I brought up a similar point a couple of years ago, in "Spontaneous SCOTUS"  (3/2/2024). The background there was an effort to recreate U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments, from transcripts made before the court starting making tape recordings in 1955. Actors read the transcripts, voice morphing was applied, and the result was a success.

But a problem remained, as the cited post notes:

There are many things besides individual vocal identity that transcripts leave out. And even a skilled actor reading a standard transcript will not put most of these things back in, neither in a generic way nor in a way that's faithful to the original.

These omissions include things like

• Filled pauses (uh, um)
• Filler words (you know, I mean, so, like… )
• Silent pauses (and pseudo-pauses)
  not in a reading-style relation to message structure
• Rapid initial repetitions (in- in- in the- the, …)
• False starts (“that was my= uh the last time”…)
• Non-speech vocalizations (laughs, sighs, grunts, … )

Such things are usually called "disfluencies", but I've argued that this is a misleading term, partly because they're typical of fluent spontaneous speech, and partly because  they often have communicative content.

And whether or not they have communicative content, these phenomena are common in effective spontaneous rhetoric from persuasive speakers like Paul Krugman and Elon Musk, as well as U.S. Supreme Court justices.

I've therefore suggested that the term "spontaneities" should be substituted for "disfluencies". And from the very beginning of the Rogan interview, Marc Andreessen show us that he's a fluent spontaneitizer:

yeah so these guys are driving around in cars
and yeah they're switching cars, whatever
they- yeah and they're- and they- they went to like a dozen locations
and like fight- and tri- tried shooting-
shooting at buildings and people and houses and- and all kinds of stuff and so
okay so these guys running around so they-
there's this system called Flock
which is one of our companies and- and what they do is-
kind of like in the movies you- you take all the municipal cameras
and traffic cameras and everything
and you feed them into an A- AI and the AI is able to
first find a license plate
in- in real time so you can- you can find that
but- but second you can actually find a car even if you don't have the license plate
you can find like distinct markings of the car
it'll- you- on the car it'll track the car
and so this- this thing is deployed it's- this- it's sold to city governments
it's used all over the country

Here's another example, from a 6/27/2024 interview, illustrating that Rogan exhibits the same sorts of spontaneities that Andreessen does:

A: well the i-  the- the internet idea was all the computers are peers
right so there's no- there's no single node
right and so there's just four computers that talk to each other
which was the basis of what the internet is today
four computers talk to each other now it's four billion computers talk to each other
but it was that same idea
R: and h- did they store things individually
like did you have access to each individual computer's data?
or did they have a collective data base?
A: i- i- it- they- you know they had a combination- I mean I- this is very- original- the- these- these were very simple systems as compared to what we have today
so these were very basic implementations of these ideas
that they- they would've- they had very simple what's called store and forward email
uh they had very simple what's called file retrieval
so if there's a file on your computer and you wanted to let me download it I could download it
they had what was called telnet where you could log into somebody else's computer and use it
R: So you are messing around with this stuff and you guys create- was it the very first web browser or the first u- like used by many people web browser?
A: yeah it was the first- it is a productized s- uh it was the first browser used by a large number of people
um it was the first browser that was really usable by a large number of people
um it was also one of the- one of the first browsers that had integrated graphics
the- the actual first browser was a text browser
uh the very first one which basica- was a- was- which was the prototype
that Tim Berners-Lee had created
so- it- but it was- it was just very clear at that point like
we- we now have the g- we have- we have Windows we have the Mac we have the GUI
right we have graphics like
and- and then we have the internet
and we need to basically pull all these things together
which is what Mosaic did

I have no doubt that AI systems — even the simplest "stochastic parrot" forms — could be trained to talk that way. But the underlying mechanisms would obviously be very different.

The cast includes Detective Question Mark, Mr. Exclamation Point, Madame Quotation, Professor Ellipsis, Miss Emily Dash, Reverend Apostrophe, Dr. Parenthesis, Lady Comma, Lord Period, and Colonel Colon.

Along with a few jokes and many tributes, the 2,325 comments also mention some other characters, e.g. "All the while not noticing that the long-suffering but loyal Footnote had slipped out of the room."

Peter Dodds and coauthors have recently published research that proposes a significant shift in the essence-of-meaning framework, which traces its lineage back to Charles Osgood’s initial efforts to use dimension reduction to quantify human meaning. The paper, “Ousiometrics: The essence of meaning aligns with a power-danger-structure framework instead of valence-arousal-dominance,” appeared in Science Advances. The abstract:

From work emerging through the middle of the 20th century, the essence of meaning has become widely accepted as being described by the three orthogonal dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. These essential dimensions have become the cornerstone of sentiment analysis across many fields. By reexamining first types and then tokens for the English language, and through the use of automatically annotated histograms—“ousiograms”—we find here that the essence of meaning conveyed by words is instead best described by a goodness-power-aggression-danger-structure (GPADS) circumplex framework; that large-scale English language corpora reveal a systematic bias toward safe, low-danger words; and that the power-danger-structure framework is the minimal framework that represents essential meaning. We find remarkable congruences between the GPADS framework and other spaces including mental states and fictional archetypes, and we construct and demonstrate a prototype ousiometer.

Extensions of Osgood’s original work led to a shift in the 1970s from his foundational dimensions of evaluation, potency, and activity (EPA) to a VAD framework that substitutes valence (or pleasure) for evaluation, arousal for activity, and dominance for potency. Dodds et al. discuss problems with the data, methods, and results in that previous work and offer significant improvements. Their main conclusion is that essence of meaning categories are more accurately characterizd by a five-dimensional framework involving goodness, power, aggression, danger, and structure (GPADS), but they also provide a three-dimensional PDS “minimal framework” emphasizing power, dominance, and structure.

A power-danger-structure framework for essential meaning seems to fit rather nicely into Lakoff and Narayanan’s model of cognitive schemas and frames, and it might also have intuitive appeal from an evolutionary standpoint. Members of a primate group inevitably have a profound interest both in potential dangers and in patterns of social dominance. But I wonder whether Dodds et al.'s third dimension, structured versus unstructured, might be better framed as animacy-inanimacy. Animacy appears to be at least as consistent with their analogy with thermodynamics as structure does, and early humans may well have interpreted much of the world through a frame of animacy, as evidenced not only by animacy as a fundamental grammatical category in many languages but also in the persistence of belief in non-human agency in most cultures, including ours.

Above is a guest post by Robert Shackleton.

Note that early work on learning semantic distances by projecting words into a meaning space based on orthogonalizing a term-by-document matric, e.g. latent semantic anaysis, was inspired by Osgood's "Semantic differential" method as well as by Gerard Salton's "vector space model".

Abstract

As traditional handwriting is progressively being replaced by digital devices, it is essential to investigate the implications for the human brain. Brain electrical activity was recorded in 36 university students as they were handwriting visually presented words using a digital pen and typewriting the words on a keyboard. Connectivity analyses were performed on EEG data recorded with a 256-channel sensor array. When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard, as shown by widespread theta/alpha connectivity coherence patterns between network hubs and nodes in parietal and central brain regions. Existing literature indicates that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning. Our findings suggest that the spatiotemporal pattern from visual and proprioceptive information obtained through the precisely controlled hand movements when using a pen, contribute extensively to the brain’s connectivity patterns that promote learning. We urge that children, from an early age, must be exposed to handwriting activities in school to establish the neuronal connectivity patterns that provide the brain with optimal conditions for learning. Although it is vital to maintain handwriting practice at school, it is also important to keep up with continuously developing technological advances. Therefore, both teachers and students should be aware of which practice has the best learning effect in what context, for example when taking lecture notes or when writing an essay.

Selected readings

• "Exercising the brain: handwriting vs. typing" (6/21/24)
• "The benefits of handwriting" (9/16/19) — with extensive list of readings
• "Handwriting Shows Unexpected Benefits Over Typing", by Denis Storey, Psychiatrist.com (1/30/24)

[Thanks to Ben Zimmer and John Rohsenow]

Because of my two months of illness, I no longer have any appetite, not even for the things I used to love to eat — for example the exquisite carrot cake made by Pastry Pants Bakery in Swarthmore; a scrumptious piece of it has been sitting on my kitchen counter for two weeks.  In the past, I would have devoured it upon sight.

Now, about the only thing that attracts my eating attention is feta cheese, especially from the barrel in its brine, which I consume copiously.  Everything else I put in my mouth tastes cottony.

I don't even like fresh water any more — sè 澀 ("astringent").

Selected readings

• "Mouthfeel" (4/10/19)
• "The mystery of "mouthfeel'"

What’s Driving Anti-Qing Sentiment in Contemporary China?

A patriotic film backfired because a growing number of Han Chinese don’t see the Manchu-origin Qing dynasty as a part of their history.
By Zhenlin Cui, The Diplomat (May 27, 2026)

Because this film touches on so many hot button issues — Taiwan, Japan, ethnic policies, language —  I will cite the article in extenso.

On May 22, a trailer for the film “The Belief” (also known as “Peng Hu” – its Chinese title means “Battle of Penghu”) was released on Chinese social media, announcing its release date of July 25. This date corresponds to the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894, after which China was forced to cede Taiwan to Japan. 

The film primarily depicts the 1683 battle in Penghu between the Qing Dynasty navy and the Kingdom of Tungning (also known as the “Ming Zheng regime”), which was a regime ruled by Han Chinese in Taiwan. Notably, the Kingdom of Tungning was loyal to the Ming Dynasty, the Han empire ousted by the Qing rulers. The Qing Dynasty ultimately won the battle, forcing the Kingdom of Tungning to surrender. 

Like most “main melody” films – meaning movies promoting the official ideology of the Chinese government – promotional materials for “The Belief” have also been released by some Chinese state media outlets. However, the film immediately sparked a wave of criticism on Chinese social media.

Most comments believe “The Belief” actually depicts the process of the Manchus, an “outsider ethnic group,” conquering a Han Chinese regime. Although the history of the Kingdom of Tungning is filled with bloody infighting and chaos, public opinion often romanticizes it as a resilient Han Chinese regime fiercely resisting foreign invasion. This has led to the state media’s support for the film being interpreted as an ideological failure promoting surrender.

The Chinese government had a different message in mind. It hopes to demonstrate its determination to (re)unify Taiwan through this film. The film’s slogan – “The trend of the world is coming with the wind” – is strikingly similar to the Chinese government’s claim that “the reunification of the motherland is an unstoppable historical trend.” Beijing apparently hopes to project the Qing Dynasty’s recapture of Taiwan onto its future (re)unification with the island. If the Taiwanese government, like the 17th century Kingdom of Tungning, rejects the conditions proposed by mainland China, Beijing will have the capability to achieve its goals by force.

In fact, this is the second time the film has sparked such a strong public debate. On October 25, 2025 – the 80th anniversary of Taiwan’s retrocession – the film released its posters and trailer, which also drew widespread criticism on social media. The announcement of its release date, despite the public pressure, is seen by some netizens as a further “provocation.” 

The backlash to “The Belief” reflects a strong anti-Qing sentiment in contemporary Chinese society. Where is this mood coming from?

The Qing Dynasty ended over a century ago, making it unlikely that contemporary Chinese people possess a deep collective memory of living under Qing rule. Furthermore, the Manchus in China today have been highly assimilated by the Han Chinese, and their language has almost become extinct. This means that a serious cultural conflict between the Han Chinese and Manchus is also unlikely. These factors make this question particularly perplexing.

This anti-Qing sentiment is reminiscent of Han chauvinism, which has long existed in China. However, its influence has been limited since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. For decades, it was more of a topic of discussion within a small circle than a mainstream public opinion. For example, contrast the reception of “The Belief” with the surge in popularity of palace dramas and romance dramas set in the Qing Dynasty in mainland China during the 2010s. Some of these dramas achieved extremely high ratings during this period. 

However, in recent years, films and television series set in this dynasty have faced more severe questioning and criticism regarding their political and nationalist implications. This represents a new wave of Han chauvinism, which has clashed with official discourse.

Under the Han chauvinistic narrative that has gained strength in recent years, the Qing Dynasty is often seen as a dark age for the Han people, bringing entirely negative consequences to Chinese history. This dynasty is frequently associated with massacres, national humiliation, monarchical autocracy, and cultural control. Some even compare it to the Japanese invasion of the 1930s and 1940s, arguing that the Qing Dynasty was a successful conquest of China, while Japan was a “defeated Qing.” In fact, these accusations are often one-sided and exaggerated.

This sentiment can be primarily explained as a result of rising nationalism among China’s younger generation. Nut more importantly, it stems from a socioeconomic narrative that has gained traction in Chinese public opinion in recent years, where the Manchus and the Qing Dynasty are assigned a class identity.

In recent years, due to the widening gap between rich and poor and the solidification of class structures, a “class narrative” is spreading among Chinese people, especially the younger generation, driven by pessimism and discontent with society. This narrative aims to explain the collective hopelessness and anxiety in Chinese society. Under this narrative, those in power and the wealthy are often portrayed as “exploiters” and the source of suffering for contemporary Chinese people.

Although sometimes accompanied by misinformation and conspiracy theories, this “class narrative” has combined with a more pervasive nationalist sentiment and spread to historical understanding. This has led to today’s anti-Qing sentiment.

Looking at history, the Manchus, who conquered China with a relatively small population, did enjoy certain privileges during their rule. These privileges have led to a deliberate distinction between the Manchus and Han Chinese in today’s sentiment, equating the Manchus with the “ruling class” and portraying them as “oppressors” of the Han. This reminds people of the rigid class system in today’s Chinese society. Viewed through this lens, the rise in anti-Qing sentiment is essentially a collective historical imagination, used to provide catharsis for contemporary Chinese dissatisfaction with reality.

While this sentiment may seem to contradict the Chinese government’s policy of ethnic unity, in the context of the People’s Republic of China’s new “Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress,” it may be used to advance Beijing’s more Han-centric ethnic policies. However, despite the possibility of exploiting this sentiment for the government’s ends, Beijing must recognize that the underlying collective pessimism and anxiety could become a potential destabilizing factor for society. 

In an atmosphere where Emperor Xi is striving for, nay demanding, ethnic unity in a nation composed of 56 ethnic groups, the majority of whom are located in the resource rich, politically sensitive, overwhelmingly vast regions around the periphery of the East Asian Heartland (EAH), this is an explosive situation that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the PRC / CCP.

More importantly, if Han chauvinism gets out of control, it could threaten the stability of China, a multi-ethnic country, in its efforts to further achieve its goal of “national unity.”

Selected readings

• "A rebirth for Manchu?" (1/16/16)
• "Polyglot Manchu emperor" (4/6/23)
• "Sibe and the revival of Manchu" (10/4/21)
• "Manchu, Former Empire’s Language, Hangs On at China’s Edge" (1/11/16)
• "Sibe: a living Manchu language" (9/30/17)
• "Ornamental Manchu: the lengths to which a forger will go" (4/24/21)
• "A confusion of languages and names" (7/8/16)

Plus many Language Log posts about various aspects of Penghu / Pescadores and its culture. 

[h.t. Geoffrey Wade]

The mouseover title: "This is one of those jokes you make, then realize people in the field have probably been saying it verbatim for 20 years."

The Aftercomic:

In a series of posts over the past year, I've suggested that evaluation of reading performance ought to go beyond the question of whether individual words are correctly decoded and pronounced.

In "Reading Instruction in the mid 19th century" (8/15/2025), I began by quoting a passage from an 1853 McGuffey Reader, which starts like this:

The great object to be accomplished in reading as a rhetorical exercise is, to convey to the hearer, fully and clearly, the ideas and feelings of the writer. In order to do this, it is necessary that the reader should himself thoroughly understand those sentiments and feelings. This is an essential point. It is true, he may pronounce the words as traced upon the page, and, if they are audibly and distinctly uttered, they will be heard, and in some degree understood, and, in this way, a general and feeble idea of the author's meaning may be obtained.

Ideas received in this manner, however, bear the same resemblance to the reality, that the dead body does to the living spirit . There is no soul in them. The author is stripped of all the grace and beauty of life, of all the expression and feeling which constitute the soul of his subject […]

Independent of the effect on hearers, we can echo McGuffey's concern about whether a reader understands the ideas and feelings of the writer.

Modern reading instruction generally tests this by asking a series of questions about the content of a passage that has been read. But in a discussion among participants in the U-GAIN project,  Ran Liu of Amira Learning suggested that a computational analysis of prosodic features could be an effective way to evaluate how well grade-school students understand what they're reading.

I followed up with a series of posts  suggesting some simple steps towards such evaluation: "A simple way to model prosody in reading" (9.27/2025), "Analysis of prosodic timing in reading" (4/5/2026), and "Inter-word intervals again" (5/21/2026).

That work argues that the pattern of inter-word-onset timing in reading is a generally reliable signal of text understanding. It's far from the only relevant feature, and it's not entirely foolproof, but it's both effective and easy to calculate.

In the cited posts, I used the prosodic timing of  fluent human readers as a basis of evaluation. But recruiting human readers to act as models falls short of total automation of the evaluation process, so from the start, the idea was to rely on models derived from today's (pretty good and improving) AI text-to-speech systems. (And the process would eventually back up a bit, using the text analysis behind such TTS systems rather than analyzing their output — but a sample of TTS outputs is a useful place to start.)

So here's a plot of median inter-word intervals, extracted automatically from 8 TTS versions of the (first five sentences of the) Shark Passage , for which we have a large sample of recordings from grade-school readers:

And here are the (first 40) word indices (with the phrase-final words bolded). The rest of the passage is similar…

Comparison to the timing of student readers' shows clearly where they slowed or paused, due to problems with decoding, word knowledge, or phrase understanding. There are probably cues to the different sorts of difficulty, and of course there are also prior probabilities to help in classification.

Includes exquisite photographs of the wood and wax booklet bound in leather with floral embossing.

Archaeologists working for the Westphalia-Lippe Regional Association (LWL) had a good feeling when they excavated five medieval latrines in the German city of Paderborn. Even so, what they uncovered from the dank chambers astonished them: an 800-year-old, pocket-size notebook containing ten pages in near-perfect condition.

The booklet is made of wood and wax and bound in a leather cover embossed with lilies, which signified purity in the medieval era, Richard Whiddington reports for Artnet. The binding was tight enough to protect the inner pages from the surrounding contaminants over the centuries. When LWL conservators opened it up, they found legible writing. The biggest challenge for transcribers will be in making out the words themselves.

The text is not easy to decipher, even for experts in the field, says Barbara Rüschoff-Parzinger, LWL cultural affairs director, in a statement from the organization. Individual words are recognizable, but the transcription will take some time, as some words may have been corrupted by incorrect spellings, she explains.

The wax layers on the pages allowed the writer to erase what they had written using the flat end of a stylus. A quick scan of the text revealed records of possible business transactions, suggesting the notebook may have belonged to a merchant.

The researchers plan to fully transcribe the book after analyzing its physical materials. It’s written in Latin, suggesting an owner from the upper class, city archaeologist Sveva Gai says, per the Independent’s Vishwam Sankaran. Another clue to the social status of the latrine users are scraps of silk fabric that were possibly used as toilet paper.

The booklet was 10 X 7.5 cm, overall smaller than an iPhone, I believe.  You could rewrite or overwrite on its wax pages with your stylus.

A colleague once dropped his precious fountain pen (Montblanc, I think it was) in the dreck at the bottom of a Nepali carpī चर्पी (I won't tell you how we retrieved it).

Incidentally, the Paderborn latrine still stunk after eight centuries.  It was one in a row of five latrines, all of which stank.

Selected readings

• Seltener Fund in Paderborn:  LWL-Archäologie präsentiert gut erhaltenes mittelalterliches Notizbuch, LWL-Newsroom (5/12/26) — numerous photographs of the excavation, excavators, the booklet, the writing in it, its cover, its carrying case
• 800-year-old medieval notebook found in German latrine still contains readable Latin writing, by Dario Radley, Archaeology News Online Magazine (May 16, 2026) — photographs of booklet and excavation site
• Scientists Found a Notebook in a Medieval Toilet, And It's Still Legible, Humans, ScienceAlert (23 May 2026), By Michelle Starr — more photographs of the writing in the booklet
• 800-year-old notebook and fancy silk toilet paper discovered in medieval latrine in Germany Archaeologists recovered the 10-page wax notebook with Latin writing and its leather carrying case from a medieval latrine in Germany, Kristina Killgrove's avatar, By Kristina Killgrove, Live Science (May 20, 2026)

[h.t. Hiroshi Kumamoto]

My plan is to start with a quick reading of the abstract from my 2011 Henry Sweet lecture, "Towards the Golden Age of Speech and Language Science":

For the sciences of speech and language, the 21st century promises to bring the kind of progress that the 17th century brought to the physical sciences.

Our telescopes and microscopes, our alembics and Pneumatical Engines, are today's vast archives of digital text and speech, along with new analysis techniques and inexpensive networked computation.

However, the scientific use of these new instruments remains mainly exploratory and potential. There are several critical problems for which we have at best partial solutions; and like our 17th-century predecessors, we need to unlearn some old ideas on the way to learning new ones.

Focusing especially on Henry Sweet's own interests in phonetics and in the history of English, this talk will discuss some of the barriers to be overcome, present some successful examples, and speculate about future directions.

I'll then add a few words about how things have changed since 2011, just as things were changing in the early 17th century.

On the technological side, we have (good and rapidly improving) programs for speech recognition, understanding, and generation. We also benefit from amazing progress in the instrumentation relevant for prosody studies. For example, this code on my laptop can pitch track an hour of speech in just a few seconds! And we're even seeing the first stirrings of "AI co-scientists".

There has also been some theoretical progress, including especially greater freedom from bad theories promoted by political methods.

And the final slide from my 2011 talk remains valid, in work on prosody just as in other areas of speech and language research:

[Geoff Pullum was also at the 2011 LAGB meeting, and posted about it.]

Oh, my!

Selected readings

• "Commas matter, Oxford and otherwise" (4/17/22) — with extensive bibliography
• "Crack and crab" (5/10/26)

In this explosive exchange, you can hear the dramatic shift from "Patwa" (patois) to standard English in a 1:17 video included in The Guardian article.

When the Jamaican MP Nekeisha Burchell stood up to give her maiden speech, she was keenly aware of how much her country’s parliament mirrored the Westminster version thousands of miles away in London.

As in the UK, the session on 12 May had started with the arrival of the ceremonial mace – a 1.7-metre ornamented silver staff representing the British monarch’s authority over parliament – which now rested on a table between the government and the opposition. Despite the heat outside, debate was presided over by the speaker dressed in a ceremonial robe.

I witnessed a similar ceremony at the opening of an international congress of orientalists in Toronto about a quarter of a century ago.

Burchell, the opposition spokesperson for culture, creative industries and information, approached the microphone and began to speak. “Madam speaka, mi git up dis afta noon fi mek mi fuss sectoral speech, pan me portfolio …” (VHM: emphasis added)

The speaker, Juliet Holness, immediately cut her off. “Hold on, hold on, hold on! Standing orders, and I think you are fully aware,” said Holness, who is the wife of Jamaica’s prime minister.

The regulation to which Holness referred was the rule that only English – and certainly not Jamaican – is allowed in parliament. “If I have to stop you again during your presentation, you will not get any additional time,” Holness told Burchell as parliament erupted into protest, with someone chiding “broken English”.

There are vast implications to Burchell's use of Jamaican in the National parliament.  It is similar to using Taiwanese in the ROC national parliament.  Try it and see what happens.

Burchell had ignited an explosive debate across the country and beyond about the enduring legacy of British colonialism and whether robes, prayers for the British monarch and the “king’s English” are still right for Jamaica, more than 60 years after it gained independence.

Burchell continued her speech in standard English. “Madam speaker, perhaps I should abandon that attempt to use our local language because I have been reminded of the linguistic conventions of this honourable house,” she said.

There are many more nuances and complications to what happened in the Jamaican parliament on May 12 when Nekeisha Burchell spoke in Jamaican rather than in standard English.  Burchell said her intention was not to disrespect parliament or cause disorder.  

“We have gotten comfortable with keeping things like the prayer we say before parliament starts every single week … We’re saying these words that we don’t understand. We’re still wearing these wigs and these robes in a hot climate like Jamaica, because we are still keeping these models.”

Burchell said her intervention was not meant to be “anti-British” or “anti-English” but was more about Jamaica’s cultural confidence.

“Jamaica’s language has become one of the most globally recognisable cultural expressions to come out of the Caribbean. Through reggae, dancehall, athletics, popular culture, people across the world recognise the rhythm, energy, boldness, humour [and] the emotional texture of our language. And I think that’s part of why this conversation resonated internationally,” she said.

It's a question of pride in one's culture and mother tongue.

Selected readings

• "David Starkey on rioting and Jamaican language" (8/14/11)
• "Starkey ravings" (8/16/11)
• "Botty man" (9/14/09)
• "No creoles?" (9/4/17)

[From an old friend]

The five undeciphered writing systems covered in this post are:  Linear A, Indus Script, Rongorongo, Proto-Elamite, and The Phaistos Disk.  We have discussed each of these scripts on Language Log, some of them at consierable length and on multiple occasions.

What conditions unite them?

• Script typology: Determining what kind of writing system it is and whether symbols represent sounds, syllables, whole words or a combination of these.

• Sufficient corpus: Having enough examples of the script for researchers to study and compare.

• Known or reconstructible language: Identifying the underlying language or being able to reasonably reconstruct it. Without this, decipherment is nearly impossible.

• Cultural context: Understanding the civilization that produced the script, including known names, places and historical references.

• Constraint: Having a crucial clue, such as a bilingual inscription, that allows researchers to match meanings across languages.

Increasingly sophisticated AI systems may make it possible to compensate for the lack of one or more of these 5 pillars.

Selected readings

• "Are all writing systems equally easy / hard?" (4/17/25)
• "Language trees and script trees" (12/27/21) — guest post by Jim Unger (J. Marshall Unger), who wrote it in response to my invitation to him to draw up a Stammbaum to show the relationships of the world's scripts.