin University announced that it has cultivated human brain organoids from human stem cells and successfully connected them to a robot using on-chip BCI technology. They called it the first human brain controlled robot.

Source:
1. Bioon.com, May 6, 2025
https://news.bioon.com/article/29648e48460b.html
2. IT Home, July 5, 2025
https://www.ithome.com/0/779/903.htm

Briefings | | May 15, 2025 | Information/Technology

(Chinascope)

The concept / technology of implanting bionic chips in the brain is not new (see "Selected readings" below). What's different is using robots to do it.

Selected readings

"Bionic neurons could enable implants to restore failing brain circuits: Scientists say creation could be used to circumvent nerve damage and help paralysed people regain movement", by Ian Sample, The Guardian (12/3/19)
"Building the Human Body: The Bionic Brain", Kalwinder Kaur, AZoRobotics (11/28/12; updated 2/6/20)
"Brain implant", Wikipedia

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69176&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bionic-brains

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69176

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https://xkcd.com/3091/

Applying renormalization to bullies successfully transformed Pete & Pete's Endless Mike into Finite Mike.

https://xkcd.com/3091/

yourlibrarian posting in

I've only seen one here twice before, once in the months after I moved in, and again a few years ago. Unfortunately just as this time, I had been on my way to the grocery, and I assumed I'd have time to take photos when I came home. Which I didn't because it was gone. ( Read more... )

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69166&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=grammatical-intuition-of-chatgpt

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69166

Grammaticality Representation in ChatGPT as Compared to Linguists and Laypeople, Zhuang Qiu, Xufeng Duan & Zhenguang G. Cai, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 617 (May 6, 2025).

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various linguistic tasks. However, it remains uncertain whether LLMs have developed human-like fine-grained grammatical intuition. This preregistered study (link concealed to ensure anonymity) presents the first large-scale investigation of ChatGPT’s grammatical intuition, building upon a previous study that collected laypeople’s grammatical judgments on 148 linguistic phenomena that linguists judged to be grammatical, ungrammatical, or marginally grammatical (Sprouse et al., 2013). Our primary focus was to compare ChatGPT with both laypeople and linguists in the judgment of these linguistic constructions. In Experiment 1, ChatGPT assigned ratings to sentences based on a given reference sentence. Experiment 2 involved rating sentences on a 7-point scale, and Experiment 3 asked ChatGPT to choose the more grammatical sentence from a pair. Overall, our findings demonstrate convergence rates ranging from 73% to 95% between ChatGPT and linguists, with an overall point-estimate of 89%. Significant correlations were also found between ChatGPT and laypeople across all tasks, though the correlation strength varied by task. We attribute these results to the psychometric nature of the judgment tasks and the differences in language processing styles between humans and LLMs.

Introduction

The technological progression within artificial intelligence, especially when it comes to the realm of natural language processing, has ignited significant discussions about how closely large language models (LLMs), including chatbots like ChatGPT, emulate human linguistic cognition and utilization (Chomsky et al., 2023; Piantadosi, 2024; Binz and Schulz, 2023; Kosinski, 2024; Qiu et al., 2023; Cai et al., 2024). With each technological leap, distinguishing between human linguistic cognition and the capabilities of AI-driven language models becomes even more intricate (Wilcox et al., 2022; Van Schijndel and Linzen, 2018; Futrell et al., 2019). This leads scholars to query if these LLMs genuinely reflect human linguistic nuances or merely reproduce them on a cosmetic level (e.g., Duan, et al., 2024, 2025; Wang et al., 2024). This research delves deeper into the congruencies and disparities between LLMs and humans, focusing primarily on their instinctive understanding of grammar. In three preregistered experiments, ChatGPT was asked to provide grammaticality judgments in different formats for over two thousand sentences with diverse structural configurations. We compared ChatGPT’s judgments with judgments from laypeople and linguists to map out any parallels or deviations.

The ascent of LLMs has been nothing short of remarkable, displaying adeptness in a plethora of linguistic challenges, including discerning ambiguities (Ortega-Martín, 2023), responding to queries (Brown et al., 2020), and transcribing across languages (Jiao et al., 2023). Interestingly, while these models weren’t inherently designed with a hierarchical syntactical structure specifically for human languages, they have shown the capability to discern complex filler-gap dependencies and develop incremental syntactic interpretations (Wilcox et al., 2022; Van Schijndel and Linzen, 2018; Futrell et al., 2019). But the overarching question lingers: Do LLMs genuinely mirror humans in terms of linguistic cognition? Chomsky, Roberts, and Watumull (2023) have been vocal about the inherent discrepancies between how LLMs and humans perceive and communicate. Yet, other scholars like Piantadosi (2024) hold a contrasting view, positioning LLMs as genuine reflections of human linguistic cognition.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this research has undertaken a comprehensive investigation into the alignment of grammatical knowledge between ChatGPT, laypeople, and linguists, shedding light on the capabilities and limitations of AI-driven language models in approximating human linguistic intuitions. The findings indicate significant correlations between ChatGPT and both laypeople and linguists in various grammaticality judgment tasks. This study also reveals nuanced differences in response patterns, influenced significantly by the specific task paradigms employed. This study contributes to the ongoing discourse surrounding the linguistic capabilities of artificial intelligence and the nature of linguistic cognition in humans, calling for further exploration of the evolving landscape of linguistic cognition in humans and artificial intelligence.

The authors maintain a strict division between grammatical judgements of lay people and linguists. Most of the time there is no substantial distinction between the two. In general, I would say that the authors do not make clear the purpose of differentiating between lay and professional decisions on grammaticality and how it helps to evaluate the ability of LLMs like ChatGPT to attain human-like grammatical intuition.

I fear that we may be on a slippery slope in our ability to recognize a dichotomy between man and machine. Will we be able to pull the plug on HAL before it's too late? Or, not to worry, are we willy-nilly evolving into a new, hybrid "life" form?

Selected readings

"Analyzing ChatGPT’s ability as a grammar fixer", Georgetown Legal English Blog (2/23/23)
"ChatGPT writes VHM" (2/28/23) — with useful bibliography

[h.t. Ted McClure]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69166&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=grammatical-intuition-of-chatgpt

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69166

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It's called "Panoply" because that's the suit of armour that knights wear. Don't worry: there's a little note inside the box explaining why this is SUCH a good title.

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May 19th, 2025

May 19th, 2025: I am in the woods of Juneau Alaska for COMICS CAMP! And there's no internet or cell signals in the woods of Juneau Alaska, so please excuse me if I take a bit longer to write back to emails than normal! I blame THE WOODS

– Ryan

puddleshark posting in

'Holloway' comes from the Anglo-Saxon 'hol weg', and refers to a sunken path that has been grooved into the earth over the centuries by the passage of feet, wheels and weather...

'The Old Ways' Robert Macfarlane

( West Dorset holloways. )

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69153&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=jianwei-xun-fake-philosopher

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69153

Jianwei Xun, the supposed philosopher behind the hypnocracy theory, does not exist and is a product of artificial intelligence
A collaboration between an essayist and two AI platforms produced a book that reflects on new forms of manipulation

Raúl Limón, EL PAÍS (4/7/25)

The entire proposition behind this scheme is so preposterous and diabolical that I am rendered virtually speechless.

The French city of Cannes hosted a roundtable discussion on February 14 called “The Metamorphosis of Democracy – How Artificial Intelligence is Disrupting Digital Governance and Redefining Our Policy.”

The debate was covered in an article by EL PAÍS after Gianluca Misuraca, Vice President of Technology Diplomacy at Inspiring Futures, introduced the concept of “hypnocracy” — a new form of manipulation outlined in a book by Jianwei Xun called Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality. However, this Hong Kong philosopher does not exist, as revealed by Sabina Minardi, editor-in-chief of the Italian magazine L’Espresso.

There is a real book out there. It has sold thousands of copies. It has occasioned vigorous debate. It is having consequences. Yet, although the idea behind it was created by an Italian publisher and bookstore owner named Andrea Colamedici (b. 1987), it was authored by two AI platforms, i.e., non-humans.

In this case, "Jianwei Xun", which is a surrogate for two non-human agents and one human idea man, is different from a pseudonym, because it is the composite representation of a semi-human, semi-machine entity. Who / what is responsible for the book and what it entails?

The theory was created by essayist and editor Andrea Colamedici, who, although listed as a translator, is actually the co-author of the book, along with two AI platforms. This fact was never disclosed, violating EU law on AI. In response, EL PAÍS decided to remove the article published on March 26, which referenced content from the book attributed to the non-existent Hong Kong philosopher.

How was the machination exposed?

Journalist Sabina Minardi, after multiple attempts to interview the supposed author, uncovered that it was a pseudonym for a work created and edited by Colamedici in collaboration with two AI tools, part of a project to reveal AI’s influence in producing coherent and convincing discourse. As a result, researcher [Cecelia] Danesi referred to this new form of manipulation as a “digital dictatorship.”

If you take a look around the internet for the keywords "hypnocracy", "Jianwei Xun", etc., you will see that they have proliferated and are having an impact. But who is morally and legally responsible for their consequences? Has authorship been falsely attributed? If so, is it subject to criminal prosecution? Have someone's moral rights been abrogated or trespassed? Has anyone been defamed? Has fraud been committed?

The EL PAÍS article closes with a defense of Hypnocracy as a worthwhile "experiment" in discussing a complex of thorny issues facing society and a more nuanced approach to the phenomenon than the one with which I began this post. The human author / actor pleads that he did not intend to deceive anyone, only wished to raise critical arguments. Yet, Jianwei Xun has a website, and his / its legacy lives on….

Selected reading

"Trespassed update" (10/15/24) — with relevant bibliography
"Hypnocracy" — YouTube video (8:42) in which the human author calls himself part of a "collective"

[h.t. Bryan Van Norden]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69153&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=jianwei-xun-fake-philosopher

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69153

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http://zoharesque.blogspot.com/2025/05/space-blankets-and-womens-labour.html

In previous posts, I've looked at the material culture and intangible heritage of women on the Moon. I talked about different ways we might make a feminist map of the Moon, how the first bootprints were made by overshoes made by women, and the work of women on the Apollo guidance computer.

There's another critical piece of lunar technology that I want to investigate: thermal insulation blankets.

Finding forgotten women in photographs

I wrote a chapter on plastics in space for the Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Plastics (2024). In this chapter I used the development of polyimide films coated in aluminium - the so-called space blanket - as an example of plastic use in spacecraft and space missions. Golden space blankets are used as thermal insulation on many spacecraft, and the Apollo descent modules were wrapped in them, bringing some much-needed shininess to the Moon.

I looked at the history of one of the earliest US spacecraft: the Echo balloons. These were massive inflatable balloons that acted as passive satellites. You bounced radio waves off them and back into the atmosphere to increase the distance they could travel i.e. around the curve of the Earth.

I was reading through the 1960s reports done for NASA on the practical and scientific aspects of these metallic balloons. In one report, I started to notice something in the photographs. Although they were not mentioned in the text, the photographs showed women working on the factory floor, applying aluminium coating to Mylar plastic film to create the balloon material. I was immediately on high alert.

Three women dressed in white lab coats are smoothing a gore made
of aluminised Mylar. From Talentino 1966.

The gores you see in the photo were stitched together to make up each balloon. They were made by the US company Schjeldahl.

It's a well-known phenomenon in the history of women in science that you can often find them in photographs, even if they are not mentioned or named anywhere (I'll often find them in the footnotes). Many people have done the research to identify these forgotten women and they usually turn out to have an interesting story, or to have made a scientific contribution which received little recognition or documentation. I filed away the fact that women were involved in the manufacture of the prototype for this essential space material. However, it turned out to be more difficult to find out who they were and what they did.

The birth of the space blanket

I've moved on to the Apollo missions because I'm interested to see if there is more to find out about women's involvement in the material culture - and thus their contribution to the heritage significance - of these sites on the Moon.

The Apollo 11 thermal blankets, on both the descent and ascent modules, were made by DuPont who had introduced the polyimide film Kapton, which turned out to be a much better core material than the Mylar used for Project Echo. The Kapton was aluminised just like the Echo balloons, but with a vapour deposition method rather than adhesive to bond the two materials together.

I was curious if there were also women on the shop floor at DuPont, working on the Apollo space blankets. This was not as simple as I thought it might be. I looked for reports in the NASA Technical Report Server, but turned nothing up. Then I discovered that the Hagley Museum and Library had a lot of historic DuPont archives, as well as oral histories. I started searching. (Oh my god their archives, I could get lost in there).

There wasn't much. A female martial arts aficionado appears in this 1969 video, testing the strength of the Kapton for the Apollo 9 mission:

Watch on YouTube

This 1970 film, from the DuPont collection at the Hagley Museum, is the opposite of showing forgotten women working for DuPont! In it, the astronaut is juxtaposed to the housewife. She's the ideal housewife fictional astronaut Tony Nelson was always trying to make Jeannie be in I Dream of Jeannie. 'Most materials in this masterpiece of man-made environment for the Moon landing [meaning the spacesuit] have been easing women's chores for years' says the narrator. You don't get to go to the Moon, lady, but hurry up and get dinner on the table!

A woman dressed in yellow fries eggs on the stove-top as a space-suit-clad astronaut approaches her. Still from a 1970 video about the Apollo 11 space suits. Image courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library.

Oh if I started to analyse this I would need several posts so I'll leave it here without further comment. Except to say there's definitely a trope at work here, as you see in this discussion of a Space Age washing machine.

DuPont may not have been quite the equal opportunity employer, even for the menial and repetitive tasks that were meant to suit women's brains. In 1971, John C. Thomas, a Senior Patent Investigator at DuPont, wrote a letter to the CEO, Charles B. McCoy, urging him to give women more opportunities. 'I have a feeling that the 1970's may be the decade of a great push for women's rights', he wrote. McCoy replied, 'I assure you the company is giving this matter more than lip service'.

I looked through two digitised advertising booklets from 1966. Wall-to-wall men, with two exceptions: a physicist and a toxicologist, neither linked particularly to Apollo materials. And, of course, some secretaries, receptionists and librarians, and a few women demonstrating synthetic fabrics used in fashion.

From the article 'Our People', This is DuPont magazine, 1966. Image shows 8 headshots of DuPont employees including two women, a physicist and a secretary. Hagley Museum and Library, PC_fHD96519D94A5_01_1966

Maybe there just weren't any women working on the Apollo thermal insulation. I might have found more in the DuPont magazines, but I'd need to look through each issue in the relevant time frame. The next step would be to contact the Hagley Library and Museum to discuss with the archivists - perhaps a future project when I've got time, or for someone else who would like to take it up.

I might not have found the answers I was looking for, but this was for me a very interesting excursion into materials, history and gender.

References

Talentino, J.P. 1966 Development of the fabrication and packaging technique for the Echo II satellite. NASA TMX-55764

http://zoharesque.blogspot.com/2025/05/space-blankets-and-womens-labour.html

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3090/

Turning in other directions can be accomplished by using a magnetized centerboard and ocean currents, since a current flowing through a magnetic field induces a Laplace force.

https://xkcd.com/3090/

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69155&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rip-john-r-haj-ross-1938-2025

Posted by Ben Zimmer

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Posted by MIT Linguistics:

Sad and momentous news has reached us of the passing of alum and former faculty member John R. Ross (PhD 1967) at the age of 87. Known to one and all as "Haj Ross", his dissertation and subsequent papers on syntax and related topics laid the groundwork for many — one might even say "most" — of the core research topics under central investigation today.

His dissertation "Constraints on Variables in Syntax" (published many years later as a book, under the title "Infinite Syntax!") built on earlier observations by Chomsky that took note of surprising limitations on our ability to form questions and similar constructions out of particular phrasal domains. Ross's dissertation showed first that Chomsky's account of these limitations was inadequate. ("Both too strong and too weak" was his famous formulation of the problem.) But more important, Ross put the nature and extent of these limitations front and center for the entire field, discovering and analyzing a vast range of linguistic phenomena that exemplified such constraints, and proposing unified accounts of many of them that still form the baseline for current research that seeks to extend and deepen Ross's original insights. In the years following his dissertation, Ross was the author of countless papers of a similar character, in which he was literally the first discoverer of linguistic limitations and possibilities that every speaker of a language knows, even if they were totally unaware (before Ross) that they knew them. Taken together, these discoveries constitute much of the agenda of modern linguistics, which attempts to discern the hidden logic behind the properties of human language that Ross first charted, understanding them as reflections of deeper properties of our human language faculty. We would not be surprised to learn that Ross's thesis (as it is universally known) is one of the most widely read and widely cited doctoral dissertations in any field — it surely has that status in linguistics.

Every paper by Haj Ross communicated its discoveries in an inimitable fashion, tinged by its author's unique odd sense of humor and unique feel for language itself. As a consequence, the field of syntax to this day is replete with quirky terminology all due to Haj. Domains that are opaque to syntactic processes such as question formation are universally called "islands" — Haj's term. (To appreciate the metaphor, one needs to imagine that boats and the capacity to swim do not exist: you cannot escape a linguistic island.) The ability of question words that move to the front of the sentence ("Which book did Mary talk about?") to lure other words to join them ("About which book did Mary talk?") he called "pied-piping", celebrating the grim legend of the pied-piper of Hamelin. Some of his infamous terminology bordered on the psychedelic: for example, an ellipsis process in questions that deletes the bulk of a sentence while leaving behind the question phrase ("Mary spoke to someone interesting, but I don't know who ___ ") was dubbed "Sluicing" as a pun on "S loosing" (S for "sentence"; "loosing" in the sense of "untying"). So remarkable, so numerous, and so beloved are Haj's terminological coinages that they form part of his lasting legacy, along with his scientific achievements, whose mark on the field will never fade.

Nothing linguistic failed to interest Haj, and his work ranged across many areas of linguistics. He explored the phonological principles that order phrases such as "snap, crackle, pop" and "red, white, and blue" (i.e. why not "pop, crackle, snap" or "blue, white, and red", which is the order in French?) — and studied the linguistic principles underlying poetry in many papers of his later career. Haj was hired as a professor at MIT immediately following his 1967 dissertation, and remained on the faculty until 1985. He subsequently taught at a number of universities internationally, before taking a position at the University of North Texas, where he retired as Distinguished Research Professor in 2021.

Haj last visited us at MIT in December 2011 for our conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Linguistics graduate program, where he was an enthusiastic and active participant, and regaled us in typical fashion with both impromptu discoveries and hilarious anecdotes. A giant of linguistics, we and the entire field (and beyond) will miss him.

Web page: https://linguistics.unt.edu/people/haj-ross.html

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Ross

Dissertation: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/15166

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Posted by Scandinavia and the World

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Roundabouts

View Comic!

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Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69149

While attending an international conference on the application of AI to the study of the Silk Road and its history, at which most of the papers were delivered in Korean, I was struck by the frequent occurrence of one distinctive word: hajiman. For some speakers, it almost seemed like a kǒutóuchán 口頭禪 ("catchphrase"). I had no idea what it meant, but its frequency led me to believe that it must be some sort of function word. However, the fact that it is three syllables long militated against such a conclusion. Also its sentence / phrase final position (though not always) made me think that it wasn't just a simple function word.

I kept trying to extract hajiman's purpose / meaning from its position and intonation (usually not emphasized, almost like an afterthought).

When, during coffee / tea breaks I asked some Korean colleagues about it, their reply — "Oh, hajiman" (with an offhand smile) only added to the word's mystique.

Finally, after the conference was over and I had access to my laptop computer where I could do some research on this puzzling Korean word, I found out that it is merely a conjunction meaning "but; however". That kind of blew my mind, because that wasn't close to the meanings I had been hypothesizing for hajiman judging from the linguistic environments in which I was hearing it.

Here's what lexical resources were telling me for hajiman 하지만:

WordHippo

but conj.

while conj.

whilst conj.

after all adv.

whiles conj.

Collins

again adv.

but conj. — four varieties

however adv.

I asked a few Koreans who know Mandarin well how they would translate hajiman, and they said rán'ér 然而 ("however; but; yet"). That fits better with the environments in which I was often hearing it being spoken at the conference, a kind of lingering afterthought, "and yet…". Some individuals used it so much that it was like a catch / pet phrase, as I mentioned above.

As for holding conversations with people on the street, in shops, etc. who did not know English, that was not too much of a problem in Korea, because it seemed that almost everyone had some sort of electronic translation device (usually an application on their phone) by means of which they could communicate.

I should note that Koreans are very big on AI and they are very good at it. Some of them treat AI as their "assistant" who carries out a wide variety of tasks for them — research, writing, design, and so forth. They even contemplate whether they might fall in love with their AI companion and whether two AI "characters" they create might fall in love with each other!

Finally, unlike my colleagues who are wary of AI and to one degree or another forbid their students from using AI (it is a very touchy subject at Penn), Koreans in higher education encourage (or even require) the use of AI.

Selected readings

"Is there no / any longer a reason / need to learn a foreign language?, part 2" (7/28/23)
"Is there no / any longer a reason / need to learn a foreign language?" (7/14/23)
"Alien encounters" (9/15/16) — esp. the fourth comment
"No, no, no; yes, yes, yes" (2/2/25) — pet phrases
"Catchphrases, mantras, and verbal tics" (11/16/22)
"'Bāphre bāph!' — my favorite Nepali expression" (8/12/18)
"A Chinese analog to English 'you know'" (11/22/19)

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the INCREDIBLE self-restraint, sustained across DECADES, that's kept anyone from slipping "calendar-makers day, the day when you high-five a maker of calendars" into their calendars

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May 16th, 2025

May 16th, 2025: If you look carefully, T-Rex's "fallback topic" is precisely the topic he was already on about! You should NOT let people get away with this!!

– Ryan

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69144&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sapir-whorf-redux

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69144

In "Linguistic relativity: snow and horses" (4/15/25), I summarized and assessed the following paper:

Temuulen Khishigsuren et al, "A computational analysis of lexical elaboration across languages", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2417304122

My post was picked up by Cody Cottier, who was doing a critique of the Khishigsuren et al. article for Scientific American. Cottier interviewed me and incorporated some of what I said to him in this review:

Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a ‘Hoax’
Inuit languages really do have many words for snow, linguists found—and other languages have conceptual specialties, too, potentially revealing what a culture values
Scientific American (5/9/25)

Cottier begins his article thus:

In 1884 the anthropologist Franz Boas returned from Baffin Island with a discovery that would kick off decades of linguistic wrangling: by his count, the local Inuit language had four words for snow, suggesting a link between language and physical environment. A great game of telephone inflated the number until, in 1984, the New York Times published an editorial claiming the Inuit have “100 synonyms” for the frozen white stuff we lump under a single term.

Then, as we at Language Log know all too well, our colleague Geoff Pullum published "The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax" in 1991, which muted the billowing claims for a generation, but, as Cottier quotes me, “it’s coming back in a legitimate way.” Fair enough, and here is why:

In a sweeping new computational analysis of world languages, researchers not only confirmed the emphasis on snow in the Inuit language Inuktitut but also uncovered many similar patterns: what snow is to the Inuit, lava is to Samoans and oatmeal to Scots. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in April. Charles Kemp, a computational psychologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia and senior author of the study, says the results offer a window onto language speakers’ culture. “It’s a way to get a sense of the ‘chief interests of a people’—what’s important to a society, what they prioritize and value,” he says, quoting Boas.

I will not repeat the methods and findings of the original PNAS paper and my Language Log post summarizing and assessing it, but will only point to three striking maps in the Scientific American article that illustrate the researchers' claim that their analysis of different themes across dictionaries of more than 600 languages that show which ones have the highest estimated proportion of references to certain concepts, in this case for "snow", "smell", and "dance", together with associated words that show the same general distribution (e.g., for "smell", "suck, rotten, ripe, pull, rub, food, climb, wet, dry, tree, nose".

Many Oceanic languages … have highly specific words for smell. In Marshallese, meļļā means “smell of blood” and jatbo means “smell of damp clothing.” This may be explained by the humidity of the rainforest, which amplifies scents.

Turning more directly to Sapir-Whorf,

Mair says this research, which he highlighted on the popular linguistics blog Language Log, helps resurrect the much-maligned idea of linguistic relativity, sometimes known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. At its boldest, linguistic relativity asserts that language determines how we perceive things, causing speakers of different languages to experience the world in radically different ways (think of the movie Arrival, in which a character becomes clairvoyant after learning an alien language). But in Mair’s opinion, this study supports a softer claim: our brains all share the same basic machinery for perceiving the world, which language can subtly affect but not restrict. “It doesn’t determine,” he says. “It influences.”

Similarly, Lynne Murphy, a linguist at the University of Sussex in England, who was not involved in this study, notes that “any language should be able to talk about anything.” We may not have the Marshallese word jatbo, but four words of English do the trick—“smell of damp clothing.” It’s not that having many precise words for smell reveals mind-blowing cognitive abilities for processing smell; it’s simply that single words are more efficient than phrases, so they tend to represent common subjects of discussion, highlighting areas of cultural significance. If we routinely needed to talk about the smell of damp clothing, we’d whittle that unwieldy phrase down to something like jatbo.

Cottier ends his article with reservations about the limitations of lexical elaboration expressed by Murphy and Khishigsuren. Thus, while the door to Sapir-Whorfianisam has been reopened by a slight crack, it remains as it should be, one of linguistic relativity.

Selected readings

Charles Kemp, Lexical Elaboration Explorer (html)
John A. Lucy, "Linguistic relativity" (pdf)

[h.t. Hiroshi Kumamoto and Ben Zimmer]

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xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3089/

Scholars are still debating whether the current period is post-postmodern or neo-contemporary.

https://xkcd.com/3089/

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69127&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hangul-as-alphasyllabary

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69127

After visiting the massive National Museum of Korea in Seoul, I was eager to go to the National Hangeul Museum nearby. Alas, it is under renovation, so I was unable to enter it this time, but I will go back on some future occasion when I travel to Korea. I did, however, manage to buy two facsimile versions of the Hunminjeongeum 훈민정음 / 訓民正音 ("The Correct / Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People), a 15th-century manuscript that introduced the Korean script Hangul, one for the populace and one for the literati.

Several of the comments to this post, "How to say 'Seoul'" (5/12/25), prompted me to think some more about a problem that had perplexed me from the time I did a review of The Korean Buddhist Canon: A Descriptive Catalogue, by Lewis R. Lancaster, in collaboration with Sung-bae Park (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979). That was nearly half a century ago, but I still remember keenly how difficult it was to romanize the titles and the proper nouns. The hardest part of that was dealing with what happened at syllable boundaries. It was obvious that different authorities romanized the sounds in discrepant ways.

As I wrestled with that large tome (724 pages) having more than a thousand detailed bibliographical entries, I grew increasingly frustrated and exasperated at not being able to get clear-cut answers about the romanization even from specialists on Korean Buddhism and language. Somehow, I managed to get through the task, which took the better part of a month, but was not completely satisfied with the results.

All of this fits with the conception of Hangul as an alphasyllabary, in that it is neither an alphabet nor a syllabary, but somewhere in between. How did that happen?

To the extent that it possesses vowels and consonants, Hangul had / has the potential to develop into a true alphabet, but the desire to make Hangul compatible with Sinitic tetraglyphs caused its creators to squeeze the letters of the Hangul alphabet into square-shaped blocks, like the strokes / components of sinographs, which they are not.

This quadratic imperative of Hangul tends to emphasize the syllable in Korean phonology, and one can hear that when spoken at normal or slow speed. But when speech is rapid, the syllable boundaries tend to get slurred or blended. This happens even with sequences of sinographs, which I have often written about on Language Log (see, for example, the long series of posts on "When intonation overrides tone", but there are many others).

In one or two forthcoming posts, I will give specific examples of such blurring / blending at syllable boundaries of spoken Korean phrases. In each case, they confused me greatly because I was not able quickly to disentangle the constituent phonemes. Indeed, they often disappeared (got swallowed up by the resultant whole).

Selected readings

"Grids galore" (11/19/23)
"Hangul: Joseon subservience to Ming China" (5/14/22)
"Hangul for Cantonese" (11/18/24)
Coblin, W. South (2006). A Handbook of ʼPhags-pa Chinese. ABC Dictionary Series. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-3000-7 — 'Phags-pa played a key role in the creation of Hangul

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Émile was still years away from his first of two nominations for a Nobel prize in literature, of course, mainly because Nobel prizes wouldn't be invented until 1901. While Nobel HAD died in 1896, his family had contested the latest of his many wills - and once cleared, it took a while for the proper foundation to be formed. This work was largely done by Ragnar Sohlman, who was born in 1870, became Alfred Nobel's assistant in 1893, and who will absolutely not be appearing in this story.

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May 14th, 2025

May 14th, 2025: I'm going to Alaska for COMICS CAMP this week, so I'll be answering email a heck of a lot more slowly in the next few days. (There is no cell phone signal where we're going, so by "slowly" I mean "NOT AT ALL :0" and I'm sorry you had to find out this way, in a parenthetical aside)

– Ryan

ysabetwordsmith posting in

These pictures are from the south lot and savanna.

( Walk with me ... )

Current Mood: accomplished

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69118&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wildly-popular-pastry-shop-in-korea

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69118

Nick Tursi suggested that I visit Sungsimdang in Daejeon, so I went two hours out of my way as I was travelling to Seoul. Sungsimdang (Korean: 성심당; Hanja: 聖心堂; lit. Sacred Heart Hall) is a phenomenally popular bakery that could easily establish branch stores all around Korea and, indeed, the world, but it refuses to do so, not expanding beyond the city of Daejeon.

We were lucky that it was raining that day, which made the line outside the store only stretch for one block, whereas in good weather it may stretch back and forth for a length equal to three blocks or more, and you'd have to wait for 2-3 hours to make your way through it.

(photo courtesy of Song Yaoxue)

Inside the store, the lines continued to wind through the aisles packed with scores of their delectable pastries. Nick had told me that Sungsimdang's customers converge on the store from all directions, and you can see them dispersing throughout the city with bags full of buns, rolls, muffins, donuts, and so forth in hand. As you can see from the photograph above, I was one of them that day.

Sungsimdang's "twi-so" (튀소), which translates to "fried soboro," is a signature item of the bakery. It's known for its crispy exterior and soft interior, typically filled with red bean paste. I was intrigued by the word twi-so, and was determined to figure out what it means. It turns out that "twi" is short for "twigim" and "so" is short for "soboro". The first part was not too hard, for it just means "fried; tempura; deep fried" in Korean, but the second component threw me for a loop. because it comes from a Japanese word that denotes a rather different type of pastry:

Bread came to Korea by way of Japan which was first exposed to it by Portuguese traders and missionaries in the 16th century–soboro bread is a great example of this layered food history. In Japanese, the word soboro そぼろ refers to minced meat/fish in soy sauce. The Japanese term is not native to its language, and has roots in the Portuguese words sabor, meaning flavor, and streusel, which looks similar to minced meat. Going even further, the word streusel originates from Germany, and refers to a topping made with sugar, butter, and flour. In Korea, soboro means streusel–it all comes full circle.

"Soboro Bread, Korean Peanut Streusel Bread, 소보로빵", Jessica's Dinner Party (1/04/19)

Whatever the origin of the word, twi-so, the pastry it designates has won a loyal following in Daejeon and beyond, all the way to Philadelphia, but you have to go to Daejeon to get the real McCoy.

"Iconic Daejeon bakery earns praise with 'no sales' notice at Seoul event",
By Moon Ji-yeon, The Chosun
Kim Seo-young
Published 2024.05.07. 15:30

Sungsimdang, a renowned bakery and a popular tourist attraction in Daejeon, will participate in an event in Seoul without selling any products, leaving many consumers who expected to purchase their breads disappointed. Following continuous inquiries, Sungsimdang announced that their products are sold only in Daejeon, a statement that has received online praise for maintaining the integrity of a local brand.

It's a pastry worth tasting and an experience worth undergoing.

Oh, another reason I went to Sungsimdang is because of the signage on the front of the store. As you can see from the photograph above, it is tastefully in four languages / scripts: Hangul, English, Chinese, French. That is highly unusual in Korea. During my travels there for hundreds of miles and through about a dozen cities, I saw almost no Hanja (Chinese characters). The signs were almost exclusively (99.99+%) Hangul. Considering the history of writing in Korea, where Hangul was invented by King Sejong in the mid-15th century, was adopted for official documents only in the middle of the last decade of the 19th century, and began to be used for elementary school texts in 1895, it is remarkable how thoroughly Hangul has conquered writing in Korea, both north and south, and how beloved it is by the people. More on that in my next post on Hangul as an alphasyllabary.

Selected readings

"Portuguese words in Japanese, and beyond" (1/8/23) — especially the word for bread
"Romanized Japanese Bible translation" (4/10/25)"

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xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3088/

P.S. If you have time travel, come to my birthday party Saturday!

https://xkcd.com/3088/

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"the only research *I* need to do is on how to avoid specifics," muttered Sherlock as he listened to the radio, or, if those didn't exist yet, stared at his I wanna say telegraph machine

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May 12th, 2025

May 12th, 2025: This comic is MAYBE inspired by me watching Murdoch Mysteries on the CBC. IT'S REAL GOOD!! They do their research though, which makes them better than me I MEAN T-REX.

– Ryan

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Posted by Mark Liberman

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On March 27, horrificgoth posted on tumblr

(crawls on all fours with blood drenched on me) I have to do arts and crafts

resulting in 56,876 notes so far. One of them, posted Saturday 5/10 by Seebs, was

i’m more mad about this than i might otherwise be because someone pointed out the “-ench” suffix in English a while back:

drink -> drench

cling -> clench

we used to have a form for “to cause-to” on verbs. and yes, there was apparently a q verb for fire-going-out that led to “quench”.

sadly, people refuse to acknowledge my other example:

wink -> wench

The causative story is correct for drench and quench, according to the OED, as long as the "we" that used to have the form goes back to Old English:

The OED's etymology for clench is less clear about the causative morphology, but still consistent with it:

Needless to say, wench as the causative of wink is a joke.

For me the most interesting thing about (the comments on) these tumblr posts is (how they exemplify) the modern fashion for vivid noms de réseau social: annielovescuteships, orthoeatspaperslips1, lilacborrower, traggalicious, trashbaby1996, hohohomyass, big-scary-bird, hypersexual-brainvomit, testosteronetuesdays, totally-not-an-awkard-okapi, ewwcringe, …

[h/t Linda Seebach]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69130&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ench

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69130

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69124&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-say-seoul

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69124

So far as I know, most Americans pronounce the name of the capital city of the Republic of Korea as "soul".

(Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /səʊl/
(General American) enPR: sōl, IPA(key): /soʊl/

Rhymes: -əʊl
Homophones: sole, soul, sowl

From Korean 서울 (Seoul, literally “capital city”), originally from Claude-Charles Dallet's French-based romanization of Korean, reinforced by the 1959 South Korean Ministry of Education romanization of Korean, which transcribed the Korean vowel ㅓ (/⁠ʌ⁠/) with the digraph "eo" and which was official until 1984.

Note that English Seoul predates the Revised Romanization romanization of Seoul. The two romanization systems simply produce identical forms.

(Wiktionary)

Then I asked many Koreans how they pronounce 서울, the Hangul pronunciation of the name of their capital city. They made it sound as thought it had two syllables. Ross King:

It's two syllables: something like [sɔul], depending on how speakers render the first vowel (for some it's more like a schwa).

For a deeper dive on the name 서울. Here's Wikipedia's take on the toponymy of the city:

Traditionally, seoul (서울) has been a native Korean (as opposed to Sino-Korean) common noun simply meaning 'capital city.' The word seoul is believed to have descended from Seorabeol (서라벌; historically transliterated into the Hanja form 徐羅伐), which originally referred to Gyeongju, the capital of Silla.

Wiryeseong (위례성; 慰禮城), the capital settlement of Baekje, was located within the boundaries of modern-day Seoul. Seoul was also known by other various historical names, such as Bukhansan-gun (북한산군; 北漢山郡, during the Goguryeo era), Namcheon (남천; 南川, during the Silla era), Hanyang (한양; 漢陽, during the Northern and Southern States period), Namgyeong (남경; 南京, during the Goryeo era), and Hanseong (한성; 漢城, during the Joseon era). The word seoul was used colloquially to refer to the capital as early as the 17th century. Thus, the Joseon capital of Hanseong was widely referred to as the seoul. Due to its common usage, French missionaries called the Joseon capital Séoul (/se.ul/) in their writings, hence the common romanization Seoul in various languages today.

Under subsequent Japanese colonization, Hanseong was renamed as Keijō (京城, literally 'capital city') by the Imperial authorities to prevent confusion with the Hanja '漢' (a transliteration of a native Korean word 한; han; lit. great), which may also refer to the Han people or the Han dynasty in Chinese and is associated with 'China' in Japanese context. After World War II and the liberation of Korea, Seoul became the official name for the Korean capital. The Standard Korean Language Dictionary still acknowledges both common and proper noun definitions of seoul.

Unlike most place names in Korea, as it is not a Sino-Korean word, 'Seoul' has no inherently corresponding Hanja (Chinese characters used in the Korean language). Instead of phonetically transcribing 'Seoul' to Chinese, in the Chinese-speaking world, Seoul was called Hànchéng (汉城; 漢城), which is the Chinese pronunciation of Hanseong. On 18 January 2005, the Seoul Metropolitan Government changed Seoul's official Chinese name from the historic Hànchéng to Shǒu'ěr (首尔; 首爾). Shǒu'ěr is a phono-semantic match incorporating both sound and meaning (through 首 meaning 'head', 'chief', 'first').

(Wikipedia)

Since I'm mingling with people of various social levels and educational backgrounds who speak a variety of combinations of Korean, Chinese, and English — and mix the three freely in the same sentences and phrases, it is difficult for me to distinguish them. I will give specific examples in subsequent posts..

Selected readings

"I.SEOUL.U" (11/15/15)
"Using Sinitic characters in Korea" (7/3/15)
"Japanese readings of Sinographic names" (/26/18)

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69124&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-say-seoul

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69124

ysabetwordsmith posting in

https://ahotcupofjoe.net/2025/05/comet-research-groups-questionable-claims-get-called/

I took some pictures around the yard today. These are from the house yard.

( Walk with me ... )

Current Mood: accomplished

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Posted by Carl Feagans

https://ahotcupofjoe.net/?p=4749

On September 20, 2021, a handful of authors wrote a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports titled, “a Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a [...]

The post Comet Research Group’s Questionable Claims Get Called appeared first on Archaeology Review.

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