Back in February, Christian Bentz and Ewa Dutkiewicz (henceforth BD) published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that presented their study of markings on Paleolithic artifacts, mostly in bone, antler and ivory, from the Swabian Aurignacian (43,000–34,000 BP). Their conclusion, based on various statistical analyses, including entropic measures, and a couple of sign repetition rate measures, was that these marks constituted a structured system of deliberate and conventional signs. By translating the engravings into 1D sequences of standardized characters, they reported strong statistical overlap with early Mesopotamian protocuneiform (Uruk V) and clear divergence from later systems as well as modern writing systems.

Predictably, the paper attracted a lot of attention, especially from the popular science press, ever eager for a story that “rewrites history as we know it”.   Coverage included CNN, Science Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, among many others. To their credit, and unlike some other recent work (e.g. Bacon et al. 2023), BD did not emphasize guesses as to the meanings of the marks.  Also, they were relatively careful in their article to avoid making strong claims about these markings being “protowriting”, much less “writing”.  The authors, however, were subtle, but explicit, in stressing pretentious and sensational claims. For instance, in the conclusions they stated that the reported “statistical fingerprint” was “very similar” to the “earliest numeric and numero-ideographic protocuneiform tablets stemming from the Uruk V period”, deliberately establishing a link to sophisticated higher-order cognition — numerical cognition and notation. (In a related article that they cite, the 2nd author explicitly claimed that the star artifact in DB's Figure 1A (so-called "Adorant") “constitute[s]  deliberate numerical representations” — Dutkiewicz, 2023.)

Such an evoked representational “numerical” interpretative framework, although flashy, ignores basic issues regarding the conventionalization of symbolic-reference subserving the origin of numerical cognition (Núñez, 2017), and obviously, the crucial fact that numerical practices in Uruk V emerged from a complex stratified society fundamentally different from that of the Swabian Aurignacian hunther-gatherers.  Of course, none of these considerations stopped the press from picking up on the sensational claims, with the Science piece, for example, enthusing that “the artifacts…might contain the earliest known symbolic precursors to writing.” 

Needless to say, given the roughly 40,000 year gap between these artifacts and anything we can truly identify as writing, such claims are completely unfounded. Whether one takes “precursor” to trivially mean that early signs temporally preceded writing (and somehow later mutated to it), or that such early signs eventually inevitably led to the development of writing, the claim is unfounded: There simply isn’t the evidence to draw any connection between these marks and the much later development of pre-literate signs to which we can assign definite meanings.

In an attempt to get the discussion of these interesting artifacts back on a more tenable track, we (along with other colleagues) have published a preprint (d’Errico, et al. 2026) that critiques the BD analysis from a number of angles, noting that while the formal numerical correlations are interesting, they are semantically neutral. Statistical similarity does not translate into semiotic or functional equivalence, leaving the status of conventionality for these Paleolithic marks unproven. At the same time, we propose ways to deal with such data noting that “[t]he broader challenge is not to determine whether Paleolithic engravings resemble writing systems, but to develop robust frameworks capable of linking statistical structure to the behaviours and cultural practices that produced it.”

We identify several serious problems in BD’s study:

• Instability of mark classification. BD’s initial classification of marks suffers from low coding reliability. While raw inter-coder agreement was high (91–94%), the chance-corrected Cohen's kappa scores were extremely low (0.29 to 0.44), signifying only "fair-to-moderate" consensus. Treating these highly subjective categories as fixed, objective statistical units over-stabilizes the dataset artificially.
• The confound of sequence length. The high overlap on metrics like unigram entropy and type-token ratio occurred strictly with the Uruk V phase. However the Aurignacian and Uruk V datasets share nearly identical sequence length distributions. Because shorter paths intrinsically suppress combinatorial entropy and inflate apparent similarity, the statistical proximity could merely be an artifact of sequence length rather than shared structural complexity.
• Privileging a single metric for behavior. BD argued that figurines, in particular anthropomorphic and zoomorphic ivory figurines, showed sequences with higher entropy rates than other artifacts, such as tools. They take this as evidence that different marking patterns were applied to artifacts with different uses, which is at least consistent with the idea that the marks had meaning. But this conclusion rests selectively on a single variable (entropy rate), without considering whether other structural indices (like repetition rates or type-token ratios) converge to support the same behavioral hypothesis.
• No comparison against control sets of purely decorative systems. BD, while arguing that the Aurignacian marks were an early conventionalized sign system, are of course aware of the alternative possibility that they were simply decorative. Their answer to this is that “categories such as ‘decoration’ and ‘numerical system’ (but see above), or ‘decoration’ and ‘writing system’ are not mutually exclusive”. In and of itself, this is a valid point.  Yet BD provide no analysis of how the marks compare to known decorative systems, comparing only against pre-literate accounting texts from Uruk, and later written language. As we discuss in the preprint, previous work (Sproat, 2014) has shown that on many measures, even purely decorative systems such as Pennsylvania barn stars can look like conventional sign systems, and so the analysis BD provide does not in fact eliminate the possibility that the marks had no communicative function other than aesthetics.

In summary, BD’s impressive-seeming results are based on a number of questionable points, including assumptions about sign classification, confounds such as sequence length, the selective focus on particular measures in drawing some conclusions, and the lack of any comparison of the Aurignacian marks to known decorative systems. This latter oversight is particularly significant since BD’s analysis does not, it seems to us, allow one to reject the null hypothesis that the Aurignacian marks were simply intended as decoration.

References

Bacon, B.; Khatiri, A.; Palmer, J.; Freeth, T.; Pettitt, P.; & Kentridge, R. (2023). An Upper Palaeolithic proto-writing system and phenological calendar. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774322000415.  

Bentz, C. & Dutkiewicz, E. (2026). Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(9), Article e2520385123. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2520385123. 

d’Errico, F.; Santos da Rosa, N.; Courtenay, L. A.; Núñez, R.; Liu, C.; Sproat, R.; & Blasi, D.. Inferring Conventional Sign Systems from Paleolithic Engravings: Methodological and Theoretical Challenges (2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7053279 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7053279

Dutkiewicz, E. (2023). Die Kosmologie der Altsteinzeit in Kosmos – Vom Umgang mit der Welt zwischen Ausdruck und Ordnung (pp. 29-64). Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing.

Núñez, R. (2017). Is there really an evolved capacity for number? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21, 409-424.

Sproat, R. (2014). A statistical comparison of written language and nonlinguistic symbol systems. Language, 90(2), 457–481. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2014.0031. 

Above is a guest post by Richard Sproat and Rafael Núñez.

There was a flurry of attention to such things a couple of decades ago:

"The new semiotics of punctuation", 11/7/2012
"Agressive periods and the popularity of lingusitics", 11/26/2013
"Generational punctuation differences again", 8/1/2014
"Query: Punctuation in personal digital media", 2/23/2015

What I've seen about it more recently, or at least noticed, is a bit off to the side:

"Prosodic punctuation", 12/19/2017
"More on grammar, punctuation, and prosody", 12/19/2017
"Barstool punctuation", 4/4/2020
"Cumulative punctuation", 4/15/2020
"2020 punctuation/prosody", 9/19/2020
"Punctuation marks hanging out", 4/8/2025
"Death by punctuation", 6/3/2026

I haven't seen any discussions of punctuational innovations in other languages/orthographies, like Chinese or Korean, though this might be because it's not happening?

A topic I wonder about: "annoying" words, and the cause of their annoyingness, and whether many people find the same particular words annoying, or if there's a long tail of very few or just one person who finds them annoying.

The broad category is "workplace jargon", but not in the "normal sense" of that ("brown bag lunch", "team player", etc. etc.)

Examples:
– I find the word "remit" (as in: what one is supposed to DO as a job function deliverable) quite, quite irritating. I don't know why. It sounds slightly stodgy, but I like other forms of stodginess.
– I find the word "mandate" equally annoying, when used in the same sense: that which one's job description requires them to do. It means the same thing! Is it because it seems to be a Britishism, while I speak American?

Is it that I dislike the things required of one's job? I really don't think that's it, but maybe my individual experiences with interactions happening upon these "remit" and "mandate" usages are the simple reason for the negative association?

Is there another reason beyond personal priors that I'd find "remit" and "mandate" out of place and annoying in the modern American workplace? Is there a category of words like this? It's more than a simple pet peeve, I think.

I did try web search and LLMing. Consulting an LLM, I find it's not "corporate BS", "pretension, or "weasel words" that bother me. Seems it's some kind of "legalese encroachment" that feels odd. I seem to not mind examples of military or medical encroachments to the same level. It's the authority that's common to them, the LLM says. Yet I don't take too much issue with: caveat, deconflict, fiduciary, jurisdiction, redact, sanction, arbitrate.

I'm going to call them "lightning-pole words", for lack of a better phrase.

Some relevant prior posts:

"Whatever", 9/12/2009
"Moving low-hanging fruit forward at the end of the day", 9/26/2009
"Memetic dynamics of summative cliches", 9/26/2009
"'At the end of the day' not management-speak", 9/26/2009
"Annoying word poll results: Whatever!", 10/9/2009
(And Ben Zimmer's Word Routes column about it)
"Peevable words and phrases: journey", 5/18/2024
"Our journey journey", 7/10/2024
"Plummet's journey", 3/18/2025

As evidence that our journey journey isn't over yet, this ad has been cropping up all over the place for me recently:

I've been trying to sneak pilgrimage in as a replacement for journey, with no success so far.

And of course there's an analogous peevological journey about pronunciation:

Tonight we're publishing a series of
previously classified U.S. intelligence community assessments
and other reports proving that our
government has wrong known these machines are
extremely exposed to attack.

Zeroing in on the relevant phrase:

Since I'm more of a phonetician than a psychologist, my topic is the difference in formant trajectories between /l/, the onset consonant of "long", and /r/, the onset consonant of "wrong", rather than the (contested) Freudian interpretation of speech errors. In the spectrogram above, you can see that the third formant of the onset consonant of the word "wrong/long" is clearly rising into the following vowel (click on the image to see a larger version).

In a pronunciation of "long", F3 would be expected remain well above F2 in the syllable onset, as in Merriam-Webster's audio for "long"

Or Wiktionary's ("general American") version of the same word:

Compare the pronunciation of "wrong" from Merriam-Webster:

Or from Wiktionary:

Because the previous word in the president's phrase was "it's", we would expect the coarticulatory effect of /s/ to reinforce the higher F3 — the F3 lowering that actually occurred is a reliable indication of a rhotic articulation. As with speech errors in general, it's possible that the President's onset articulation was influenced by /l/ as well as /r/, but (for me at least) the perception is clearly /r/.

There's an interesting morpho-lexical question about why long has an adverbial version while wrong doesn't, but that's a topic for another day.

From a couple of days ago, Karl Bode's opinion about near-term AI workforce effects.

A relevant fable from a century ago.

Emily Bender's list of things that "AI" means, and an essay expanding on the list.

Of course, printing, computation, and the internet are steps forward from scribal monks…

Geoff Pullum discussed examples of this kind many years ago, in "Dangling etiquette" (12/14/2003). His verdict: "It's manners, not grammar".

"Does this fall under the no dangling modifier prescription?", asks Rosanne, in a post on The X-bar. Yes, Rosanne, it does. Like participles, adjectives and also some idomatic preposition phrases, when used as adjuncts, need an understood subject (or, it might be better to say, a target of predication) to be filled in if they are to be understood. The prescriptive tradition says that the subject filled in must be the one obtained from the subject of the matrix clause. Here that would be your guests, which makes a nonsense reading, so the sentence cited would be treated as an error.

But the prescriptivists have a problem. Sentences of this kind, which call for you to fill in the understood subject from somewhere else (here, the subject of is light in the subordinate clause), are so common that when I and several friends have spent some time picking new ones up from print and radio sources, we get them at a rate of as many as one per day. That's in edited sources, where grammatical errors have almost entirely been screened out. This just cannot be syntactic error. It's too frequent.

I definitely think that sentences that make you twist this way and that, hunting for the intended subject, are ill-written and discourteous. But it simply isn't reasonable to say that they are syntactic errors. We follow our syntactic rules so much better than we follow this principle of courtesy. The syntax of English says (for example) that the subject should precede the predicate in a normal declarative: The cat wants to go out rather than *Wants to go out the cat. Ever seen anyone get that wrong? I thought not. People mostly know their syntax. Dangling modifier cases fall down on simple courtesy. It's manners, not grammar, that's what I think.

See also "The Fellowship of the Predicative Adjunct", 5/12/2005; Arnold Zwicky's list of "Dangler postings" through 2008; and a few more recent posts, e.g. "Dangling as promised?", 4/7/2009, and "A dangler in The Economist", 10/8/2009.

As WoodyLing points out on YouTube, the discussion of Alisa's vowel in pink needs to start with the effects of final-consonant co-articulation on vowel color, and specifically the raising of the second formant involved in "velar pinch".

We can see (and hear) this clearly, in the audio examples from the online Merriam-Webster dictionary for "pink" and "pimp":

pink:

pimp:

In the MW audio for pink, F2 is 2616 Hz immediately at the start of voicing, and 2717 Hz in the middle of the vowel. In the MW audio for pimp, F2 is 2268 Hz and 2088 at the comparable points.

This suggests many questions about variation in acoustic-phonetic details across words and speakers and contexts.

• Is this difference phonetic (due to coarticulation with the final consonant), or phonological (representing a symbolic shift of vowel categories in the affected words), or both?
• Is it a near-merger as described in many other cases by sociolinguists?
• What is the distribution of the associated variation across words, space, time, and social structure?

Of course, this is different from things like the merry/marry/Mary (near-)merger, in that there's no lexical difference between /ɪ/ and /i/ before /ŋ/ to start with — that is, there's no analog to peen/pin in /ŋ/-final words. So it's not a question of whether a set of word pairs are distinguished, but rather just a question about the phonetic realization of a set of rhyming monosyllabic words ending in
/ŋ/, and preceded by a vowel whose correspondence with the rest of the phonological vowel space is unclear.

I haven't seen any systematic studies of this phenomenon. Even if there's been some coverage, I suspect it remains a good opportunity for a term project or two.

Yesterday's news was full of stories about how the U.S. Government had agreed to let Anthropic release Fable 5. However, my Claude app still opened conversations with a note telling me that Fable 5 was not available. So I asked when that would change, and got a weird answer (from the Sonnet 5 version):

In this answer, Claude is putting Fable the video game at the top of our conversational common ground, ahead of the new Anthropic release.

That's a weird conversational move, since I asked the question immediately below Claude's note about Anthropic's Fable 5 being unavailable; Google News at the time listed literally hundreds of stories about Anthropic's Fable 5, versus none about Fable the video game; and my previous conversations with Claude hadn't touched on any games.

So I focused the question, and Claude switched gears to give a relevant answer:

"Dinosaur intonation", 8/28/2021
"Hummed 'I don't know'", 8/29/2021
"More 'I don't know'", 8/31/2021

There are some resonances with a conference paper from 52 years ago — "Prosodic form and discourse function", CLS 1974. Unfortunately Ivan Sag's kazoo performances from the original conference presentation have not been preserved.

The last six panels of Yesterday's Doonesbury:

Letter sequences aside, what's the relation of trumped up to the president's name?

The OED's gloss for (the relevant sense) of trump:

A playing-card of that suit which for the time being ranks above the other three, so that any one such card can ‘take’ any card of another suit; spec. the card, usually that last turned up by the dealer, determining this suit; also, plural (formerly also in singular), the suit thus determined.

Its etymology, according to Wiktionary:

Possibly from French triomphe (“triumph”) or Old French triumphe. If so, it is a doublet of triumph and thriambus. Compare German Trumpf.

The OED just says that trump is "A corruption of triumph".

As for trumped up, that idiom started as a (obsolete) figurative extension of the verb "To put a trump upon; to take with a trump", whereby "to trump" could be used to mean "to deceive, cheat", apparently based on the idea that the trump card's triumph is temporary and artificial.

That gives rise to "to trump up", which remains in use, with the OED gloss "To get up or devise in an unscrupulous way; to forge, fabricate, invent."

What about the President's name? His Palatine ancestors bore a name originally spelled "Drumpf". According to Family Search, cited by Grokipedia,

Drumpf is a rare surname of German origin, primarily attested in the Palatinate region from the early 17th century, deriving as a nickname from Middle High German rumph denoting a 'trunk' or 'body' for a large or stout person, or possibly a bent/misshapen figure.

The initial 'd' devoiced to 't' at some point, presumably due to the High German Consonant shift. According to his Wikipedia article, the president's grandfather Friedrich Trump signed in to the U.S. in 1885 as "Friedr. Trumpf"; in his 1892 naturalization papers he's "Friedrich Trump".

In any case, his name has no etymological connection to card playing or to the fabrication of legal charges, although his region of origin does have an ironic connection to Benjamin Franklin's 1851 concerns about immigration.

The city of Bergen, Norway, shook on the night of June 22–23, not because there was an earthquake or an unknown geological phenomenon. But because the Norwegian national team scored a goal during the 2026 World Cup. This curious phenomenon was reported by a team of researchers from the University of Bergen, who found that fan celebrations produce vibrations in the ground so intense they can be detected even by highly sensitive scientific instruments like seismometers.

Celebratory geo-linguistics aside, I wondered about the period before "But" in that paragraph, especially because what follows "But" is just a because clause, parallel to another one in the previous phrase:

not because there was an earthquake […]
But because the Norwegian national team scored a goal

And the scalar implicature of "even" in "even by highly sensitive scientific instruments" seems upside down. Compare "…so intense they can be detected even by relatively crude instruments", vs."so intense they can be detected only by highly sensitive instruments".

Maybe the reason is this (from the bottom of the story):

This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

But here's the Italian version, which doesn't seem offer an explanation:

La città di Bergen ha tremato nella notte tra il 22 e il 23 giugno scorsi, non perché si è verificato un terremoto o un fenomeno geologico sconosciuto. Ma perché la nazionale norvegese ha segnato durante i Mondiali di calcio 2026. A raccontare questo curioso fenomeno è stato un team di ricercatori dell'Università di Bergen, secondo cui sarebbero proprio i festeggiamenti dei tifosi ai gol della nazionale di calcio a produrre vibrazioni nel suolo così intense che possono essere rilevate anche da strumenti scientifici molto sensibili, come i sismometri.

Commenters may be able to enlighten us about Italian punctuation norms, and the direction of anche 's scalar implicatures. My guess is that Italian is just as variable as English, both on the former and the latter question, but the issues are subtle ones.