Language Log

Well, now, for all those doubting Thomases who insist that there was no contact between western Eurasia, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia in antiquity:

"The Amber Trade along the Southwestern Silk Road from 600 BCE-220 CE." Lü, Jing et al. Palaeoentomology 8, no. 6 (December 29, 2025): 679-682. https://www.mapress.com/pe/article/view/palaeoentomology.8.6.10.

P.O. wrote to ask for help in analyzing this phrase from season 2, episode 5 of The Crown:

They're stopping the palace evolve
in keeping with the rest of the world.

Since it indicates the official language and main ethnicity of China, this character is of utmost linguistic and political importance for readers of Language Log.

Prompted by Philip Taylor (commenting on this post [first item in the list of "Selected readings" below]), this ample response from ChatGPT would seem to cover all the bases for what 漢 means.

One important meaning of 漢 omitted in the above generous overview is pejorative, "a bad guy", as shown by this entry in Wiktionary.  Although, in this term, èhàn 惡漢 ("villain; scoundrel; bad guy"), 漢 is explicitly modified by the negative adjective 惡, 漢 by itself can have derogatory implications, somewhat like "hombre" ("man") in "mock Spanish" when used disrespectfully. 

Androcentric China will have to live with this potentially formidable woman, just as they're having to deal with Prime Minister Takaichi.

"Is North Korea's 'princess' walking a path toward succession?", Nikkei staff writers, NikkeiAsia (11/25/25)

This is a most impressive article, based on AI analytics of more than 14,000 hours of footage that highlights the elevation of Kim Jong Un's daughter.

Knowing full well that 漢文 ("Sinitic Writing; Classical Chinese; Literary Sinitic") is pronounced Hànwén in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM), Kanbun in Japanese, and Hanmun in Korean, I wanted to know how it is pronounced in Vietnamese, and was directed to this resource,  "Another Nôm Lookup Tool based on Unicode", where I learned that it is Hán văn.

Jesse Ventura has had a successful career as a pro wrestler, actor, and politician — all largely built on the foundations of his mastery of pro wrestling rhetoric.  And recent events have brought him back into the public eye. His Jan. 8 interview on the Minneapolis Fox News channel got 2.7 million likes and more than 47 thousand comments on TikTok, lots of play on other news-ish outlets, 295k views and more than 7400 comments on YouTube,  and 3.7 million views and more than 1400 comments on X.

See "The art of the promo" (10/31/2020) for some background on this rhetorical style, including its role in Donald Trump's career. And if you haven't listened to Ventura's interview, you should do so as background for this post.

[This is a guest post by Alexander Bazes]

I was delighted to discover this well-researched (and very entertaining) YouTube video about the Baghdad Battery by Penn Museum archaeologist Dr. Brad Hafford (I have reached out to him with my recent article on Sino-Platonic Papers and welcome his criticism).

"The Baghdad Battery? Archaeologist Reacts!" (33:02)

Towards the end of his lecture (~25:00), Dr. Hafford discusses a likely ritualistic role played by the Baghdad Battery and similar objects that have been found at the archaeological sites of Tel Umar and Csestiphon. I find his explanation quite plausible given that the devices from Tel Umar were found in close association with other ritual objects, including three incantation bowls (Waterman, Leroy. "Preliminary report upon the excavations at Tel Umar, Iraq." 1931, 61-62). I find Dr. Hafford’s discussion of Sasanian-period incantations written on papyrus and lead sheets particularly interesting, as I believe it was probably the corrosive capabilities of the Baghdad Battery and similar artifacts that were employed by its users for ritual purposes. For example, I speculate that the artifact discovered at Csestiphon, which contained ten bronze tubes, each filled with rolls of papyrus and sealed, was intended to produce a corrosive effect on the outside of the tubes, thereby releasing the prayers inside.

Melissa Heikkilä, "LeCun: 'Intelligence really is about learning'", Financial Times 1/2/2026:

(The AI pioneer on stepping down from Meta, the limits of large language models — and the launch of his new start-up)

LeCun’s lightbulb moment came as a student at the École Supérieure d’Ingénieurs en Électrotechnique et Électronique in Paris in the 1980s, when he read a book about a debate on nature versus nurture between the linguist Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, a psychologist. Chomsky argued that humans have an inbuilt capacity for language, while Piaget said there is some structure but most of it is learnt.

“I’m not gonna make friends saying this . . . ” he tells me, “but I was reading this and I thought everything that Chomsky . . . was saying could not possibly be true, [because] we learn everything. Intelligence really is about learning.”

AI research — or neural networks, as the technology was then called, which loosely mimic how the brain functions — was practically a dead field and considered taboo by the scientific community, after early iterations of the technology failed to impress. But LeCun sought out other researchers studying neural networks and found intellectual “soulmates” in the likes of Geoffrey Hinton, then a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon.

Christian Horn writes:

Oreo cookies are famous and widely known.

I never attached the name "Oreo" to single piecesof the cookie, but once you start this is possible:

Having just spent a week in close quarters with two large German Shepherds and a big German Shepherd mix, I was primed to learn about the Indian Pariah Dog, which somehow crossed the path of my consciousness yesterday.

Observing the behavior and ability of the German Shepherds, and reading about the history and canine qualities of the Indian Pariah Dog, I became fascinated by how different are the aptitudes and characteristics of various types of dogs, yet all domestic dogs are the same species, Canis familiaris, or more technically, a subspecies of the gray wolf, Canis lupus, hence  Canis lupus familiaris, and have been so for more than ten thousand years of evolution.

Until today, I had never heard of "Dry January".  I learned about it this morning from an article in The Harvard Gazette:  "How to think about not drinking:  For starters, treat Dry January as an experiment, not a punishment, addiction specialist says."  

Remember Prohibition (in history; in the United States)?  It didn't work, did it?

Swarthmore, Pennsylvania was decidedly a dry town when I moved here half a century ago, but then a different sort of people than Quakers started to move in, until now the borough is decidedly wet.

Annie Joy Williams, "The Last Days of the Southern Drawl", The Atlantic 1/4/2026:

By the end of my life, there may be no one left who speaks like my father outside the hollers and the one-horse towns.

On Sundays after church, my family would pile into our crank-window GMC truck and head to Kentucky Fried Chicken. “Can I get me some of them tater wedges?” my father would say into the speaker, while my sisters and I giggled in the back seat. My dad has always had a southern accent: His words fall out of his mouth the way molasses would sound if it could speak, thick and slow. But his “KFC voice,” as my sisters and I call it, is country. It’s watered-down on work calls and during debates with his West Coast relatives. But it comes out around fellow cattle farmers and old friends from Kentucky, where he grew up.

My mother’s accent isn’t quite as strong. She’s a therapist, and she can hide it when she speaks with her patients and calls in prescriptions. But you can always hear it in her church-pew greetings, and when she says goodnight: “See you in the a.m., Lawd willin’.”

I was always clear on one fact: I wasn’t going to have a southern accent when I grew up. I was raised in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, near Nashville, where the accents grow stronger with each mile you travel from the city. I watched people snicker at the redneck characters on television who always seemed to play the town idiot. I knew what the accent was supposed to convey: sweet but simpleminded. When I was 15 and my family went to New York for the first time, the bellhop at our hotel laughed when my mom and I spoke; he said he’d never met cowgirls before. That was when I decided: No one was going to know I was from the South from my voice alone.